The problem with [conservative] libertarians is that they are half anarchists.

They support "radical individualism" (anarchy) and "free market absolutism" (hierarchy). This is a blatant contradiction no matter how you talk your way out of it.

If you are participating in a free market, then you are subject to corporations. The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that one must both allow corporations to rule over them, and never allow anyone to rule over the corporations.

This is where most people, including the author, present liberalism as the solution. Free market + democratic regulation is a great way to manage an economy; but is it really a good way to manage the rest of society?

The article brings up copyright without exploring the idea at all. I think this is the greatest mistake of all. Copyright is what forces every facet of society to participate in a capitalist market.

Without copyright, what would change? First of all, we wouldn't have tech billionaires. Wouldn't that be nice? Next, we wouldn't be structuring all human interactions with corporate ad platforms. There seems to be a lot of unexplored opportunity there. Even more exciting, moderators would suddenly have all the power that they need to manage the responsibility they are given. No more begging to reddit admins! No more fighting automated censorship! Doesn't that sound good?

It boggles my mind how people from nearly every political perspective have accepted copyright as the one perfect inarguable virtue. Even the cyberlibertarians op argues with are only willing to concede copyright with the promise of a magical free market replacement! Now's as good a time as ever to think about it.

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slopinthebag 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> They support "radical individualism" (anarchy) and "free market absolutism" (hierarchy). This is a blatant contradiction no matter how you talk your way out of it.

Not quite, they support property rights, which is something that social anarchists implicitly accept as well, they just have a different conception of how that would work. To a right anarchist or libertarian, "Free market absolution" is not an ideology or a goal, it's just the result of private property rights + freedom of association.

Most right-wing libertarians and right-wing anarchists (allow me this even if you disagree with the phrase) are against copyright because it's nonsensical in their conception of what property is and how property rights work. I would assume that left leaning libertarians and social anarchists would also similarly agree that copyright is nonsense but I'm not so sure - the time I spent in those communities have me wondering if they even hate authority and hierarchy, or if they simply desire their own forms of it. Many indeed defend copyright.

	▲	thomastjeffery an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Not quite, they support property rights, which is something that social anarchists implicitly accept as well, they just have a different conception of how that would work. The libertarian conception is that groups of people can form hierarchical corporations that compete directly with individuals in the marketplace. The social anarchist conception is usually that people participate in anarchist cooperatives instead. It depends on the anarchist what that means in practice. > Most right-wing libertarians and right-wing anarchists (allow me this even if you disagree with the phrase) are against copyright because it's nonsensical in their conception of what property is and how property rights work. Yes, but what they are sorely missing in that argument - in my opinion - is that the problem with copyright is monopoly power; which is also what you get from an unregulated market of corporations. The somewhat regulated market that exists today is obviously dominated by corporations whose anticompetitive participation is predicated on their copyright moats. > Many [left-leaning libertarians and social anarchists] indeed defend copyright. Yes, and I'm at least as frustrated about that as with any other political group. It's incredibly rare to hear copyright's role in our society even described, let alone criticized; even though that role is incredibly significant.

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pdonis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> If you are participating in a free market, then you are subject to corporations.

No, if you are participating in a free market, and a corporation is the most efficient way to provide what you want to buy, then you will end up buying it from the corporation.

But "corporation" is an extremely broad term. Mom and pop businesses are corporations. A friend and I own a corporation that makes games, just the two of us, no employees. But Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc. are also corporations. So "corporation" doesn't capture what's bad about the latter.

> The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that one must both allow corporations to rule over them, and never allow anyone to rule over the corporations.

No, that's not correct. The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that, first, corporations are not people--they don't have the same rights as people do. They are tools that people can use in a free market to more efficiently produce things and create wealth. But that's all they are. If we had that kind of free market, corporations that are larger than many countries probably wouldn't even exist.

Second, corporations like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc., as they are now, are creatures of government favoritism, not a free market. The original concepts behind those corporations arose in what was more or less a free market--Larry and Sergey didn't need to get anyone's permission to put the original Google on the web, Jobs and Wozniak didn't need to get anyone's permission to build the first Apple computers. But at the scale those corporations are now, they cannot exist without the support and favoritism of governments. (And not just the US government; Apple, for example, would be dead in the water if it did not have the cooperation and support of the Chinese government for its manufacturing base.) And that means they are not products of "libertarian ideals". They might have started out that way, but they didn't, and couldn't, scale that way.

> Without copyright, what would change? First of all, we wouldn't have tech billionaires.

Sure we would. Zuckerberg isn't a billionaire because of copyright. He's a billionaire because he's convinced a substantial fraction of the entire planet that it's perfectly normal, routine, nothing to see here, to have an immensely valuable social networking tool appear by magic on the Internet for free. Same goes for the Google billionaires. Bezos isn't a billionaire because Amazon holds valuable copyrights; he's a billionaire because he sells something valuable, "what I want delivered to my door when I want it" convenience, and he's able to curry government favors so he can bully his supply chain into making that happen. Apple isn't sitting on a huge pile of cash because of copyrights; it's because they make devices that give a significant minority of the market what they want, no fuss, and governments let them manufacture those devices on the cheap while the market they're selling to is upscale.

Of course those companies hold copyrights and patents, and defend them, because that's the legal environment they're operating in. But they'd do just as well, if not better, in a world without copyrights, as long as that world still had governments who would give them the favoritism they get now.

	▲	thomastjeffery 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Everything that Meta owns is either copyright or hardware that facilitates the ownership of its distribution. They wouldn't have the interest or capital to run giant datacenters without the ability to profit from their "owned" users' data. Facebook and Instagram can only be valued because they are proprietary software: a category predicated on copyright. Even Meta's VR headsets are sold at a loss, with a walled garden app store designed to pay the difference. > Of course those companies hold copyrights and patents, and defend them, because that's the legal environment they're operating in. Yes, that's the thing I'm arguing against. Would you mind considering it for a moment? > No, if you are participating in a free market, and a corporation is the most efficient way to provide what you want to buy, then you will end up buying it from the corporation. That's how corporations immediately outcompete individuals. The argument that a corporation should not be treated as an individual is irrelevant, because that is its role in a marketplace. That's who individuals directly compete with! > Second, corporations like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc., as they are now, are creatures of government favoritism, not a free market. They are creatures in a market. Whether that market is free does not define them, only their opportunity. I agree that they get the opportunity of government favoritism, and that that is a significant part of the issue. My point is that it is not the root cause of the problem. In a "free market" that incorporates copyright and patents, any corporation who owns IP can leverage it as a moat, enforced by state violence. The fact that any individual can do the same does not change the power imbalance between an individual and a corporation: it increases it. Each of the corporations you mentioned leverages a copyright moat as their core valuation. Even Amazon's anticompetitive behavior is predicated on their vertical integration of Amazon the delivery/fulfillment service with Amazon the marketplace. The fact that a marketplace can be owned at all is predicated on copyright.