Dispatches from Libertopia

Libertopians are so afraid of Big Brother, or at any rate so eager to fearmonger about Big Brother, they seek in profit-taking a circumvention of government tyranny and supercession of government corruption. Of course, there actually are ineradicable differences among the stakeholders of a shared finite world, and so there can be no convergence onto an optimally profitable, utilitarian, or efficient outcome that transcends politics, only the interminable reconciliation of those differences through politics and government. Profit-taking, it turns out, is satisfied as much through the anti-social externalization of costs as by innovation, through the secretive collusion of incumbents as by competition, through the concentration of existing wealth as by the equitable distribution of greater production, and hence profit-taking is quite as prone to tyranny and corruption as the government Libertopians so disdain in principle if not in deed. Indeed, it is only when enterprise is constrained by good government that the tendency of profit-taking to tyranny, incumbency, mediocrity, corruption, predation, and petrifaction can be overcome to the benefit of all. As for Big Brother, it turns out that it is only through the democratization of governance that legitimate fears of government's potential tyranny and corruption can be addressed, just as the more democratic the government, the more it is shaped by the values of equity-in-diversity, the more likely it is to restrain the tendencies of enterprise to tyranny and corruption as well. Those who want to smash the state -- whether through invocations of profit-taking or of love-making -- rather than to democratize it, are not serious about tyranny, whatever their protestations to the contrary.

More Dispatches from Libertopia here.