Saturday, December 1, 2018

Supporters of Free Markets Should Oppose Gifts of State Privilege to Property Owners


     Some free marketers don't know capitalism when they see it.
     1) Easy credit from the Federal Reserve,
     2) small business loans from the S.B.A.,
     3) incorporation as an L.L.C. (which confers privilege to be irresponsible of legal and financial liability),
     4) the granting of patents, trademarks, and other forms of intellectual property rights,
     5) continued insurance of business accounts by the taxpayers (through the F.D.I.C.),
     6) giving trade promotions and protections,
     7) favorable professional regulation that has the benefit of shutting out established firms' competitors,
     8) sometimes even subsidizing and bailing out, and
     9) protecting physically with state employed police and military, and state licensed "private" security guards:


     These are all ways in which government protects each one of the businesses in this country. Not each business receives all of these, but nearly all receive at least a few.
     The taxpayers - a group which includes poor people, who pay sales taxes, income taxes, and innumerable opportunity costs - foot the bill in each stage of this process. Anyone who supports retaining the state's monopoly on these things, cannot be said to support competition, not free markets, nor true statelessness.
     Leaving aside the issue of whether and where it's legal to fully own property in the first place, anyone who is born without property is coerced into either foraging and homesteading for survival (if possible and legal), or else selling one's labor. Those are the only "legitimate" modes of survival which do not involve either theft or violating minor infractions which arguably criminalize victimless crimes.
     Aside from being coerced into "choosing" from among these, to whom we shall sell our labor, we are additionally coerced into relying upon established sellers for food and other products, because our foraging and homesteading options are limited, and because our ability to go into competition with those producers is limited by an regulations.
     And in a "free market capitalist" system with "minimal" regulations, "minimal" will be excused to justify any or all of the business privileges I have listed, based on the false assumption that capital is the source of wealth (rather than land and labor, which come prior to it).
     That idea, of course, is what leads to the notion that corporate tax credits are socialist. Because only someone so deluded as to think free markets must involve even "minimal" business supports (from the state), would argue that allowing corporations (which the public created) to keep more of the money it has stolen while maintaining its books with taxpayer backup, counts as giving workers collective ownership of those corporations.



For more information, please click the following link to read my previous article on this subject:



Originally Written on August 11
th, 2018
Edited on December 1st, 2018
Published on December 1st, 2018

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