Which principle in Objectivism would make this question legitimate? If the government is not involved in economic policy and all laws are aimed at individual rights, exactly what would the bribe be about and who would be doing the bribing?
Bribing a policeman to not enforce a law perhaps? Or to falsely investigate a killing so I can carry out a mafia hit to slowly institute a protection racket? Profit is much less without “illegal” drugs and working for the government but maybe they have funding from outside and want to see the society fall.
If oil prices go down because of competition, that would be good for me, no? Who are you to say what is an “artificial price”, let alone one that is “high” or “low”?
Sure it would be good for you, unless it was a price war intended to monopolize, selling oil at 50 cents a gallon only to later hold the economy hostage at $50 dollars a gallon due to sudden predatory impulse. The market would eventually fix the problem, but damage would be done. Possibly catastrophic damage. What if the army paid to protect the nation in a free market suddenly held it hostage and demanded triple the wages to fight off the invader?
And I dont know if i’m proposing i’m the one who is saying what an artificial price is. Making the government responsible for protecting people from human-on-human predation only creates a bunch of people who blame the government if it cant foresee everything and who have no ability to judge for themself what is dangerous. I’m aware there is no more protection than in nature which is predatory. But if it went from 50 cents to 50 gallon and it was an artificial scarcity caused by controlling the supply lines and arbitrarily shutting them off during a crisis to drive things even higher, at the very least that is extremely abusive. People would have no ability to go somewhere else for gasoline during the crisis - the market would eventually provide a solution if it was a chronic problem and they would likely not allow that to happen again. Maybe predatory abuses NEED to happen, because they are inevitable, to shock people with their horror in the media so they wont happen. That is an acceptable answer if you want to give it, I was just hoping for better if there is one.
Let me put it another way, what if you were going under anaesthetic for an appendectomy, and you were aroused during the middle of it to be told “were almost out of anaesthesia, and to have enough to finish the surgery you need to sign over your house because the new price is 100x the old price”, would you view that as a free and fair contract? You aren’t threatening violence or fraud afterall, just refusing to continue to work. Some may say yes, that youre responsible for being so paranoid you can percieve absolutely every possible abuse and extortion that can be used against you.
I’m not suggesting gangsterism is a sustainable way to run a business, nor good “branding” once word got out of what you done. What i’m saying is if there is nothing preventing it (other than contracts the size of an encyclopedia which still have teams looking for exploitable loopholes), then you may have certain superpredators who will make it their goal to make one good somehow legal financial killing and then settle down for life. Get the billionaire under anaesthesia and take everything just because nobody ever expected such unprofessional abusiveness. Why not? It’s free contract, right?
I’m playing devil’s advocate. I have legitimate concerns that i’m hoping are proven wrong through enlightened answers. Maybe these things would only happen if people were pathologically cowlike and failed to have the proper wariness necessary to survive in a society without protectors or safety nets. Perhaps the problem would eugenically solve itself within a few generations.
No monopoly is without competition: from many other markets outside of its area of specialty. For example, Alcoa may control 90% of the aluminum market, but it competes with the titanium and stainless steel (and other materials) markets. It cannot arbitrarily set prices.
Yes that’s a quote from the book. See my above medical example for perhaps the most extreme case I can think of. The answer is probably simple but I can’t put my finger on it or put it into words. :-/ I guess what i’m really asking is whether there is ever a case for regulated anything - whether health, safety and other standards should all be voluntary market compliance and free choice. Whether police and military forces should be hired by the ‘state’, or whether there should be absolutely no state at all and just hired private police and mercenaries. (the danger I see being that mercenaries historically arent very trustworthy and dont have the love for country or self sacrifice that nationalistic statist armies Espirit de Corps)
An Objectivist society deals with individual rights and your examples above do not indicate problems with, within, or for an Objectivist society. A “black market”: what in the world is that in a free society? Black markets are free markets in societies with controlled markets. So let’s use our terms clearly.
What happens when individual rights destroy the very society they live in. Does my right to play my stereo at 130db outside still apply at 3am? Does my right to hold a KKK rally still apply in front of the holocaust memorial? I’m not saying they shouldn’t and i’m not saying they should, i’m trying to have a discussion.
Black markets would be markets that are illegal. Nuclear weapons, child prostitution (if youre not against prostitution and youre not against child labor laws it would be legal), murder for hire (pretty sure that would be illegal to solicit violence in an objectivist society, but a market could still exist for it - jilted lovers and by definition it would be illegal).
Would you argue that one should have the right to purchase a nuclear weapon as an individual right because it’s their personal responsibility not to misuse it, and that the society cant forbid it because it has no right to regulate or forbid trade?
On a scale of zero to infinity, how often would you as a consumer fall for that trick? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice…
An individual consumer with the ability to choose, exactly once. After which a free media would have such an uproar that the market would scramble to provide alternatives because nobody would do business with the thug. I’m just saying the danger is still there without regulation. It may be that that is a preferable danger to the danger of government regulation since the dangers of government are worse - the corruption of Stalin killed 20 million, but I find myself whether there should be a free an open market for things that primarily have a purpose in say, extortion or terrorism. What if I was a capitalist willing to sell guns and weapons to the looters and rioters that wanted to storm Hank Rearden’s factory, isnt that kind of undermining things?
Should I be able to secretly release a disease, and then hold a monopoly on the cure, saying it’s fair and free contract even though you wouldn’t have had the sickness or even needed my product without me extorting it? Rand understands markets, but whether she understands criminology i’m not as sure.
With all of these scenarios, you’re basically asking that people not be held responsible for their decisions.
Yes I am aware of that, but there are situations where the herd of people can still be manipulated. Enviromental standards are not really something you can put to a free and open market. You have a race to the bottom, a tragedy of the commons, where everyone pollutes because to clean things up would cost more, and so the herd makes a poor choice that individuals would never make.
If the scenario reflects reality, which it does not.
I tried to give what I felt were some more specific examples. One i’ll post in it’s own topic if it isn’t answered here, what about a case like genetically modified food crops? Should that be sold on the open market because it’s an individual right to choose to buy it or not? When the problem is that they cross contaminate everyone else’s fields and have severe health side effects that the companies have struggled to keep suppressed with thug like behavior? If your neighbor plants GMO it could wipe out your organic farm for instance, is it their right to plant seed that has such effects? I would not support a state existing to steal my neighbor’s profit and deliver it to me but if my neighbor is doing something that will sicken me like dumping mercury into the water table and there’s nowhere else to move because everyone everywhere is dumping different poisons elsewhere in the name of industrial production…
The purpose of objectivist society is to supposedly raise us above the level of nature where violence and retaliation rules the normal order of things and to protect individual rights. It is, in essence, an attempt to prevent organized crime and violent thuggery. The question is that if the crime and thuggery simply evolves to be more sophisticated and still cause the same effects by doing a workaround to every limiting law, does an objectivist society attempt to evolve new laws to stop the thuggery or does it stay as it is? It’s utopian to believe that criminals wouldn’t try to take things over, it just takes a smarter breed of criminal and human predator. The reason I mention social darwinism elsewhere is that if the freedoms of the society lead to it’s own downfall what was the point. It may be there is no way to prevent abuse and corruption any more than there is a way to prevent eventually having an injury or getting a disease, and that objectivism provides not only the best possible tools for fighting it if so but also the only moral way of fighting it. If thats just an inevitability that’s fine and maybe a series of horrors is inevitable because statism only prevents one horror to create an often worse one.
I dont know if Rand predicted things quite like we have now. A bridge of Rearden metal possibly collapsing and killing a trainload of people is not the same as genetically poisoning the entire planet, or carrying out bioweapon research without safety controls that could infect the majority of the world if it got out. Hopefully a world of economic freedom and without state sponsored coercion everyone would have more interest in creation and at worst hedonism than in figuring out ways to game the system because it’s easier to get ahead legitimately than to figure out a borderline criminal way to do so.
In no way am I suggesting I would rather live in a statist controlling society. I am saying this is the weight of arguments against objectivist laissez faire societies for which so far i’ve had no counterargument.