I'm
glad you've complimented Ron Paul for his consistent opposition to
military intervention. It's regrettable that he's hired so many
racist people to work and write for him, but I'm glad you're still
willing to point out when he's right.
I've
heard you talk about interviewing Ron Paul, and supposedly proving
him wrong about a free market system being possible and viable. I
haven't seen that video. But I wanted to point out the
following:
Ron
Paul has said that "we've never had free markets". There
have certainly been times when free enterprise ownership and property
ownership happened at higher rates, but that doesn't mean we had a
fully free-market system.
For
example, on the border issue:
While
Paul may have a softly anti-immigration stance, he has also implied
that if government were minimal or did not exist, then private
property (and the risks involved in becoming a trespasser) would be
the only thing stopping immigrants from coming to the United States.
This
could reasonably be construed to imply that in a free market society,
individual property owners living along the border would be free to
invite immigrants onto their property, and the government would be
able to say little or nothing about it, because it would be fully
private property, not the government's jurisdiction. As far as I know, America has never tried a system like that, with all property enforcement occurring voluntary (that is, unless you count vigilante border "protectors").
It's
also worth noting that there have rarely been times when the
government both 1) adequately and effectively utilized its antitrust
power against monopolies, and 2) declined to tax earned income.
A
real free market system would have no monopolies, no taxation of
ordinary people's earnings, no state-controlled professional
licensing systems, and most importantly, no government power
to steal taxpayer money and then use that money to subsidize
businesses and keep them afloat.
Your
point to Dr. Paul that "Markets have never regulated themselves"
is perplexing. It's not that markets should be expected to regulate
themselves. Consumers and workers are supposed to
regulate the markets. By boycotting products they don't like, and
companies which they feel are behaving unethically.
But
they're not able to fully boycott those products.
First, because the Taft-Hartley Act prohibits secondary labor actions
(i.e., coordinated boycotts which take place across
multiple industries), and second, because subsidies exist (that is,
government steals our money through taxes, and gives the money to its
cronies in business).
So
we can try to put a company out of business through refraining from
buying its products, but the government can just bail it out in order
to save jobs. That may look like "capitalism", but
it's not free-market, because it's government
intervention in the economy. The fact that the intervention is for
the benefit of businesses, should not sway free-market supporters
towards capitalism, although regrettably it often does.
I
respect your opinion, but I believe that Ron Paul is right on this
one. We have never tried free markets; we have never tried having
government without monopolies; and most importantly, we have never
tried depriving the government of its ability to bail out companies
we don't like, insulate them from legal and financial risk, and
deprive us of our freedom to have sustained, coordinated boycotts of
private sector institutions which we don't wish to help fund.
Written on June 27th, 2019
