From: Billy Brown (bbrown@transcient.com)
Date: Tue Jun 06 2000 - 13:53:05 MDT
phil osborn wrote:
> As an anarcho-capitalist, objectivist libertarian from the '60's on, it
> pains me deeply to actually find myself even close to the same side of
> things as Janet Baby-killer Reno, but the fact is that if you were really
> aware of how badly the market has been served by the MS mob, and why, you
> hopefully would never have made such silly remarks. MS, to me, represents
> the triumph of a fundamentally idealess moneyed yuppy oligarchy in using a
> corrupt system to sell amazingly shoddy products to an ignorant market.
And
> they didn't even invent that!
If your analysis is correct, the very concept of anarcho-capitalism is
fundamentally flawed. Any society based on personal freedom must be built on
the presumption that individuals are largely capable of making their own
decisions, and that leaving them free to do so is the best available
approach to running an economy. If, OTOH, individuals are fools and informed
experts can make better decisions than the markets, then the technocratic
socialists are right to demand control of the economy.
One of the hard parts of advocating freedom is realizing that you,
personally, are not exempt from the arguments we have long advanced against
the centralization of authority. If a panel of experts can't be trusted to
decide which product we should all use, neither can a panel of one. If a
free market makes a decision you think is stupid, odds are that you are the
one who is wrong. At the very least, you should assume that the result is
due to differences in individual desires, needs, abilities and/or
information, rather than some kind of sinister plot.
Claims that the "wrong" product has won out in a free market are commonplace
among supporters of the products that lost, but they almost invariably turn
out to be incorrect.
Billy Brown
bbrown@transcient.com
http://www.transcient.com
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