Quote:
Originally Posted by xholly
How do companies that make a profit by raping the environment fit into this? Weapons manufacturers who profit from war. How has the privitization of the prison system helped society?
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On free market capitalism and the environment: In a free market, a company can't simply for example dump its chemical waste in a river because that way it would be causing damage to the property of the people living downstream. I recommend Walter Block on this issue. He's an Austrian economist and has written tons of stuff on how based on the concept of private property rights, problems like pollution, the preservation of endangered species, offshore drilling etc can be handled.
On war and the prison system: The current system in for example the US isn't a free market. It's not free market capitalism. It's a mixed economy with strong corporatist tendencies. I would agree if you called it "crony capitalism", but free market capitalism it certainly is not. In a free market the majority of people currently locked up in US prisons simply wouldn't be in prison because their "crimes" wouldn't be considered crimes.
Take drug use for example. If you want to do drugs all day than imho that would be pretty stupid but since you own your body, you have the right to do that. The war on drugs has placed an incredible burden on society and the economy. People who have not caused damage to someone else's property are being locked up. The state then has to raise taxes to pay for the incarceration of all those people.
People who don't even have anything to do with drugs get caught in the crossfire. Mothers that buy a couple of boxes of sinus pills because their husbands got the flu and their children have allergies get arrested and thrown in jail because by buying more than a certain amount of sinus pills in a certain amount of time they get flagged as pseudoephedrine smurfs.
By limiting production and raising the risks (of violence etc) involved with the manufacturing and distribution of 'drugs' the state essentially guarantees that only people who are willing to take that risk move into that sector. As a result the most violent gangs survive and get richer and more powerful. It's Prohibition all over again. How many liquor store owners do you see shooting other liquor store owners these days? None. How much violence was there between gangs selling liquor during Prohibition? A lot.
Privatizing tiny bits of the state's infrastructure won't suddenly solve everything. Especially when the cause of the problem still exists. One swallow doesn't make a summer. A few privatizations here and there don't make a free market. On the contrary, most of those privatizations are just a corporatist way of rewarding cronies: Politicians use tax dollars to build something and then sell it at submarket prices to their cronies.