The Biggest Flaw in Libertarianism

There is a theory that seems almost holy to Libertarians and which many posters dodge like hell. So if there are any Libertarians who would like to take a crack at responding directly to a point, I'd like to hear their views. Of course, if they all use the same dodges and analogies I got from another Libertarian, then quit asking why no one takes you guys seriously.
Here it the central economic theory I've heard from Libertarians and why I dispute it:

"The Market Will Correct Itself". They claim if a company is not nice, people won't buy its' products and services, they won't work there and The Magical Market will make the bad ol' company go away! Wrong. It doesn't.
Without government regulation, companies hurt people (e.g. unsafe working conditions, denial of health benefits, toxic dumping, unsafe oil rigs etc...).
They make harmful products (e.g. dangrous drugs, cars that blow up etc...).
They treat employees horribly (e.g. discrimination, wrongful term, etc...).
And no - those companies don't disappear if they are bad because "the Magical Market Corrects All".
The Market does little to correct anything a company does, once it gets big enough. That's just plain fact.
So the biggest flaw I find in Libertarianism is the belief that companies will regulate themselves, if simply left alone. History proves this is not the case.

This is why a strong centralized government and reasonable level of regulation is necessary to the well-being of citizenry.

I would welcome any commentary from Libertarians on this and will not stoop to the petty insults, labeling etc... that the weak use as their only means of debate. However, I will challenge you if your reasoning is flawed! Cheers, FS

 

Really? No Libertarians?

 

Companies can be sued rather than regulated. No one is saying that companies should be able to market arsenic as milk or dump sulfur into a river, and if companies did those thing they could and would be sued just like they are now. I'm also not sure why employers shouldn't be able to fire anyone for any reason; it's their business why do you have a right to work for them? Libertarianism is not the absence of government so much as the massive reduction of it.

 

Companies want to sell their products, not poison the populace. On the other hand...top regressive globalist, anti-human dirtbags want to reduce the population by 80-90%, own the gov't, the media, and the regulatory agencies. They're succeeding in destroying the industry in America, just as they stated they wanted to do.

Take a look, progressives, progress is poverty for the masses who are not on Bill Gates or Al Gore's income level.

You're the cancer and they want to cure it.

 

Seriously, thank you. It's good to see a Libertarian who will espouse their views. So the problem is, if say Ford was dumping toxic waste into a river next to their factory and kids were dying, how would the connection be made? Or a drug that caused blindness? Even if it was, do you know how often a single or group of consumers prevails against a major company in a lawsuit? Less than 1%. That's hardly a sufficient deterrent.
While I think we definitely over-regulate in many ways, I don't buy into the concept that The Market will correct such things - at least not once a corporation gets big enough.

 

Where are these "not nice" companies that have survived so long? If you can't provide any examples, then your claim about the free market is baseless and unfounded.

"Companies" can't hurt people. A "Company" is an abstract concept. Only people can hurt people. If you're going to understand Libertarianism, you need to abandon your fundamentally flawed Collectivist thinking first.

Unsafe working conditions like what? Generalized statement that's far too vague to respond to.

Health benefits aren't actually benefits. You think that the company actually pays for that out of pocket? Utter nonsense. They just pay their workers less. The worker ends up paying for his own health benefits no matter what. Again, your thinking is flawed.

Toxic dumping is a violation of private property rights. No libertarian supports that. Strawman.

Are you referring to the BP incident?

So you're saying that certain drugs should be criminalized? I can't help you there if you believe government should have the ability to tell people what they can and can't put in their bodies.

So who should regulate that? The government? General Motors has been involved in cars blowing up recently...cars that were engineered under government ownership. How can you trust an institiution that allows cars to blow up to protect people from cars that blow up? LMAO!

If you don't like being discriminated against, quit. Wrongful termination is BS too. Why shouldn't an individual be allowed to fire anyone he wants when he wants?

Then I'm sure you'll have no problems coming up with examples to support your baseless claims.

Your reasoning has been proven to be flawed on multiple counts. Try again.

 

I talked to a libertarian and I asked him he was against fishing licensing laws that restricted the number of fish fishermen could catch.

He said he was against such laws.

I asked if he would still be against such laws, even if it meant all the fish got caught and there would never again be any fish.

He said he would still be against any such laws, even if meant that there would never again be any fish.

That's when I gave up on libertarianism. It's not even slightly reasonable to be a libertarian.

 

We make those kinds of connections all the time. If someone dumps arsenic in the drinking water, and suddenly the drinking water has high levels of arsenic, well how much further do you need to go to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the two events are related? I also don't know about that 1% number, I'm curious if you can provide a good link. I'd be curious to know how they came up to that number. For instance were settlements counted as victories or failures (technically not a win, they didn't win the case) and is every case like "fat man sues McDonalds" and suits employees who mess up a job suing for discrimination despite obvious failures to do their job included in that estimation.

 

Many things have changed and there may be a need for some regulation but it can be cut extensively. Rather than regulate, create laws that forbid things. Naturally, business owners don't want to be sued for a huge chunk of money, so they will hire people to inspect things. But from the private sector. No government money is spent with bureaucracy after bureaucracy.

I have not done a great amount of research, though, so I could be missing certain facts. This is just my general thought process after reading a book or two.

 

Why would all the fish go away? Take salmon. We have hatcheries, the salmon aren't going anywhere. All someone does is need to find a way to make that profitable and it's a non-issue. For instance if tuna were going the way of the dodo; set up a tuna farm. May as well say we're going to run out of cows, chickens, and other food sources.

 

So... less government right?

 

They do not regulate.

They are payed off. Just like every branch of our pseudo-gov't. They allow so much garbage on the market and are helping shutdown independent farmers and non-Big-Pharm-indoctrinated doctors. None of their medicines work, and if they do slightly work, they have 1000 side effects. You've seen the commercials.

They're geniuses but every imaginable category of nutritional and synthetic-induced disease and death are shooting through the roof.

Point is, they are more harmful by shutting down the competition to Rockefeller foundation Pharm and Bill Gates' Monsanto GMO farm, than they are in preventing destructive drugs and foods from reaching the market.

It's kind of like what was the point of having banking regulators if Obama was going to hire Timothy Geithner (Goldman Lizards) and keep Burnbank at the head of the failure.

 

Libertarian's to me do not make any logical sense in their economic theories. And I think I figured it out. My view of economics has a goal. That goal is to increase economic growth and to increase the standard of living of each faction of the economy. Libertarian's do not have these goals. Their goal is strictly independence. I would call Libertarian's Darwinist. Either you can make it or you can't. So when you argue with them about solutions and you bring up how these alternate solutions created by the Govt can work, it's completely foreign to them. Because it violates their ideology that every man has responsibility for himself.

 

Examples of dirty companies that have lived so long, mmm let's thing: Apple and his monopolistic tactics and dirty tricks, Microsoft, mmm there is a British company, that I am not able to remember the name that became rich thanks to the opium wars in China, it was an opium selling company. There are many examples of companies living for long time. Also we have companies like Coca-Cola and others and their direct implications in worker unions killings in Colombia and similar places.

Companies usually are dirty. For something have the power that they have.

 

It seems to me that Libertarians actually have a misguided view of human nature. Not all humans or collectives of humans are enlightened. See the thesis that the corporation is a sociopath:

The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary examines the modern-day corporation, considering its legal status as a class of person and evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a psychiatrist might evaluate an ordinary person. This is explored through specific examples. Bakan wrote the book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, during the filming of the documentary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(film)

An example of corporate sociopathic behaviour is Ford and the Pinto, where cold calculations were made:

According to a 1977 Mother Jones article by Mark Dowie, Ford allegedly was aware of the design flaw, refused to pay for a redesign, and decided it would be cheaper to pay off possible lawsuits for resulting deaths. The magazine obtained a cost-benefit analysis that it said Ford had used to compare the cost of an $11 repair against the monetary value of a human life—what became known as the Ford Pinto Memo.[14][17][18] This document was, technically, not a memo regarding the Pinto specifically, but a general memo Ford submitted to the NHTSA in an effort to gain an exemption from safety standards; it was also primarily focused on the cost of reducing deaths from fires resulting from rollovers, rather than the rear-end collision fires that plagued the Pinto. It was nonetheless submitted in court in an effort to show the "callousness" of Ford's corporate culture.[6]

An example of a Pinto rear-end accident that led to a lawsuit was the 1972 accident that killed Lilly Gray and severely burned 13-year-old Richard Grimshaw. The accident resulted in the court case Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co.,[19] in which the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth Appellate District upheld compensatory damages of $2.5 million and punitive damages of $3.5 million against Ford, partially because Ford had been aware of the design defects before production but had decided against changing the design.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto

Regulation of human behaviour is required where more than one human gets together with another.

 

Ah. A reasonable and intelligent post. How refreshing. There are tons of examples. The pharmacuetical industry was unregulated and not even required to thoroughly test drugs for decades. Millions of people suffered permanent side effects or death from drugs. Tons of victims never realized what was hurting them. Then regulations were instituted and the FDA established. Among those laws, came the requirement that the potential side effects be identified and labeled. I think that's a good thing.
Not all but many Libertarians seem to think those ompanies would just do that on their own. That's awfully naive.

 

Let us know when you succeed in hiring people to turn the weapons on the sociopathic corporations, instead of oppressing the people because of the higher bids from the sociopathic corporations.

Liberty movements have always been against the ruling class and their law. Modern liberals are fooled into believing that some tailored suit jackoff will work for them. Wrong 100% of the time, with Obama being the latest example. He was thoroughly exposed by libertarians in 2007 btw.

 

There's other reasons to prevent extinction of animals that have nothing to do with keeping them as a source of food. Did that ever occur to you?

 

We had a free market system in the second half of the 19th century. Didn't work out to well...

 

Well THAT was special.

 

Is one more powerful with a pocket full of cash, or with a badge and a pocket full of cash?

Option B is the situation. ....And, they're destroying individual liberties and killing us intentionally.

 

I have actually met people who think its a good thing bumble bee's are disappearing...

 

I hear this from a lot of Libertarians and Conservatives.

I have all the freedom I could imagine. I own a business, I do what I what I want (because you know, I don't WANT to mount a .60 machine gun on the hood of my car or whatever), I travel often and wherever I want.
So what are these freedoms that have been stolen from you? How are you oppressed?

 

The oppression has not hit America yet, although the build-up is evident all around. think you still have a the 4th amendment? Patriot Act said no. Still think you have 1st amendment, eroded day by day. think you can protest on public grounds? shoveling that that through the verbodden zone.

The Greece fire is coming to America and Obama and Bush already chose to side with the bankers. That debt clock is not an imaginary ticking time bomb, it's a real one. The history of fallen empires is also accurate in most cases. Buckle up, businessman.

 

The FDA is a mess. Drugs that harm get past it all the time; watch TV and wait for the class action lawsuit against drug X to pop up. The testing procedures are also messed up and prevent progress. I wish I could find the article but I'm not having luck. It's something to do with once an item goes into testing it cannot be altered. If you find a better way to do what you want to do, you can't change the item in testing. Also, again, companies don't want to harm people. They want to sell a product and they want people to buy and use it. Selling poison is bad for business and can result in lawsuits. Not even the FDA can save them from that, though you'd think if a government agency said something is OK that you could sue the agency, but of course you can't (well unless the government allows you to).