Comment by komali2

> and "rent-seeking", whatever defines that really.

"The act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth." This is in opposition to profit-seeking, where "entities seek to extract value by engaging in mutually beneficial transactions." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Friend, with respect, the mental blocks you're coming up against regarding roads, police, and resource distribution, within an American libertarian framework, are outlining exactly why American libertarianism (unregulated capitalism) is an untenable ideology.

Private roads don't make sense in capitalist framing because there's no possibility of competition - no market for a free hand to move in. Furthermore, there's ethical issues around the fact that roads won't be built to people who aren't as instrumentally valuable to capitalism, which is in opposition to the idea that all humans are equally intrinsically valuable. In plain words: poor people won't get roads built to them, won't be able to work, will get poorer. This is bad, and if you want to just be selfish about it, will lead to crime and social discohesion.

This argument extends to all the resources governments typically involve themselves in: electricity, sewage, water. We have direct evidence that when they try to privatize these things, it goes horribly wrong: see, the American healthcare industry, or, what's happening to the UK as it privatizes sewage. See the Texas privatized power grid.

All capitalist entities (corporations) are simple algorithms: Make profit go up. We like to tell ourselves that making profit go up is possibly only through mutually beneficial trades, aka the aformentioned profit-seeking, however that's not true in practice. The most profitable activity is slavery driven labor, and the most profitable state for a corporation to be in is monopoly. All optimized capitalist behavior selects for and trends towards that activity and that state, and literally the only way to stop this is through establishing some kind of hierarchy that allows for the limiting of corporate behavior - governments, and regulations.

Any example you give of a corporation in capitalism not trending towards slavery or monopoly has one of several explanations. 1. It's regulated, 2. It's led by someone who ethically doesn't want to trend towards slavery or monopoly, or isn't intelligent enough to do so. In the case of 2, that company will eventually be surpassed and consumed by someone with less morals, more intelligence, and more capital (more power).

> "We should just naturally have the natural things that we naturally want" somewhat unironically. I feel that way, the same as anyone else. The difficulty, as observed up the thread, is in working out what's natural, or vital, or wanted and feasible.

I completely agree, and there are other ways to do this other than capitalism, regulated or otherwise. I strongly recommend the most cited economist in history: Karl Marx. Peter Kropotkin is also very good, "The Conquest of Bread" is a great speculation of alternative systems.