ancaps be like

taxes
mandatory rental fees

i'm sure someone has a good but quinn as to how corporate collusion to put income tariffs in the rental agreement is somehow not the same as government taxation but it kinda sounds like any ancap/libertarian environment is just one jump from "taxation with extra words" at any given moment

@icedquinn I’m not going to say it’s a fundamentally different thing, but I’d argue the incentives in a free society align to protect against that sort of thing much better. What happens to shitty corpo landlords that do dumb shit like that? (They lose customers and begin shrinking)

@ademan questionable how much that works in practice.

some people end up with too much money.

@ademan an un-clowned market system is good at posting exchanges and some of those exchanges can do things like filter shitty tedious jobs down to people who have to do them because they have no other way to avoid starving. ex. voluntarily enlisting the homeless in to cleaning up recycling bottles.

market systems are also rife with failure modes (what happens if i have no social credit and no money? i.e. every teenager ever). the whole lolbert ancap argument assumes that no one person can "execute the 51% attack" on the bitcoins.

the problem is that in reality, they do.

Lords and Villens accidentally models this

@icedquinn

market systems are also rife with failure modes (what happens if i have no social credit and no money? i.e. every teenager ever).

They work for less while they build up both things, the market figured this one out a while ago 😉

assumes that no one person can “execute the 51% attack” on the bitcoins.

I think you’re asking too much of any system, but I also think this is less likely than you think, and more mitigable in a free society than you think.

@ademan @icedquinn even if not, just switch back to gold :)

@lain it's not really about the BTC, i just use the 51% attack because its a neat phrase.

when you have enough clout to 51% attack the entire society (ex. a monopoly) the market systems completely fall apart. and that can be reached with cartels for example.

@ademan

@icedquinn @ademan it's a good point but this might be interesting to you: https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/the-misplaced-fear-of-monopoly/

@lain @ademan

Other critics will point to the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations and the dubious causes those institutions have supported. Their objection is irrelevant to the specific question of whether the men themselves, in their capacity as entrepreneurs, improved the American standard of living. That question is not even debatable.

except my point is that they did acquire enough money to dictate terms to the society. this article just handwaves it because they dictated terms by acquiring the medical industry and locking it down to their designed preferences instead of using it to bogart the steel.

@icedquinn @ademan that's not what the article does, it does show that what they did did indeed lower the prices of their products immensely (and didn't raise it like you'd expect from a 'monopoly'), and their companies became smaller again due to general competition. Please try to read it with an open mind.

@lain @ademan
> the cost of steel went down so don't pay attention to the billions of dollars they turned around and clowned a different industry with

ok.

@lain @ademan my whole original argument was that some people earn too much money and use it to dictate terms to society.

rockefellers were successful in more or less shutting down the majority of medical schools in the US.

@icedquinn

An important factor driving the mergers and closures of medical schools was that all state medical boards gradually adopted and enforced the Report’s recommendations.

@lain

@ademan @icedquinn @lain

Before Govt granted the AMA a licensing cartel in 1905, poor illiterate Southern black refugees (& Euro immigrants) had ~98% health insurance coverage

1 day's wages paid a year of 'lodge medicine' coverage, hospital stays & minor surgery

America's lassiez faire economics created affordable, high-quality retail healthcare for the masses for the first time in human history, & actuarial science

The AMA was a Govt-created cartel to destroy lodge medicine

@Libertarians_AMA rockefellers had a lot to do with the clowning IIRC. what i remember of it is they basically created standards that just happened to perfectly enclose what they were invested in, and then everyone else was shuttered.

the entire field of electromedicine was killed off this way.

@ademan @lain

@Libertarians_AMA the robber baron stuff i've seen argued against before but i'm thinking of modern (post 90's) behavior most of the time; in this age we see a lot of acqui-hiring and mergers that exist solely for political reasons.

some of the companies standard oil and carnegie's shit merged made sense. they turned two steel mills in to one steel mill. but microsoft buying software just to destroy it *doesn't* benefit the average american like stopping two steel mills undercutting each other out of business does.

@ademan @lain

@Libertarians_AMA @ademan @lain i should say two halves of a steel mill in to one steel mill. anyway. i haven't refreshed on the 1920s era shit in a long time.

Google wasn't exactly given a government monopoly on search but still became the dominant search engine. And now they're pivoting that success to basically co-opt the town square for their own reasons. There's also no real government requirement that we all have to keep using Google, but good luck getting any form of penalty levied against them either.

@icedquinn
Yes, pointing to #GoogleIsNotWhatItSeems by JulianAssange offers insight into the #corporateState totalitarianism that has accelerated since the 90's.

Google basically had a nice search algorithm people found helpful, the rest appears to be extreme #cronyism.

@lain @Libertarians_AMA @ademan