Because I’m Tired of the Child Accusation

Writing to your congressman often results in useless emails asking for donations to their campaign. Congress is gridlocked for the foreseeable future, I don’t see much changing for the little people, but you’re not wrong about corporations. That’s why it’s better to support local mom and pop establishments.

Which are going the way of the dodo, thanks to mega corporations like Walmart and Amazon pricing them out the market.

Rugged individualism only carries you so far.

You can also thank government for that. Small businesses are hindered by red tape policies as well. Licensing fees, zoning regulations and other local policies prevent start ups from getting of the ground.
ETA: there are also a lack of anti-trust legislation that prevents conglomerates.

Just when I thought you were making progress...

Absolutely this. A corporation (or most other business entity forms) is just as fallible as the government. The key difference? Governments are accountable to the people, corporations are only accountable to shareholders.

When the government fucks up, heads roll. When a corporation fucks up, it either declares bankruptcy or changes its business form, or just has enough capital to pay the costs to settle out of court and make shit go away. The government doesn't have that luxury, which makes it far more trustworthy than private corporations.

But wouldn't anti-trust legislation be a government intrusion into the free market? That doesn't seem like a very libertarian position.

Yet the use of slave labour happened and continues to happen around the world today, driven by the free market.

In fact when you break it down slavery in the Empire was driven by market forces and it was the violent intervention of a fledgling state which ended it (sort of, if you squint and stand on the white side of the fence)

Whether Apple are guilty on that score is another question for another day, but market pressures are exactly what produce modern day slavery and most people don't question where their cheap stuff comes from.

They do, however, pay attention at election time.

If you charted every bill put forth to vote by congress, then tracked along the X axis how popular that bill was to the American people - 100% would be all the way to the right; and whether or not congress passed that bill on the Y axis - 100% they pass the bill, you should end up with a line that roughly runs diagonal from bottom left to top right.
but that isn’t what happens. That line actually runs about 33% straight across the board regardless of whether or not the people want that bill passed.
conversely, if you chart how likely the billionaires who but the politicians want a bill passed, THAT line actually does run diagonal bottom left to top right.
our government does not work for us. Not republicans, not democrats, not libertarians. They work for those who bought them.

For those of us who don't quite have your visualisation skills could you provide an illustration?

He offered a good faith argument. You did not.

Indeed.

Progress is listening to alternative viewpoints, not necessarily accepting them verbatim.

Dangling the carrot of progress, and yanking it away?
Why, it's Dayton 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Indeed, for the majority now functioning in society without being at least partially excluded inevitably means using google, amazon, facebook.....

It’s not, but it doesn’t mean I’m 100% opposed to them. You could argue though that if you eliminated the regulations that I mentioned, you wouldn’t need the anti-trust laws in the first place.

Why not? It's not just government regulations that make it possible for corporations to squeeze out the competition, then impose whatever they want on the public.

Consumers need to wake up. There’s probably more choice in the marketplace than there has ever been. Everyone has become a food critic, for example and restaurants live and die by yelp. Consumers have a bigger say than they used to. The taxi industry has been hit big time by Uber and the drivers compete for better service because of the ratings system. Again, if you wanna stick it to the big corporations, vote with your wallet and go local. If more people were to do that, then the market would likely correct itself. You wouldn’t need the government to step in. Unfortunately people don’t do that, but people are starting to. The farm to table trend is gaining steam and hopefully changes the restaurant business permanently so local businesses beat out the chain restaurants and local farmers start making more money. That’s one really good example of the market correcting itself.

I'm continuously inundated with far right nonsense on Facebook. I'm a tiny, inconsequential dot of purple in an extremely red State. I come to WF to see what the other half thinks without having to wade through the grating far-left side.

When I was young, and stupid, I thought that the people in charge where in charge because they were smarter and better at their jobs than everyone else. They made decisions, and if I didn't agree, it was because they could see the "big picture" that I couldn't see. Then I started coming up through the ranks and I learned that the leaders were mouth breathing, blithering idiots groping their way through the day like a blind man in an unfamiliar house.

The old axiom is that those who can do, and those who can't teach. That's a lie from the pit of hell. Those who can do, those who can't go into politics.

I do not trust government in any way, shape, form or fashion. But, I trust the private sector even less.

If you think mouth breathing, blithering idiots in Congress are bad. Wait until you are saddled with mouth breathing, blithering idiots entrenched in a monopolitistic global mega-corp. You will enjoy your nutritionally balanced Prime Meal, in your Prime Clothes, in your Prime House, Prime Citizen...

At least, theoretically, there's a route to getting rid of the elected officials.

Oh, I trust corporations even less than government. They are the poster children for short-term thinking. And there seems to be a maximum size for corporations beyond which they become almost 100% incompetent.

How do you then square such a statement with a (latter day) libertarian position?

If you trust corporations even less than government why place yourself ideologically against keeping them in check?

Cognitive dissonance on full display.

But it hasn't corrected itself has it? What you are describing is way too little, way too late, to really qualify as representing a self correcting mechanism. To even approach warranting such a descriptor it would have had to kick in long, long ago.

The market has allowed some of those vast corporations to get to the state where they effectively own their respective corners of it and that success only makes it harder for others to compete.

Again, the way you combat that is to consume locally. I didn’t say that the market had worked it out, I said that it would if most people decided to patronize small businesses. You’re never going to eliminate corporations all together, but you can reduce their impact.

Again, you equate libertarianism with anarchism. I recognize the need for government - people are assholes, after all - but that government must be minimal and restrained.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” James Madison

That's a big if and simply shifts the goal post in terms of who intervenes and how.

I'm actually sympathetic to your case, I grow much of my own food and try to buy not only locally but off people I know personally but the reality is that only stretches so far and eventually sits at odds with quality of life, convenience and finances. I cannot, for instance, get locally sourced bananas, coffee or persimmon. The UK is ideal for growing most herbs, root veg and (surprisingly) chilli varieties, not so much citrus fruit or plantain for instance.

People by and large will shop according to what is convenient and affordable, not their politics. Some will try to an extent, much as we have "fairtrade" or "buy local" goods over here, but most will not make their groceries an ideological statement. Most will simply go to a supermarket, or mall, or whatever and do their weekly shop, only looking elsewhere if prices shift noticeably or somewhere opens nearer to home. Ask them to act in a unified manner as a regulatory body by proxy and you have to make it obvious it is in their personal interests and not merely why it is the moral or ethical thing to do. That's pretty much the free market summed up AFAICT.

Failing that (and I think you would) the only other entity legally or logistically capable of regulating the market is the government.

Ok, but it must also be in a position to do some restraining of it's own.

I'm not confused over the difference, I'm drawing attention to a fundamental flaw in the logic of expecting the free market to solve the world's problems or, for that matter, do anything other than exist as an abstract exercise in chaos theory.

“Human nature” is the fundamental flaw in every system of governance or economics so far developed. Some more than others, such as Marxism, which makes assumptions regarding human behavior that are laughably, disastrously wrong.

This is true, but there is absolutely one universal, fundamental aspect of human nature which trumps all others IMHO and that is speaking not only from the POV of a poster or a politically biased person, but as someone whose own research background lies in the evolutionary basis for human nature and how that still drives us today.

We are social.

We have to be, we are only viable as a species when we work in groups.

The ability to form those groups and those structures is why we survived and prospered despite being optimally adapted to precisely zero natural environments.

Human beings acting in isolation are essentially rubbish, we are always outdone by some other organism filling an evolutionary niche better than we could ever hope to.

Structured societies are not an optional thing for human beings. They are not a way individuals compromise their interests in order to avoid conflict, nor are they a way of ensuring universal rights are maintained, they are a survival strategy for which our brains are designed at the hardwire level and that hardwiring has implications for which the phrase "far reaching" is a woeful understatement. The drive to form such societies can in one form or another be said to shape almost every aspect of human behaviour since, behaviour of which modern politics and political philosophies barely qualify as icing on the cake.

No system based on humans being individual agents whose interests only overlap in a coincidental sense is bound to fail every bit as much as one based on some idea of inherent fairness.