Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because humans are shit at governing, the only viable way (until someone invents something new) is external control. No, that's even worse, because, as you admit, humans are shit at governing--and the "external control" is just more humans being shit at governing, but with a much bigger negative impact because the scope of their shitty governing covers many more people. Advocates of free markets, like me, don't adv…
My point was not that government is better or worse than corporate oligarchy in a question of governing. It's all the same people, same humans, just with different labels. My point was that free market is kinda like unstable isotope, it can't exist for any significant length of time and will decay into a government. As soon as some corporation starts dictating its rules to an unrelated people, we can call it a proto-…
If this is true, I think we're screwed.
I don't think it's actually true, but it is true that in our current world, the number of people who understand the downsides of government and are willing to truly support a free market is miniscule, not even rounding error in the overall numbers.
> Competition can't work in the free market.
You're forgetting that in a free market, all transactions are voluntary. And in a society where that had been true for a long time, and people upheld that principle and acted accordingly, institutions would evolve that are very different from our current ones. David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom is a book length attempt to imagine what such a society would be like, in some detail. It would not be at all like what you would get if you took our current society and just eliminated the government. Of course that's a stupid idea, because our society has evolved for a long time under the assumption that it has a government, and its institutions have evolved accordingly.
> The instant external control ceases to exist, the most shrewd and smart players would start employing all kinds of currently illegal shit.
To paraphrase David Friedman in a similar context, unfortunately this sentence remains true if you take out the first seven words.
You're describing what happens now, in our current world, which has "external control" up the wazoo--just external control that does what the most shrewd and smart players want it to do. Google, Amazon, Walmart, etc. have all done "all kinds of currently illegal shit", and paid no real price for it. True, they've also made a lot of shit that should be illegal, technically legal, by buying the laws and regulations that favor them. But they've also broken the law, straight up, numerous times, and the government never makes them pay the proper price. They always get away with what for them amounts to a tiny slap on the wrist.
And the situation now is worse than it would be in a free market, because in a free market, at least no one would believe that there was some magical "external control" that would somehow protect them. They would know that it was up to them to simply refuse transactions whose long term cost outweighed whatever short term gain was being dangled in front of them. In our current world, people still believe, even with all the evidence to the contrary, that the government can somehow protect them from all the "currently illegal shit" that the big players get up to. And that "protection" simply isn't there. Government always ends up being just another tool that the big players use to get what they want at the expense of everybody else--and it's an easier tool to use than trying to do it in a true free market would be.
Again, it might be that humans are simply incapable of doing the things that a free market requires at scale. And if that's true, I think we're screwed. In any case, it's not a problem that is solved by having a government.