Are government privileges to corporations justly acquired rights? [...] |
I have already explained how I oppose the government in all its actions, including corporate welfare, and how it is people like you who are the enablers of corporate welfare through your willingness to tolerate the government "crutches" that you find more agreeable.
A corporation, by its very definition, is dependent on state power.
This is why there's the term corporations and the term businesses. [...] |
One person can run one or more "businesses", and in an informal sense a child playing legos might tell another child that is bothering him to "mind his own 'business'". When two or more people form a legal entity that can outlive them, however, then it's called a "corporation", no matter if those contracts are enforced by a government, by a competing mesh of free market arbitration authorities, or even if they don't have a coherent plan for enforcing them at all. For example, if the FreeTalkLive.com domain and Web-site(s) are owned by Ian, and he puts Mark's and Julia's names on the contract with the hosting company to give them the right to take over control if he's incapacitated, then you can call FreeTalkLive.com a "corporation" of sorts.
How do you know that a politician has never been elected on promises of corporate welfare?
Have you ever seen the major sponsors of most political campaigns? [...] |
Sure, corporations find it in their interest to pay off whatever Mafia bosses come between them and their customers, but a thug like Obama doesn't go on stage and say "vote for me because Goldman Sachs gave me a ton of money and now I owe them", he tells the plebs whatever lies they're most likely to swallow. Those who live by the sword (i.e. initiate aggression) deserve to die by the sword, and those who want to steal via big government deserve to be stolen from!
This depends on one's definition of capitalism and one's definition of socialism.
Read my other thread (Drop the term capitalism) to see where I stand on this. |
I have, and I've pointed you to a rebuttal on my existing thread, "
Definition of 'Capitalism'" .
Its funny how you say that socialism cannot exist without the state and commies say capitalism cannot exist without the state.
Either semantics are fucked up, or both are right (the state is a precondition for both those ideologies) or both are wrong. |
It's an empirical fact of history and of the present day that the most capitalist societies have the most minimalist and restrained governments, while the most socialist societies have the most tyrannical ones. I am right, and the commies are wrong.
Where do rights come from? |
The same place where mathematics "come from" - empiricism.
Are they inalienable? Why? |
By its definition, Natural Law (on which Natural Rights are based) is the societal ruleset that leads to the greatest empirically-observable competitive advantage over other potential rulesets. (This is based on the single axiom of evolutionary pragmatism - that life and civilization are desirable.) A society built on the premise that murder and theft are permissible would do as poorly as a spaceship built on the premise that Pi equals 3.000!
We already agreed on that the concept of rights have consequentialist advantages (the utility they bring is greater than if they were not used), i'm asking you to prove that they come from "somewhere" other than subjective agreements among people. |
Is the Pythagorean Theorem a "subjective agreement among people"? No, it is provable in hundreds of different ways, and people who engage in geometry find it in their interest to be rational, just as people who are as rational in the field of political philosophy find it imperative to recognize Natural Rights. Fortunately geometry is not a science through which would-be tyrants can acquire a great power monopoly, so it has not been as corrupted by religious lies as the science of political philosophy has been. The same erroneous political ideas that have been shown to yield negative results since antiquity continue to gain popularity over and over again!
There are many reasons why studying economic history objectively has been far more difficult that studying a math problem on a piece of paper, and most of those reasons relate to the shortness of human perspective. How can you test the merits of an irrational religion (government) when that religion has near-total grip all over the world, injecting ever-more cultural bias into the cultures it controls though child education, influence over academia and military training, control over the recording of history, and so forth. Without those cultural biases, it would be much easier to see how there exist certain economic laws that are essential for sustaining and further growing a civilization:
thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill, and so on.
Wal-mart would not last 1 day if the government dissipated tomorrow. |
Government disappearing in one day won't do anyone any good (see
my Gradualism thread), but a gradual phase-out of government force over the next few decades would have a tremendously positive effect for the human civilization as a whole, including the countless millions of people who are WalMart's stake-holders (investors, employees, and customers). Do you really think that a company that can get millions of different products to 7000+ stores all over the world on razor-thin profit margins cannot negotiate access to privately-owned transportation infrastructure (or build its own), or do whatever else you think government bureaucrats have a magically-unique competence at doing?!
The success of these chains results from their ability to undercut their local competitors with lower prices. But their lower prices are possible only because of the massive state subsidies to trucking, shipping, infrastructure, aviation, etc. If such corporations had to cover their own costs in these areas, they likely would not be able to compete with local alternatives (not praising local alternatives, just sayin'...). |
It would be a long and off-topic argument to discuss how different-sized retail companies are affected by different government subsidies and tax schemes. Yes, if WalMart's (or Amazon's, etc) current success comes from over-dependence on government aid then it would have a harder time competing on a level playing field once the government is phased out, but it would have several decades to prepare for that eventuality and adjust accordingly. If mom'n'pop stores become more competitive as the result, that's OK by me, and if they don't they don't. Free market is all about merit-based competition - may the better stores win!
Agreed. But then, why do you claim products of government action (corporations) are examples of the free-market when making a case for defending free-markets? |
Throughout American history, most consumer-oriented and B2B businesses have preferred to limit the growth of government, and generally wanted the government to just leave them alone (military manufacturers and other government contractors being a minor exception). Most businessmen have been Minarchists, but if ideas about polycentric jurisprudence and private defence agencies hadn't been forcefully excluded from their education then many could have become Anarcho-Capitalists as well.
More importantly, most corporations can continue operating just fine without government help. Sure, WalMart would have to hire more private security to compensate for the absence of municipal police, etc, but that's just a minuscule fraction of the savings they'd get from not having to pay income, property, or any other taxes. A company like Microsoft, knowing that government force is being phased out say 20 years from now, would know it has to transition itself away from selling licenses to selling hardware, certifications, consumer and B2B contract-based services, or whatever else they happen to think up. Furthermore, you must remember that corporations are transitory abstractions: someone may work for, invest in, or do business with Corporation A but switch over to Corporation B as circumstances change without a great loss.
The Free Talk Live BBS
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Topic: To Welfare Haters (Read 5180 times)