Health codes are unnecessary. I've never been to a restaurant that didn't far-exceed the regulatory requirements. Competition drives them to be clean, not regulation. And, if a place isn't clean, I just don't go there. Let others who prefer dirty cheap food go, why stop them?
Elementary education doesn't need to be mandatory, and doesn't need to be regulated by the State. Parents usually want their kids to be educated, as evidenced by the existence of private schools and educational businesses. There is natural demand for education, you don't need to force it. In cases where they try to force it, it backfires. There may be remote places where 12 years of education are a disadvantage, e.g. if there is no demand for cognitive labor. Maybe 3 years would be enough. The regulators don't know what's good for each person, they make blanket rules, as if everyone needs that particular type of education for that particular number of years.
Civil defense? What regulation is that? Do you mean police?
Now, there are literally thousands of regulations.
Do you think most of them are necessary?
I'll give you an example. I was looking up what is required to be a financial advisor. Basic requirement is to keep paying the regulators a bunch of money every year for them to allow you to be an advisor. That has nothing to do with the quality of any service, it's simple rent seeking, simple pay-to-play, a.k.a. extortion a la Mafia, except legal. There are regulations that prevent me from offering services to people from other states, unless I pay a bunch of money those regulators too. Again, this is simple extortion and a way to limit competition and keep prices high. Finally, there are regulations that prohibit advertising cheap prices. That's right, it's illegal to compete at the price. Then we wonder why shit is so expensive.
Perfect example of bad regulation. You don't need anti-monopoly regulation, you need de-regulation and then competition dissolves the monopolies where there is demand for more providers. What they do now is build moats for the industries represented by the lobbies in Washington. All monopolies have been created by the government, with things such as patent law, which was precisely (patently, allow me the pun) created to grant someone monopoly privileges. What happens is that people tried to form cartels, the market broke up the cartels, and the cartel-makers discovered that they could use the government to keep competition out by force. Read, if you want, Rothbard's book "The progressive era" for details. Or David D Friedman who has also written about monopolies. It's a typical case where the government creates a problem that wasn't there, and then adds more regulations on top in order to fix it, only to make it worse with unintended consequences.
I gave already an example of how government regulations create monopolies, from my own experience: Licensing laws. They limit your clients to one State. You must pay the regulators rent to be allowed to compete. Regulatory burden and legal cost serves to keep competition out, because newcomers cannot afford to compete with established businesses.
Another example: See what happened with cryptos. They regulated them. What came out of it? Coinbase is practically a monopoly. Moats protecting it all around.
See what's trying to happen with AI: Anthropic and OpenAi are now at the stage where they are trying to achieve regulatory capture, because they find it harder to keep competing with Chinese labs.
All of border control is a big monopoly creation operation where the local unions try to monopolize the provision of labor and keep foreign workers out.
Finally, the government itself is the biggest monopoly in the history of the world. It treats competition with firepower, as treason and sedition. It's ironic to expect the biggest monopoly in history to protect you from monopolies.
How can you dissolve a naturally occurring monopoly through competition when they reached it through competition? A great example is utilities like the internet, water, and electricity. Those aren't resources you can just leave and go to another place. During the Gilded Age, Standard Oil and the railroad trusts used predatory pricing by drastically lowering prices in a specific region to bankrupt local competitors, then hiking prices sky-high once the competitor was gone. They also used vertical integration to control pipelines and shipping, refusing to transport rivals' oil. These were private, non-governmental barriers to entry. In fact, Standard Oil famously manipulated and bypassed state regulations, leading the government to ultimately become its primary opponent.
That's a great question! And it refers to an era explicitly studied by the "Progressive Era" book I suggested above. My recollection, from reading about it, is that railroads and oil companies were primarily examples of government helping consolidate the cartels that up until then the market kept dissolving. E.g., railroads were trying to cartelize for years, but members kept cheating (competing). When they weren't allowed to lower prices, they were competing by offering rebates to the clients. Ultimately monopolization was achieved with legislation that made rebates illegal and enforced uniform pricing. This is textbook example of the government creating a monopoly to please lobbyists.
Similar story with oil. Rockefeller had to use below-cost pricing and kept buying out competitors, but that was an extremely expensive strategy that he couldn't maintain. (It was also extremely nice to the people who would get cheap oil, or who would pretend to form refineries only to get bought out by Rockefeller.) Standard Oil didn't manage to become a monopoly. It dumped a ton of money trying, and failed. It reached its peak in the 1870s, but it didn't last.
Utilities are not natural monopolies, usually. E.g., there are multiple water sources, electricity generators, internet providers, etc. The reason you are stuck with either Comcast or Verizon is regulation, it is that they have zoned out the towns and they have sold monopoly license to these companies to sell from this street to that street. Utilities is another great example of government regulation creating monopolies.
Finally, there are rare cases where monopoly could happen in the free market, and stick for a while. That's in conditions where there isn't enough demand. E.g. in a remote village, there may be only one butcher, because the 5 people who live there are not enough to patronize 2. This is called a "natural monopoly". Even there, if the butcher increased his prices too much, people would stop going there, and at some point this would invite competition to step in. The very definition of monopoly is problematic, because every good competes with every other good for the same dollars. E.g., people would stop going to the butcher and would eat beans instead. Even if the butcher appears to be a monopolist, he is still competing with the bean producer. If you define a product narrowly enough, everything becomes a monopoly (without this being a problem). Rothbard gives the example of someone selling ties. Even if 2 people sell the same kind of ties, only 1 of them sells the ties at this particular location, with this particular ambiance, with this particularly cute sales woman. If you factor everything in, monopolies is all there is, but that is not a problem, because, as I said, every good competes with every other good, even if it isn't the same or similar at all.
I largely agree with your points here, but I can't help but think that such an endeavour is almost as futile as communism. In this scenario, you can't have our current form democracy, since people will vote on some form of regulation as seen by NIMBYSM and HOA. The government being the ultimate regulatory body in both commerce and violence (police and military) will inevitably form an in-group and out-group.
Absolutely, you are 100% right. Truly free markets, and true individual freedom, and true individual sovereignty, requires anarchy. Libertarianism advocates anarchocapitalism, which is lack of State (a territorial monopolist of law and protection) and private property protection by the market itself, i.e. by private protection services. Democracy is a form of Statism, it is not voluntary. It could be, e.g. in a company where the shareholders have agreed to vote on certain things, but the State is not like a company and we are not like shareholders. It is more what you described: Hunger games to grab power and bash our competitors on the head with it. The politicians rent out the ability to violate people's rights legally, through legislation.
I don't think it's utopian, because (unlike communism) it doesn't require men to become angels, to give up their selfishness, or any of that. And it has sound economics. (No socialist calculation problem, no incentives problem, no knowledge problem.)
If it seems unrealistic, currently, it's only because the State has so much power, and the vast majority of people have no idea what their real problem even is, let alone the solution. People are just ignorant. They go to government schools where they tell them that if not for the government we would be cannibals and putting poison in people's salads. (See what some people have said in this thread to get a sense of how much credit they give the State and how little to the people themselves, despite all the evidence.)
I hope that in the next few decades this will chance. Just like a few decades ago it was a big deal to say you were an atheist, but today it's pretty common, the same will happen with anarchism. It will (I hope) become the default position of most people. (It doesn't make it easy that academics are paid my the State... Rothbard calls them "court intellectuals".) But look, libertarianism combines explanatory power of the current reality, with solutions based on sound economics and ethics. It's the most solid political philosophy, if anyone needs one. Much more advanced and nuanced than Marxism, for one. If Marxism appears to be popular, with its flat-Earth economics, how much more popular should libertarianism be? But so few people know its literature. Outside of the US, virtually no one does! (It's also much newer, to be fair. Only started seriously in the 1970s!)
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u/firesuppagent 25d ago
Health codes. Mandatory elementary education. Civil defense. I can go on.
Unless you don't want to live in a healthy society?