01-20-2017, 08:34 PM
(01-20-2017, 07:53 PM)David Horn Wrote:(01-20-2017, 02:27 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(01-20-2017, 01:56 PM)David Horn Wrote:(01-20-2017, 03:15 AM)Galen Wrote: You like authoritarians when they think like you which is very revealing because saddling everyone with a huge bureaucracy is so liberating.
Why is private power acceptable to libertarians, but public power is not?
Because public power is held by a monopoly: the government can be as unreasonable as it wants, and the individual can do nothing about it.
Private power is normally held by competing providers; if one provider is unreasonable, the individual can switch to a different provider.
Do you honestly believe that, given free reign, the wealthy and powerful will not collude? They always have in the past. The idea that some fictitious playing field exists that forces some form of competition is frankly naïve in the extreme. Why compete? It's costly and exhausting. It's much easier to divide the market and force potential competitors out.
We have Android and iOS ... and that's about it. Blackberry, Nokia and even Microsoft got squeezed out. Now, they have faux competition (keeping the regulators at bay) and the two biggest players in the market are happy campers. That is not an accident. Barring the minimal regulation we have today, prices would already be through the roof ... or more properly, as close to the roof as the market will bear.
Read my response to Eric. If you still have any questions, let me know.