this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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The only way for libertarianism to work is if every human had only good intentions. Since that’s simply never going to happen libertarianism will never work. Just my opinion feel free to disagree.
Respectfully, I think the opposite. I think, for the most part, a free(r) market naturally benefits humans with good intentions and harms those with bad intentions.
For example, let's say in a free market, somebody wanted to start a business with horrible working conditions, horrible salary, horrible everything. Now, if the economy is real bad then people might work there, but for the most part, that business is going to fail because people won't work there, and would choose other jobs instead. So in this case, a free market actually incentivizes "good intentions". The business owner will have to improve work conditions, salary, etc. so that people will work there instead of elsewhere.
And one of the important aspects of a free market is the ability to start a competing business. If there was a company with overall poor working conditions and salary, it would highly incentivize someone to start a new company with better conditions, because they could pull in all the workers from the other company.
And look, I'm not saying this is fool proof and works 100% of the time, and I'm not saying there shouldn't be a healthy amount of regulation. But if you compare this to an economic system where businesses are run by the government, you can simply just be stuck with shitty work conditions and shitty salary, and not be able to do anything about it.
That’s fine to disagree. I used to believe this back when I took Econ classes in college, every Econ professor is a libertarian lmao. I just don’t think a free market would punish bad actors. Tons of people turn a blind eye to anything as long as costs are cheap
The free market punishing bad actors (depending on how we are defining bad actors) is inherently dependent on the morals of the consumer.
The question would then become: "Whose morals are truly virtuous?".