Comment by pdonis
9 months ago
I don't know any "free speech absolutists" who argue that fraud should be legal. Misrepresentation of a product or service you're selling is fraud. We already have laws against that.
9 months ago
I don't know any "free speech absolutists" who argue that fraud should be legal. Misrepresentation of a product or service you're selling is fraud. We already have laws against that.
Then consider yourself lucky, but I've seen that position argued strenuously right here on HackerNews in the past.
This has actually been a fairly common position among American libertarians. Alan Greenspan, for instance, was strongly against fraud laws until some time after the financial crisis. The idea was that the market would sort it out.
(And no, I don't understand how this is a serious position that serious people can seriously hold, but then that is how I feel about libertarianism in general.)
> American libertarians
The term "libertarian" I feel is almost useless as a description of the political views of Americans, because it gets used to describe views that don't make any sense with that label. Greenspan, for instance, often described himself as a libertarian (or "libertarian Republican", whatever that means), but that seems a bit rich for someone who was chairman of one of the most powerful central planning organizations on the planet for so long. If central planning is libertarian then I'm a blue whale.
The term "free market" gets misused just as much. It's not a free market if the government (or the Fed, which is just an arm of the government) has its thumb on the scales.
It's the thumb on the scales that allows the free market to exist.
Without it there's just men with guns, and men with more guns.
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> It's not a free market if the government... has its thumb on the scales
See, this is why libertarianism doesn't make sense. If there's no government intervention, then monopolies, incumbents, and rich and powerful people in general take their place. The point of having democratic institutions intervene in the market instead is to keep the intervention under control and in check. The alternative is Oliver Twist, ecological disaster, maybe even feudalism.
But we agree that there's a lot of hypocrisy on the Right in general. A lot of insider trading and "I'm a free speech absolutist" and then buying up mass media to censor people who don't agree with you.
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