A new myth appeared during the presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson

Beccaria is interesting, it's true. Nothing wrong with digging up the underrated and overlooked, if you can find them.

Perhaps it would be surprising to some people who haven't thought much about it that we will likely be viewed poorly for wasting non-replenishable helium, necessary for advanced medical technology, on party balloons. But I don't think there is anything we do that we can't currently reason about being considered immoral for. I have absolutely zero doubt that George Washington would not be surprised to leap to 2025 and see someone condemning him for his slave ownership. There is nothing about living in the 1700s that would prevent him from reasoning that what he did was immoral, and indeed, many people in the 1700s did reason that.

Cultural adoption of morality moves significantly slower than reason about morality. This is because cultural adoption requires action. Humans will behave immorally even if they know their actions are immoral, for their own benefit. To counteract this requires coordinated group effort, which is an extremely slow process because, for example, convincing people that it's worth them risking death in a bloody war to stop other people from owning slaves, when they are not themselves ever at risk of being treated as a slave, is a very challenging task. That one participates in selfish, immoral actions for one's own benefit because one's society does not yet coerce one through collective threat of violence to behave morally does not absolve one of one's actions, which can already be reasoned through even if the collective will to enforce it does not yet exist.

Cultural adoption can also diverge from reason about morality completely, of course. This is because selfish people with power can use their power to enforce immoral values like absolute service to themselves, for their own benefit. If a society does not collectively overcome powerful individuals acting selfishly, then the culture's apparent morality will be warped in the service of what benefits a specific individual at the greater expense of society. However, even in such a state, people can and do reason about morality. Human history is a long, long tale of people defying immoral abuse of authority.

> These are inherently synonyms for each other. As soon as you have anyone deciding how resources are allocated, they're taking them from whoever did the work to create them to begin with.

Nah, this is a very wrong take. If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen? Thats just a tiny little example.

There are millions of other examples where trust is employed without theft because the consequences matter.

> The best you can hope for is voluntary interactions...

Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us? Capitalism REALLY is just oligopoly with extra steps. They know this and count on it.

This is sort of like saying that an oligopoly isn't a monopoly. Technically true but not a solution to the problem.

The only way to have a large central government but not have a small handful of people with an outsized amount of power would be to make the decisions through direct democracy, which is the thing that doesn't scale to organizations that size.

> Both of them freed the slaves.

But only one of them ever gets credit for it.

> If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen?

There are two ways to frame this.

The first is, you're in charge of your portfolio and the manager is just your employee, so the one at the top is you, but then you're only in charge of your own money and not anyone else's.

The second is, retail investors are unsophisticated and lack the understanding necessary to hold portfolio managers to account, so the managers engage in shell games to steal from the investors and buy themselves yachts and otherwise act against the investors' interests. In which case they're at the top and they're autocrats.

> Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us?

Nearly by definition the only types of organizations are public (i.e. government) and private (i.e. capitalism, any organization that isn't a government). If you don't like private organizations, and the government is corrupt, then what are you even proposing?

The inherent problem here is that if you have centralized power structures of any kind, Machiavellian opportunists will try to capture them for their own ends. What you need is a structure of government that prevents that from happening. It's nominally supposed to look like a government constrained in what it can do (checks and balances and enumerated powers) to prevent it from having the authority to issue competition-destroying regulations in the event it gets captured, and therefore reduce the incentive to capture it. But still having the authority to enforce antitrust rules, to prevent the same thing from happening in private markets.

We don't actually have that. A lot of the original checks and balances were removed by populists in the early 20th century so now the US federal government is thoroughly captured and in turn issues thousands of competition-destroying regulations and doesn't meaningfully enforce antitrust laws. But the only thing to do is fix that, because what else is there?