[leot]

... and "in the long run" everything would work out, right?

Except for the most part, there's no such thing as "the long run", since the entire concept depends on the universe being relatively stationary (from a probabilistic/statistical perspective). In fact, the universe, and especially the economy/culture/society, is highly non-stationary, making the entire notion of "the long run" fallacious.

In other words, your model assumes that aggregate consumer demand for a particular basket of goods will "stay still" long enough for bad actors to get weeded out. But this is an empirical claim, and one that has been shown to be frequently false. Indeed, its falsehood is in part responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.

The world is always changing deeply and unpredictably. In the imagined scenario above, your needs for insurance wouldn't remain constant, and neither would the base of providers. Indeed, the entire ontology of the marketplace would be constantly in flux, making "in the long run" free market approaches mostly impotent as compared with collective action that directly deals with the problems we face right now.

[baddox]

> ... and "in the long run" everything would work out, right?

Don't be silly. The world would still be a horrible place. Heinous acts would be committed every day. People would be murdered, tortured, and raped. There would still be a lot of violence—it would just be a lot less than what we have today.

> In other words, your model assumes that aggregate consumer demand for a particular basket of goods will "stay still" long enough for bad actors to get weeded out. But this is an empirical claim, and one that has been shown to be frequently false. Indeed, its falsehood is in part responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.

Of course there is truth in all of this. But how is the government a better solution?

> The world is always changing deeply and unpredictably. In the imagined scenario above, your needs for insurance wouldn't remain constant, and neither would the base of providers.

Again, that's true of insurance just like it's true of cell phone providers, automobile manufacturers, etc. Again, how does government solve any of this?

[sophacles]

You're the one proposing a radical change, onus of evidence and "how it would be better" is on you. By the way "but there would be no government!" is not a valid argument of how it would be better, only a tautological statement of "if there was no government, there would be no government". We have seen governments arise for as far back as there is history, and not really a lot of evidence of how great things are without government, suggesting (but not proving) that a government is a good thing.

[baddox]

Well, that argument is ludicrous. We've never had a society without murder either, but I dare say that a society without murder would be superior. How would a society without murder work, you say? I don't know how to respond to that. It would be a bunch of people living together, like today, except there wouldn't be murder.

[sophacles]

This is a disingenuous analogy. It is easy to imagine a society without murder. It is a singular act that most everyone frowns upon, and generally we work to prevent anyway. In fact, since I don't know anyone who's been murdered, I actually have a harder time imagining the consequences of the murder of someone I know than I do imagining there is no murder.

Further, a society without government is much harder to imagine, because the idea of rules enforcement is sort of built into every society I've ever heard of - your proposal is "no rules enforcement at all, everyone do what they want in all cases". Sounds frightening - I would have to treat every single person I encounter as a terrible person, and they would have to do the same for me. If you think that is really not different than what exists now, you have the following issues: 1. you are too paranoid to do anything, 2. you must be extremely rude and agressive to people if they always treat you that way. 3. you must be terribly lonely. I pity you.

[leot]

The entire premise of libertarianism rests on the notion that the world will stay still long enough for market forces to weed out the baddies. Government can sometimes be the better solution because regulations can respond much more quickly to baddies (e.g., I can inspect the restaurant within a week of its opening, or we can wait 6-12 months for enough people to get sick and for the restaurant to develop a bad reputation). Without regulations, the restaurant can just close its doors if it develops a bad reputation, sell its assets, change its name, go somewhere else, and repeat the cycle.

The point isn't that "government will solve any of this", it's that laissez-faire economics can't. Bad actors can skip from exploitation to exploitation -- if there would be less government, then everyone would need to look out for themselves all the time and there would be less social trust, with all the attendant effects.

[baddox]

The false assumption a lot of critics to libertarianism (or nearly any political philosophy) routinely make is that libertarians believe their proposed system would be a utopia with no violence, no "baddies," no market inefficiencies or market failures, etc. Granted, some libertarians who aren't really educated in the political philosophy probably do claim that. But I don't. I certainly don't think that a pure free market would solve all problems. I just believe there would be more prosperity, less poverty, and less violence in a society without a government than in a society with a government.

[leot]

Libertarians often claim that laissez-faire will always do better than intervention. From the above, it should be relatively obvious that depending on the government and depending on how non-stationary the economy is, laissez-faire could work either quite well or exceptionally poorly.

It's the possibility that laissez-faire could do a much worse job than regulations that libertarians refuse to accept.