Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: The Internet Can Stop Big Government

Well put. It seems to me that there is a lot of room for a moderate libertarian party, which could sit between the two major parties as a reform-oriented 3rd party. The majority of the electorate is uncomfortable with the idea of government regulating their bedroom activities, and is highly alarmed with the profligate spending and clearly unsustainable entitlement obligations, and is very skeptical of overseas adventurism. If this 3rd party simply co-opted the Democrats social policies and the Republicans fiscal policies, but with a reformist, common sense, moderate-libertarian bent, it could probably win enough seats in Congress to become legislative kingmakers - especially with an electorate as disgruntled as in the last two cycles.

There are poorer countries than China that are not growing at their pace. Your claim implies all developing economies should be growing because of the "gap" between them and developed countries. In reality, most developing economies are struggling to find a path to growth.

You're perhaps right, people will one day "demand regulation" because that's what happens when countries get so wealthy that politicians can't pander on bigger issues and instead start making big deals out of smaller ones (i.e. we'll protect you from unhealthy restaurants). Not to mention, like all organizations, governments fight to continually grow. Unlike corporations, governments can't go out of business (easily) and have the support of misguided do-gooders.

Europe is going through this right now. They developed before the United States and they are declining before us as well due to the excess of government.

Finally, to claim economic growth in China is "abusive" is to show total disregard for the poverty of the people living in the country. China is still an incredibly poor country and economic growth is helping move millions out of poverty every year. Would you prefer slower growth and more poverty?

Well, who's giving the State its legitimacy right now?

It's not some god in the sky that does. We do: not just a generic we, but most people reading this, you and me included. We choose to participate in the markets it establishes; it tells us what property rights are and says they're property rights because it says so and has the guns to back them up. The corporations we work for rely on it to break down people's doors when someone gets ahold of a next gen device that they misplaced, and we feel safe that the money we put into our banks is safe for us because the State will yell at the bank if it takes our money and pay for it if the bank loses it.

There's no reason a protection agency wouldn't do the same to establish its own legitimacy. It seems like a good business model, in fact: convince everyone that questioning it is morally bad, create some ideal of "citizenship" that amounts to brand loyalty to violence, and then expropriate value from a populace that's not only cowed but actively consenting.

Don't get me wrong: it gets my goat as much as yours that that's the situation. But I wasn't describing before how a hypothetical, ahistoric government-like entity might develop: I was offering a general theory of how it actually did. If it's right, the State isn't some aberration but an emergent, self organizing maelstrom that has gradually grown to envelope virtually all people in all places.

My issue with libertarianism as it exists in popular culture is that its idea of liberation seems to be getting the State to deign to rewrite property rights to privilege one part of society instead of the current one (that's all of electoral politics, actually). Once that's achieved, one gathers, we can all become happy and free consumers because a certain property right regime has become the law of the land, imposed from above by our now-purified and almighty State.

He explained this pretty well. How come most ecommerce websites have "trust badges"? The government didn't need to create an agency to rate web site security, but yet such a thing exists.

If people wanted a health inspection organization to rate restaurants it'd exist. Since the govenrment already monopolized that field it doesnt. Okay, it sort of does, it's called Yelp.

Anyways, the point is pretty clear, we have all sorts of "trust" systems on the Internet to verify everything from privacy (Truste) to security (Verisign, etc.). People can create these types of organizations on their own without government and will if they actually do something useful.

>Let's analyze this situation with some economic rigor. What you're invoking is Coase's theorem.

You're attacking a strawman, and I said nothing about the Coase theorem. For some criticism of Coase by a libertarian economist see here from page 4 of the PDF: http://mises.org/rothbard/lawproperty.pdf

I said, "Pollution would be treated as a tort." Nothing really special there because all rights violations would be, viz. we do not believe in victimless "crimes against society".

I then was mentioning the idea of easement rights in pollution (for more on this cf. from 26 in the above PDF).

>A polluting coal plant might cause $1,000 of health damage to each of 100,000 people, and it isn't worth any of their whiles to litigate such injuries. Yet the cumulative impact of such activity is large--the coal plant is essentially "stealing" $100m, but getting away with it by stealing a little from a lot of people at once.

In common law tradition, people were able to sell their tort claims, no matter how small. Modern authoritarian law prohibits this, there are barriers to class action suits, and so on. We'd like to return to the common law tradition here, so if you are concerned about this, you ought to be on our side.

Besides the problem with a governments ability to simply be corrupt, polluters often pay fines to the bureaucracy rather than compensating victims. You are incorrect to automatically assign a $ amount to any claim of this sort. The punishment could involve at least a chance of death and who knows what all these minor health hazards might add up to.

Still, the impact of an individual polluter may be seen as trivial, but firms would be able to collectively pursue the torts after buying claims from the victims.

I believe in a continuation of good 'governance' after abolishing 'government'. I'm working on some interesting ways in which "municipal" service providers might utilize distributed torts against polluters into something resembling various "social welfare" programs we have today.