Yeah, I can’t see how this goes on for much longer without the rise of a new land independent nobility that “employs” everyone else as “contractors” for food, clothing, shelter and very little else. This year amazon has grown enough to “hire” 500 more families in this city. Please put in your family’s application for warehouse attendant now. With the “white collar” jobs becoming like the butlers/valet of yesterday (the privileged servant class).

What are your ideas for how to shift things in a more positive direction?

If I were to write my congressman tomorrow, what do you think I should say? What are the top-5 key actionable bullet points?

Genuinely curious. I like to hear all sorts of ideas for how we can steer the country (hell, the planet) in a more positive direction.

I wish I had actionable ideas.

For a top 5 (or 7) wish list it would be along the line of:

- Outlaw billionaires the same way we’ve outlawed (at least on paper) monopolies. At that scale individuals have the power to sway governments. (A billion is likely not the right number, but it’s a good starting point.)

- Kill the money in politics. Make lobbying illegal.

- Kill the filibuster

- Kill the electoral college

- Decouple healthcare from employment (The only realistic solution I know of is socializing it).

- Provide a robust safety net (but get rid of the checks balances to prevent “abuse”). Just blanket give everyone $2000/month.

- Eliminate exemptions to providing benefits make it proportional to hours worked (worked an average of 10 hours a week for a month? That employer must provide 1 week of benefits to that person.) There is no common good from giving employer a massive expenses break to employ 2 people at 20 hours a week instead of just hiring one full time employee. This is gaming the system plain and simple.

Based on my understanding of their platforms, that seems consistent with a Warren/Sanders ticket?

For billionaire, wish list will have this top item:

1. Kill solarmist (it's good starting point).

I concede we need the state and am therefore not an anarcho-capitalist. My ideal state is as small as possible and no larger. Military and nuclear weapons are my biggest gotchas that I can’t reason my way around.

So you are asking me the wrong premise - if the state has no power, what regulation can a corporation capture?

I like corporations because businesses provide value. They can fail. The organizing principle has a straight-forwards goal of earning money. I don’t see any states failing (except for socialist ones like Venezuela) in a way that can put them out of business - they tend to grow forever in all directions, capturing more wealth and diminishing freedom.

The next question - do I care about inequality as a given? If everyone on earth had a healthy, purpose driven life but one family had 99.99% of all the wealth, would this be a problem? Basically do we dislike inequality because of envy or because most people genuinely have nothing?

You are correct that corporations are already running the show. Our biggest corporations are more powerful than most countries on earth. Because innovation in free societies is emergent and decentralized, the best the government can do is play whack-a-mole every few years as the free market laps them over and over.

I like the chaos, I like the unpredictability, I like weird people, I like having the freedom to do whatever I want. I want maximum freedom in all things and the least amount of coercion.

One area you should look at if you aren’t familiar is cryptocurrency. This is the most powerful innovation in regards to regaining individual freedom - financial freedom - that has come in centuries. The ability of governments to print their way out of debt is coming to an end, and individuals all over the world are going to have an escape valve from corrupt elites.

This was kind of a rambling response, no beer involved. Cheers

The problem with a state with no power is that it has no ability to prevent organizations from externalizing all of the costs of their profits. A simple place to see this is in environmental regulations. I can give plenty of examples, but before the rise of environmental regulation in the late 20th century, wide swathes of our country were regularly and freely polluted. We fixed lots of that through application of government power and imposed costs on polluters, both large and small.

I wonder if there is any sort of a market mechanism proposed from the libertarian side that would account for this?

Ok, so this is kind of interesting because to increase freedom, we would have to actively reduce existing legislation. So both sides, the side that sees government as the problem, and the side that sees government as the solution, have to get legislators on-board to actually do something to implement their plan.

Oh man, things aren't looking good for any of us on either side.

Let's check back in 10 years.

Both you and the person you are responding to have held a very interesting and civil discussion on a topic that is often charged. Thank you both for expressing these ideas so sanely. I found both the retraining "valley" from the parent poster and your positioning of libertarian worldviews as a state of mind interesting and crisp. Cheers.