Comment by thegrimmest
3 years ago
Funny that your optimum free market strategy is murder. A market where murder is a legitimate strategy is anything but free. In fact a good litmus test as to the freedom of a market (or any social structure) is the legitimacy of murder.
Comparing murder to antitrust therefore seems to be a pretty weak argument. Deontological libertarians would view the use of force required to enforce antitrust as authoritarian overreach. They would see no moral justification in the enforcement of arbitrary limitations on the voluntary transactions of consenting parties. They would see these as tyrannical.
This stems from a core disagreement about the nature of society. Some people see it a as a collective project for the good of all participants (the sticky points being the definition of "good", and the non-optionality of "collective"). Others see it as simply an agreement to coexist peacefully and cooperate only voluntarily, while embracing the Darwinian nature of said coexistence.
Each side is well meaning I'm sure, but I find it hard to reconcile these two worldviews.
Coexistence - peaceful - darwinian. A circle that's hard to square.
I don't see why. It's basically what happens in any free society - we (as individuals, organizations, social orders) compete over finite resources. Disputes are resolved via due process. Winners win and losers lose. The difference between civilized and uncivilized is only in which actions are available to the players, not in the nature of the game.
The problem is that competition for resources is taken as the essence of markets, which it is not. Competition exists in markets, sure, but it's not the point of the market per se. That's psychotic. This is the problem when decontextualized practicalities become enshrined as abstracted ideological and moral tenets of the highest order. According to your view, if I were starving, and you had a warehouse full of food, then I would be stealing if I were to break in and take some food to survive. Theft is always wrong by definition (you cannot say it is sometimes justified in ad hoc sense while remaining coherent; if the law just is competition for resources, full stop, then the starving man is just a loser, full stop), so I, the starving man, am morally obligated to accept my death outside the walls of that warehouse.
But as I said, this would be an incorrect view of markets, which occur within societies, to enable the good. Human beings are social animals, and so our good depends on society. The common good is also prior to private property. A scenario where people are starving, but where there are warehouses full of food, is one that demonstrates some degree of dysfunction.
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