The Libertarian Thread

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twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Radbot posted:

Yes, I'm sure Payday lending place with APRs in the hundreds or thousands of percent only exist because the government wants them to.

In an ancap situation, we don't have a central currency, so I'm not even sure what lending looks like, or how you would go about recovering resources from people who refused to pay. I'm imagining "I'll lend you this tractor now in exchange for 1000X the value of the tractor in beans at the end of the season", followed up with, "gently caress you, I sold the beans for gold and buried it in the forest, now what?" The only incentive to pay I can see is either fear of violence (in that case why not just rob people directly?) or fear of loss of reputation, but if we think fear of loss of reputation (the goto hand wave) will induce people to pay (and thus why loans companies would exist at all in the first place), presumably loan companies couldn't act more predatory than the community thought was good without themselves losing reputation. Now maybe "more predatory than the community thought was good" is still too predatory, but that's a problem we also have with democracy.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2014 21:55

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 08:26

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Mo_Steel posted:

Flash forward a few years and you sell yourself as a willing slave to buy your family out of indentured servitude but it's okay because it's a rational action to make every step down to hell.

I don't follow the logic. I have no assets whatsoever. I have an entity X that claims I owe it Y scrip, which I could only possibly pay by selling myself as a slave. Under an-cap, why don't I just tell entity X to gently caress right the gently caress off? If the answer is "They will murder you", then the problem isn't with predatory lending it's with people who will enforce debts via murder (I contend such lenders would be better off just enslaving/robbing/murdering people without entrapping them into contracts). If the answer is "The community won't like you", then I don't see why we are supposing the community will hate debt-ignorers more than entities that create unreasonable debts. Clearly if we go an-cap and everyone is assholes, then it is a really, really bad situation, but we don't need to examine what lending even means without currency to figure that out.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that predatory lending wouldn't be a problem, I'm suggesting that if you create an an-cap society such that lending is even possible (lenders believe they can actually collect payments, debtors have non-violent reasons to give payments), it most likely could only be because you've passed a lot of other hurdles, which would imply a problem like predatory lending would have solutions (like reputation).

# ¿ Aug 13, 2014 23:05

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Ratoslov posted:

Wait, if your an-cap model has zero way to actually enforce contracts, what makes it -cap at all?

I'm not proposing an an-cap model, people are asking how predatory lending would be policed, and I'm asking them why they think lending would exist at all, because I suspect that an an-cap model that somehow does allow lending, can use the solutions that made lending feasible in the first place to police predatory lending.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2014 01:15

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

JawnV6 posted:

The framing of corporations existing at the behest of the state is so odd. Like hundreds of thousands of people in a single hierarchy doesn't have inertia, if a document in Delaware gets shredded it all dissipates overnight.

The transition to anarchism would presumably involve more than shredding some documents in Delaware, but even if it didn't, the state is the thing enforcing rules that corporations own the things that they own, and that shareholders own the corporation. Given the level of employee theft that exists even with a government enforcing such rules, I wouldn't be surprised to see large corporations quickly collapse without those rules.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 19:42

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

panascope posted:

Here's something I don't understand: if you're a public figure espousing libertarianism yet you're taking public money for whatever reason (maybe grants for your business or tax money for your district), how is that not ridiculously hypocritical? If taxes are theft full stop then isn't benefiting from that theft just as bad? I guess I just think that if your morals fly out the window at the slightest inconvenience you're probably a piece of poo poo. Does this bother anyone else?

"benefiting from that theft" is pretty nebulous. I imagine that virtually everyone is anti-theft, but given the fungible nature of money does that suggest everyone should not do business with someone who has committed theft? After all, the dollar that the thief gave you might be a dollar they stole from someone else. The connection between "someone paid income tax" to "that income tax is part of a grant" is pretty attenuated. I'm assuming here that the libertarian in question is drawing a distinction between personal income tax versus more voluntary taxes like corporate taxes and such.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2014 05:44

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