“Data, stop. Data. Stop. Data, SHUT UP!”

Nice, you avoided having to think on a self-imposed technicality. Real intellectual rigor there.

Makes it easy to dismiss my argument without bothering to think about it, you mean. Just take abortion, then. Or “tax is theft”, or right to bear arms, or any of a thousand other beliefs you probably don’t agree with.

So like, if you were in a restaurant and ordered food, but it never came because a couple of the servers were blocking food from being served because the company wasn’t taking a strong stance against abortion, you’d think “these good people are taking a moral stand, good for them! The company better not take any action against them to make sure I get my food!”

Or for that matter, if Google stopped all cooperation with the IDF, the company’s Jewish employees could (in fact should) disrupt business because Google was supporting terrorism?

It seems to me that you can only support forms of protest you’d be willing to accept when the other side uses them against you. Basically the golden rule.

This is sort of implicitly true. You can’t get people’s money if they can’t figure out how to use your product/service.

At the same time… People are pretty dumb.

As a software dev and open source contributor: stay the course, then! I’ll take open source software over a union 10 times out of 10. I get paid so well for what I do that it’s silly, and I love spending my time doing the stuff I like. I’ve been a union member in other fields, it’s not an experience I’d like to repeat.

I seriously doubt anybody is contributing to open source for status & seniority. Respect, maybe. The status & seniority people become managers; as the old joke goes, that’s the best way to get them out of the workforce.

A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

Man, fuck off. You claim to know everything? You sure don’t do much exposition if that’s the case. Content to just bitch, huh?

I know about Bell and the breakup. I don’t know as much about the original evolution of the telecon market in the US. I bet if I did some research I’d find regulatory capture, government protectionism, and at the very least abuse of IP law. Not sure how much explicit government funding I’d find, but I bet it’s a lot more than zero.

I know the government loves to set baselines. I’m very skeptical, in many cases, that they’re necessary. Just asserting that they are and telling me to “Read. Up.” is not persuasive.

I’ve listed some of the many reasons I’m not a libertarian elsewhere in this thread. See, I’m of the opinion that any intelligent person should be able to explain an argument, even if they don’t fully agree, because if you don’t understand an argument you don’t actually know if you agree or not.

But you wouldn’t know about that. If I were you, I’d stick to your forte: scanning pages of arguments and examples, ignoring almost everything while looking for cases where you suspect a person might have made a mistake or admitted they didn’t know everything, then jump out and yell “HA! You don’t know a specific thing, therefore everything you said is invalid! Do your own research to see if you’re wrong or not, because I’m like too important to spend time explaining my own beliefs! PUBLIC. RECORD.”

Explain to me: if I were a libertarian, why the fuck would I try to hide it, anyway?

No, on second thought…don’t bother.

(cont)

So the FDA is strict and overbearing… but did nothing to prevent it?

Yes, exactly. They control what drugs are allowed in the country in the name of safety, and yet some of the most damaging drugs in history slipped right past them. So what’s the point, then? Much less regulated markets do just as well when it comes to drug safety, drugs are cheaper, and terminal patients can make decisions about their own health. So what’s the benefit of the FDA?

I listened to a podcast years ago talking about the FDA. Wish I could find it. It wasn’t some right-wing think tank or anything, in fact a lot of the issues it raised trended left-wing. For example, I remember one of the issues being that the FDA banned human trials on women of childbearing age–that is, 18 to 50. Of course, testing on children is verboten anyway, and over-50 is a whole different category because hormones change dramatically post-menopause. So, effectively: the FDA banned human trials on women.

This resulted in some ridiculous consequences: pregnancy or birth control medications being tested on men, for example. But more generally, all drugs are tested on men only, and men are substantially different from women. This meant that women tended to face much more severe side effects from drugs, since drugs that had gender-specific side-effects on men were filtered out by the trials process, but not those affecting women. There were examples in the podcast where these side-effects were fatal. This has been going on for decades, ever since the 1970s, and it’s only started to change recently.

That’s one example of overregulation having very concrete consequences. And yet, the FDA hasn’t faced any consequences, and in fact the consequences are largely hidden because they’re diffuse and aggregate: hundreds of thousands of women feeling sick or dizzy or tired.

I would say that counts as the FDA being “strict and overbearing” and yet failing to prevent harm to the public. And again, even as they protected a handful of women from the potential consequences of human trials, they let fentanyl out the front door (along with many medications that had adverse effects on women, discovered in the wild rather than in trials).

Are we sure this is all important and necessary?

If anything, it was exacerbated by the obscene amounts of money it made for the makers of the drug, money that they used to lobby government officials. Isn’t that the free market in action?

Absolutely not! That’s regulatory capture in action. High levels of regulations result in high profits for drug companies by strictly controlling IP, excluding generic drugs, and making it nearly impossible to start up new drug companies. In turn, the existing companies use those high profits to influence further regulation, streamlining the approval process for their own (sometimes dangerous) drugs, giving them a veneer of safety, and blocking out competition. This is exactly the kind of thing that libertarians rail against.

The libertarian ideal would be more like: dozens and dozens of drug companies offering low-price, high-quality drugs, making a reasonable but profit in the process, with independent consumer- and hospital-funded organizations checking them for safety and effectiveness. People are less trusting, and more careful about the drugs they take, but in extreme cases, where a person is terminally ill, they’re free to try whatever treatments they want. A single drug with terrible side effects would be enough to put a drug company out of business (because they’re smaller and less wildly profitable) and severely damage the reputation of any rating organization that stamped their approval on it, so both are much more careful about putting out and approving new drugs.

But again, I’m not a libertarian. I’ve got views that would blasphemous to a libertarian. Hell, I’m pro gun control. I just get sick of the endless ridiculing of strawman libertarian caricatures on Lemmy and Reddit. They have valid points, they just tend to carry it way too far (from my perspective). I’m done defending them for now, I think I’ve managed to flesh out the strawman a bit for people who are open-minded enough to consider their POV, instead of just saying “LOL libertarians just wanna fuck teenagers and shoot guns” or whatever.

You LITERALLY did.

I LITERALLY was talking about Hong Kong from it’s establishment in the 1840s through to the Chinese takeover in 1997 (and beyond, really, because they were mostly left to their own devices for most of 2 decades after Chinese rule).

As I said, you skipped ALL the other stuff that led to today, including how most of the civilized world followed the same general trajectory.

Hong Kong should have been the exception to that rule if heavy regulation is actually a requirement in the healthcare industry, but in fact it’s top of the heap. If you can achieve the same results without regulation, what’s the point of regulation?

I was suggesting it was an example of how your “the British didn’t care” bit is incompatible with facts.

I was speaking informally. I meant that the British didn’t govern with a heavy hand. They weren’t entirely disinterested, but they were a lot less paternalistic than they were back home in Britain.

Externalities? You mean the kind of stuff that governmental regulations on private businesses are intended to prevent/mitigate?

Yes, exactly that kind. You do realize I’m arguing your side here, right? Are you having trouble keeping up?

You’re debating like all the libertarians I know. Poorly.

Yeah well ur stupid. Zing!

They got safer over time because what people want is to not die and the government put rules on how those things can be manufactured and operated.

So explain why things continued to get safer even when the government was not actively adding extra regulations? Why did life expectancy go up through the Reagan years, when the government was actively deregulating?

Sounds to me like the regulation on the automobile manufacturers pushed them towards innovation.

Regulation must have helped somehow, right? It served an an inspiration! There’s no way customers would’ve simply showed a preference for safer cars over time…

No, the bad press happens when the press leaks an internal memo proving that the car maker knew full well that they’re car had a flaw that could cause death or dismemberment but they decided not to do anything about it because it would hurt their bottom line.

This is the status quo. Car companies sell cars, and car accidents are one of the leading causes of death in the US. I’m about to shock you to your core, here: car companies know about car accidents, and yet the continue to sell cars! Even weirder? People also know about car accidents, and continue to buy cars!

Every car on the market has known flaws that cause accidents. For example: they have rubber tires, and those tires have a tendency to wear and eventually blow out, a known cause of accidents which leads to a known and quantifiable number of deaths every year. Shocking!

It’s all shades of gray, man. Car companies can’t make perfect cars that never cause accidents, and even approaching that ideal would make for ridiculously expensive cars. So, they find themselves (like every producer of a product ever) in a situation of balancing costs & risks. Emails talking explicitly about that look bad out of context, but even the NHTSA has thresholds and compromises in their regulations.

They still knew to avoid the dangerous mushrooms or berries.

What, without the government itemizing the dangerous mushrooms & berries in law? What stopped self-proclaimed Hong Kong doctors from passing off poison berries as medicine, if they didn’t have some FDA-equivalent telling them what to do?

[Re: housing] Cite your sources.

I mean, the YIMBY movement has all kinds of pages and YouTube videos making my case for me.

An example: housing prices in Tokyo were going wild in the 80s, and they responded with massive deregulation. Now housing is Tokyo is much cheaper than comparable cities (I mean, to the extent that other cites can even be compared to Tokyo, with a metro population roughly equal to the population of Canada). I saw a graph a few years ago where there was an obvious elbow in Tokyo housing prices when the deregulation occurred, putting it on a totally different trajectory from New York, London, Paris, etc.

And notably lacking since then: stories of high rises collapsing or massive fires burning down whole neighbourhoods. Tokyo is incredibly safe, even though you can build a 5-story house on an area only large enough for 2 parking spaces and open a restaurant on the first floor.

Like Hong Kong: it only takes one counterexample to demonstrate that heavy regulation isn’t required. You can argue that it can be beneficial, or at the very least isn’t too harmful, but it’s hard to argue that it’s necessary when Tokyo does fine without.

I spent years in that house dealing with the never ending noise of the traffic and the foundation shaking any time a semi drove by.

But you did have a place to live. You weren’t homeless. You didn’t have to stay with your parents. You didn’t have a 2-hour commute to work & back. You made the choice to live there, and to stay there for years, in spite of the fact that there was road noise.

There simply isn’t enough land in and around major & desirable cities for everybody to have a nice, quiet, private 2-bedroom house with a yard. So the choice is: do you regulate as if it were possible, and fuck anybody who can’t afford the resulting $8M homes (see: the Bay Area)? Or do you allow lots of housing development so that people can at least find affordable places to live, even if they have to experience road noise?

Again, I agree that there are some zoning laws that are due to be revised or repealed, but suggesting that they are all pointless and detrimental to society demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of basic civic planning.

Even most libertarians agree that some regulation is a good idea, they just think it should be minimal.

But also…that’s an easy assertion to make, and you could make it everywhere. “You just don’t understand X well enough to know you’re wrong”. That’s not convincing. I’ve faced similar dismissals in cases where I’m convinced the counterpoint was wrong, and I could make my argument at length (eg: rent control is great!). I reckon I could imagine approaches to civil planning that would be compatible with libertarian principals, but would avoid situations where industrial plants were stuck in the middle of residential areas. I’m sure there are think tanks that have worked on the problem.

No, the libertarian playbook says my neighbor should be allowed to open a gun range in his backyard if he wants to.

Not all Communists are Stalinists, and not all Libertarians are this extreme either. Even the extreme ones tend to support courts & policing, and have an explanation for how this sort of situation would work itself out. I dunno, I don’t understand their perspective enough to defend it in this case.

You know that’s actually a thing, don’t you? There have been plenty of people with a terminal condition who have volunteered in clinical trials knowing full well it may kill them.

Yes. But it’s also a thing that some chronically ill patients have to travel abroad for experimental treatments, because the FDA hasn’t got around to allowing trials yet.

Opioids are a problem all around the world. Some countries are way worse than others, but it’s not at all unique to America.

It’s not unique, but it’s uniquely bad, in spite of the fact that healthcare is one place where the US leads the world in heavy regulation.

I’m pro-gun control. I like public transit. I think cities should be organized to some extent. Countries that managed large-scale cooperation did much better during the pandemic. Global warming is hard to solve in a pure libertarian system. There are lots of reasons why I’m not a libertarian.

I wish it were nice and simple to identify where regulation helps and where it doesn’t, but it’s the source of endless debates.

Even most liberals love to dunk on libertarians.

I’m not a libertarian, because I don’t take my liberal views to the extremes that cross the line into libertarianism. But I find many of their arguments persuasive. And yes, I explicitly said I was going to play devil’s advocate, because it annoys me the way people dismiss a ridiculous parody of libertarianism and then act like they’ve made a real point.

I’m definitely a liberal, and I don’t deny it at all. I fit right in on /r/neoliberal on Reddit. That doesn’t make me a libertarian: I’m pro-gun control, pro-public transit, etc. I have lots of views that libertarians would absolutely hate.

that’s what your writing conveys.

You mean my devil’s advocacy? I think any intelligent person should be flexible enough to explain ideas they don’t fully agree with. If you can’t even explain an opinion you disagree with, you don’t actually disagree with it: you’ve just dismissed it in caricature.

Don’t have any counterarguments? Don’t let that stop you! Just throw out some insults and act as though a serious reply is beneath you, given your superior understanding of the world. If confronted, gesture broadly at the comment you’re replying to and say something like “that third point you made is stupid!” Don’t bother elaborating or explaining why. Everybody will probably think you’re a professor of economics who’s just sick of explaining himself or something!

Here you go. That’s some examples where economists have considered the effects of regulation on cost, and thus mode of travel, and thus fatal accidents.

It’s hard to put specific numbers on a counterexample. Here’s an article with a table estimating the impart of increasing the cost of air travel.

Re: Hong Kong, I’m not talking about their system circa 1870, I’m talking all the way through to the Chinese takeover in 1997 and beyond. Very recent. Throughout, life expectancy and health outcomes rose steadily.

The fact that Western & Chinese doctors trained at Western medicine isn’t incompatible with libertarian values, at all–quite the opposite. Yes, there was some government funding during the century of British rule, but that’s not the sole source of progress, and it’s debatable whether it was necessary.

I think the pandemic is a good counterargument against libertarianism, because it required cooperative action (or at least, cooperative action dramatically improved outcomes). Interestingly, though, Hong Kong, which is still relatively light on regulations, did very well compared to Western nation. It was more of a cultural issue.

Global warming is another sticky point. Any place where externalities cause problems is a good point for argumentation. Again: I’m not a libertarian.

Pharmaceuticals, automobiles, and homes all get safer over time because that’s what people want. People buy cars that are rated as safe by independent bodies, so cars are often much safer than is strictly required by regulation–and getting safer every year. That’s because people want safe cars, and are willing to pay more for them, and because unsafe cars cause lots of bad press. There were very few restrictions on what could be sold as medicine in Hong Kong for a century, and yet people didn’t all die of toxins in their medication. Developers follow professional standards, most of which are not enforced by government. The government hasn’t been adding newer and stricter regulations year-on-year in these industries–and yet they get safer year-on-year. If regulations are the sole driver of safety, why is that the case?

You were scolding me for referring back to the 19th century in reference to HK healthcare (though I wasn’t doing that), and yet you suggest that the only thing keeping us from living in dirty hovels is government regulation. That’s silly. If libertarians (and incidentally, most economists) are right, fewer regulations would mean much cheaper, better-quality housing for low-income people. Shit, let me point you at the YIMBY movement: Fuck single-family zoning! Fuck building restrictions, and parking requirements, and set-back regulations, and dozens of other petty and arbitrary regulations–all put in place by well-meaning but naive bureaucrats. Getting rid of all that shit would drastically reduce housing prices, meaning better housing for everybody! And incidentally, the YIMBY movement is not only fully compatible with libertarian views–it’s basically torn straight out of the libertarian playbook!

We need to regulate the development, production and distribution of drugs. ALL drugs.

Tell that to people with chronic conditions waiting impatiently for the FDA to approve experimental medications which might well help them with their sicknesses, which will kill them soon. Why shouldn’t they be free to try something that might save their life?

Fentanyl was developed and distributed right in the open, approved by the FDA, and distributed to doctors and pharmacists, and everybody happily prescribed it and took it believing that it wouldn’t be FDA-approved if it was dangerous. It’s only recently that it’s gone underground. Meanwhile…lots of less-regulated countries have no such opioid epidemic. A strict and overbearing regulatory regime (the FDA is relatively strict even compared to similar nations) did nothing to prevent it, and arguably exacerbated it.

The state of healthcare in the 1960s through the 1990s? I mean, it wasn’t that bad. Life expectancy at the time was rising very quickly in developed countries–and in Hong Kong.

Libertarians can drive me crazy too, and I agree that a lot of them are driven by ideology, not practicality. And a lot of them can’t even make these arguments in defense of their own beliefs–they just come at it from a simple moral POV (“taxes are violence!”). But that’s not unique to libertarians: most people hold to ideologies they don’t fully understand, which is why they defend them rabidly with insults and attacks, instead of just explaining why they believe what they do. “I believe we should do this because it’s right, and I’ll get mad if you try to explain why it’s impractical, impossible, or counterproductive!” is an attitude I hear more often, if anything, from the Left.

And, well, in a libertarian world, your ability to opt out of things may depend, to some extent, on your wealth–but (they would say) it’s easier for people to get wealthy in general. And as I pointed out in my original post…well…no, it’s not really true. I opt out of Facebook and Microsoft and other ‘monopolies’, and I’m just fine. Why would that change? But I really, actually can’t opt out of the state, and the bigger the state gets the more restricted we are. So, the solution to “if the libertarians got their way, some people would be more free than others” is “we should significantly restrict freedom overall, for everybody”?

The nation noted for its “free market healthcare” on the world stage has shit health stats.

You mean the nation where the government spends more per-capita on healthcare per citizen than almost anywhere else, while also claiming to be “free market”? The US healthcare industry is a fucking disaster.

'Cause you are so fucking far off the mark it’s hilarious.

Well, don’t trip over yourself correcting me or anything. Silly me, I thought SaskTel, BCTel, Manitoba Telecom Services, and Alberta Government Telephones were Crown Corporations (i.e. public). I’m not as familiar with the history of telecom in the US–but also, the modern-day telecom industry is a hell of a lot healthier in the US.

At what cost in bodies?

Did you skip the rest of my comment? Over-regulation of airlines is almost certainly costing bodies today. That doesn’t bother you, though, right?

Look at the 737-MAX fiasco, where government abrogated its oversight of the airline, permitting companies to “self-certify”

Dereliction of self-assigned duty. The government claimed responsibility for airline safety, then quietly dropped it. If they’d never taken responsibility in the first place, there’d be independent bodies doing it–the same way Consumer Reports gives safety ratings for cars without government funding.

And even so, even with aalllll those 737-MAX deaths, airlines are still 1000x safer than driving your car. Per 100k flights, you can expect roughly 1 accident, of which fewer than half result in any fatalities at all. Keep the ‘fiasco’ in perspective.

Seriously, go visit those 346 people’s families.

Okay, how 'bout I do that, and you go console all the victims of car accidents in the US. Hell, restrict yourself to the ones where one involved party said something like “You know, we could fly…nah, it’s too expensive!” Hard to quantify, but given the car accident stats, I think you’ve got your work cut out for you.

The idea of regulation is to stop the bodies from happening in the first place instead of waiting

Just ground all planes, and flight accidents would fall to zero! Brilliant! And incidentally, that is analogous to the situation today: we severely restrict airlines in the name of safety, resulting in more deaths elsewhere (but that’s not on us, the airline regulators!)

This religion of “the market solves all” is why libertarians are fuckwits.

But the market solves a hell of a lot more than people give it credit for.

And there’s the name-calling! Boy, you sure showed them libertarians!

Typical libertarian blather.

Typical ad-hominem dismissal.

In each one of these cases the industry predates the regulation.

Yeah, I preempted you and pointed out that’s the argument of the ‘other’ side.

There are some cases where you can argue that regulation was a response to abuses. I’d agree with banking. I gave a counterpoint re: healthcare, where free market healthcare worked really well.

Telecom was largely rolled out by government monopolies, in order to do it quickly. Then (at least in Canada, where I’m from), the government basically passed monopolistic government bodies to private companies, with a little “make sure to allow competition!” clause. Surprise surprise, there’s basically 1-2 telecom companies per province in Canada today, and they’ve captured the fuck out of regulatory bodies. Corporations are corporations, and they’re gonna seek profit. That’s a good thing if they’re competing and struggling, but terrible if you pass them a harness and whip.

I’m skeptical about airlines & insurance. They’d have worked themselves out eventually, if left to market forces, but that’s never been allowed to happen.

Early airlines were a mess, but the last 50 years have been incredibly safe. You’re like 1000x safer in a plane than a car. I’ve seen arguments that such extreme safety regulations are actually causing thousands of deaths per year: the level of regulation significantly raises the price (I’ve seen 2x as a rough estimate, no idea how accurate that is), which causes a lot of people to drive instead of fly–and driving is 1000x less safe, so lots of them die in car accidents. If flying were only a few hundred times safer than driving, and prices dropped by 25%, it might save hundreds of lives due to fewer car accidents.

There’s this problem with regulation: nobody ever lost their bureaucratic job by being too careful. If you’re a government bureaucrat and you eased up regulations on airlines (or food & drug safety, or building codes, etc), and that caused some incident that killed a person or two, you could be offered up as a sacrifice to public rage–even if the same relaxation of regulations saved lives by encouraging (safer) flying over driving, or made drugs available that saves hundreds of lives, or made housing 13% cheaper in some given city. The benefits are diffuse, the harm is acute–and newsworthy. And what’s the upside for you, as a bureaucrat? You don’t get a raise, or a bonus, or even a pat on the back for lower housing prices or exciting new cancer treatments.

So: restrict, limit, contain, regulate. That’s the only sane thing to do. Make a big deal about how safe you’re keeping everybody. Nobody will ever know that thousands of lives could have been saved, or housing could’ve been affordable, or travel could’ve been quicker, etc, if you’d eased up on regulations. You, the bureaucrat, will never face the counterexample–or the costs associated with overregulation.

Somebody already did.

But yeah, sorry, I couldn’t fit the worldview in a tweet.

I think you may have come up with the least unpopular opinion on Lemmy. There’s more people who are unabashed fans of Stalin and Mao than there are libertarians.

Buuut…I mean, I’m not a libertarian, but I’ve taken libertarian ideas more seriously than you have, so I can play devil’s advocate.

The idea behind libertarianism isn’t to hand power over to corporations; that’s just what detractors claim will happen. What they claim will happen is that corporations will become far less powerful.

The nightmare cyberpunk scenario where companies acquire private militaries and just physically take over doesn’t really apply. The difference between libertarians and anarchists is that the former do see a place for government, usually including military, courts, policing, enforcement of contracts, and a few other things. So companies would continue to have to earn your dollar the old fashion way.

Now, think of industries that suck, where the companies are really shitty causing people to complain about them all the time, but are nonetheless stuck using them for lack of options.

Got some? Okay, now, were you thinking of electronics companies? No? How about bedding, or kitchenware? Hardware & tools? Flooring? Children’s toys? Food & grocery?

Or…were you maybe thinking (depending where you live) of banking, airline, healthcare, insurance, or telecom industries?

Okay, now, change of topic: think of some industries with lots of regulation and government intervention.

Did you by any chance come up with the same list?

Lots of people will claim those industries are heavily regulated because they’re somehow inherently shitty, and need the government to step in to fix them. Libertarians would say that those industries are shitty because regulations and government interventions prevent competition and shelter incumbents. They don’t have to treat customers well anymore, or make particularly good products, because their position is secure whether they do or not. In an actual free market, competition is easier, so it’s harder for a company to establish a monopoly.

An extreme example: Britain famously demanded Hong Kong as compensation from China during the Opium Wars, and used it as a gateway to Asia. They treated it with a sort of benign neglect: as long as the port was functioning, they didn’t pay that much attention to the operation of the territory. It was not heavily regulated, to the point that even (for example) the healthcare industry was basically regulation-free. You could literally stick a sign on the door of your apartment claiming you were doctor, and start treating people, and nobody would stop you.

So, since healthcare is one of those sacred industries that requires heavy government regulation to protect people, the life expectancy and health outcomes of Hong Kongers must have been abysmal, right? Well…no, it actually climbed steadily throughout, and is #1 in the world today (though it should be noted the situation re: regulation changed post-1997). And it was a hell of a lot cheaper than American or European healthcare at every point.

There are industries where monopolies seem to form naturally. In my lifetime, Microsoft, Facebook and Google have all been accused of being monopolistic. There were calls for government intervention. But like…they were monopolies (or got close, anyway) because lots of people chose to use them. Nobody was forced. I couldn’t stand Microsoft or Facebook, so I switched to Linux way back in the 90s and I’ve never really used Facebook at all. I do use some Google products, because they’re pretty good.

And I’m fine. Nobody ever threatened me. My life wasn’t negatively affected AFAICT. I just didn’t use that product. Competitors appeared, like Linux & BSD, Reddit, Lemmy, etc, and I liked those better so I used them instead. That was it. Pretty boring as far as dystopias go.

The situation is a bit different when it comes to government. I can’t opt in or out, I’m just stuck. I mean, I can move (assuming I have enough cash to do it), but fully extricating yourself from your home country is surprisingly hard: the US will chase you around the world to claim taxes from your income. And you immediately have to pick another country, and your options are severely limited.

People talk about corporations in such dire terms. It’s kind of mystifying to me: just don’t fucking use that corporation’s products. Voila! You’re free from their insidious influence.

Ahh, but they corrupt government institutions with their lobbying money! The libertarian answer is: have fewer government institutions, then. They can’t lobby to bend regulations in their favor if there are no regulations in the first place. They would say that heavy regulation means incumbents are protected from competition, and can thus extract more ‘rent’, meaning more profit, which they can then turn towards warping the copious regulations in their favor…meaning still more protection, more profit, and more regulatory capture.

Like I said, I’m not a libertarian, but I understand their perspective, and I think it should be more influential than it is. I can talk about how rent control raises housing costs, or how “worker’s rights” results in lower pay, or how minimum wages are racist and sexist.

Or you can just call me names for taking libertarians seriously! That seems like the more popular approach.