Comment by AdieuToLogic
17 hours ago
> But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable.
It's the same question libertarian advocates cannot resolve:
If one truly believes in personal sovereignty, how are
shared resources paid for, such as roads, power grids,
potable water, sewage services, fire departments,
and police departments?
It is also not a coincidence that leadership in many tech companies have expressed libertarian ideals.
What do you mean by "libertarian advocates cannot resolve"? Like, they have no answers at all, or you aren't personally swayed by them? Because they definitely have answers to this question...
I think the typical answer is “free market” but that answer doesn’t sway because:
1. Nobody bothers to explain why something could function as a free market and
2. Nobody bothers to resolve the plethora of domains that de-facto cannot operate as free markets.
So, in that sense, they don’t have answers. “Look over there!” is not an answer.
Free markets are actually not a given. We have to build them and build in systems so that they can operate as free markets. How that intersects with healthcare, public utilities, etc is complicated. IME libertarians are reductionist and simple, which is why many people have just taken the route of ignoring their arguments.
I find this comment a bit odd. There is a ton of literature on the topic, as well as lively debate online. I would recommend both The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman and Michael Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority (specifically pt 2) as great readings on the topic.
If one judges any idea by the average discourse on internet forums, especially throwaway comments, and trolling, no idea would ever stand up to scrutiny.
> What do you mean by "libertarian advocates cannot resolve"? Like, they have no answers at all, or you aren't personally swayed by them?
The latter I suppose.
I qualify my answer because what few rational responses I have seen to this question are equivocations at best and thinly veiled myopic sophistry supporting personal greed in general.
The short answer is that "shared resources" in a libertarian system is a bit of an oxymoron. It's a category error.
The long answer would probably be that access to these resources would be gated through pay-per-use, instead of a distributed taxation system. Of course for convenience you might end up with a structured way of purchasing a group of resources and it might even look like a roundabout way of taxation, although libertarians might argue that taxation is the roundabout way.
Or they might give a different answer, there are different schools of libertarianism!
* not a libertarian, but interested in niche political ideologies
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Libertarians can just flip it round and say how do socialists solve the free rider problem? Neither system resolves both problems.
Extremist dogma is not a great way to run a society, but it does good numbers on social media, so here we are.
Only one is a reasonable problem in functioning societies, the other one mostly a fallacy.
Democratic socialists and social democrats solve the free rider problem through general taxation and regulation.
Consider universal healthcare as the case in point for this; we absorb the cost of chronically ill people by mixing them in with the rest of the population, at a fraction of the price that the "free market" costs to attempt and fail to do the same thing.
Actually I don't think libertarians would argue that the problem is unsolved in both systems, they would argue that the problem itself is nonsensical. Most libertarians don't believe that non-excludable positive externalities are a problem, since it involves no harm to anyone and no violation of rights. They simply don't believe that because you indirectly provide a benefit to someone, you then have the right to coerce payment.
One could argue that there is an efficiency problem however - for example, take a bee keeper whoes bees benefit their neighbours. It could be argued that if there was some means to which the keeper could exclude those positive externalities, and there some level of payment at which the surrounding property owners would be indifferent between the excludable and the nonexcludable situation, there could be a Pareto-efficient gain. And since there is no reasonable way to exclude the benefits, it leads to the conclusion that the neighbours should be coerced into payment. Most libertarians reject this type of coercion prima facie.
> Libertarians can just flip it round and say how do socialists solve the free rider problem?
This is a fallacy (tu quoque/whataboutism). You're changing the subject to distract from the fundamental problem in libertarianism and implying that some other strawman is just as bad.
Without solving the fundamental problem, libertarianism will never work for anything but toy societies.
Your spidey sense is failing you, you're making assumptions you've got no ground for. I've voted for left of centre parties all my life. I was born in the NHS and I'll probably die there too.
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