Does social liberalism not depend on a strong state? Affirmative action, critical race theory, food stamps, public school indoctrination...?
Let's imagine we'd establish a completely free market and we somehow prevent people from having a communist revolution. A market so free, an unemployed single mother would starve to death because she cannot afford food. Unemployable people either have to leave the country, or die. Capitalism as cruel as it possibly could be.
Woman has a child with a black guy who leaves her? Death sentence.
IQ below 70? Too dumb to work in an increasingly automated country? Death sentence.
I believe people would go back to shotgun marriages, racism, eugenics and prudish manners within a generation.
There would be nothing to stop corporations from growing super powerful and becoming de facto state authorities themselves, engineering society however they saw fit (what else are they going to spend insane profits on?). At some point profit becomes power. But even before that possibility, there's nothing to prevent competing centralized states from manipulating your totally free markets with dumping, labour invasions and shit like that (assuming they don't just conquer your uncoordinated voluntary defense forces with military might).
I agree that without welfare, behaviour would improve dramatically; however, I think you underestimate the chaos/destruction that the huge newly useless proportion of the population would cause before they expired or were 'subdued'. The rest of it is a lolbertarian pipe dream, I'm afraid. State authority is an inevitable result of civilization.
I think you underestimate the chaos/destruction that the huge newly useless proportion of the population would cause before they expired or were 'subdued'.
I'm unfortunately aware. As technology, AI and automation progresses, an increasing number of people will become useless. Unless you want to live in North Korea, it's inevitable.
If you don't want to starve or actively kill them, you may come up with something like this: Give them free stuff, make them feel important or like rebels for doing exactly what you told them to do, convince them to not have children, even better yet turn them gay. Make them less threatening by reducing their intelligence and destroy social cohesion.
There would be nothing to stop corporations from growing super powerful and becoming de facto state authorities themselves
Would that be worse than what we have right now?
Amazon seems a likely candidate. They already provide shipping, streaming, books, music, are developing video games, provide cloud hosting... They are on this path.
Let's say Amazong launches "Amazon Education Prime". There will be a phase of competition, and Amazon decides to outcompete everyone, until they are a monopoly in what used to be a government service.
Would that be bad? Yeah, maybe they eventually become lazy and corrupt. But don't forget that our current government run schools already feel like prisons, are already lazy and corrupt, are a hotbed of liberal propaganda and had a fair share of school shooters.
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