Companies A - F, the six largest companies, form a coalition because they realize if they take out the competition, they will be able to corner the market and generate more revenue for themselves. first they use their capital reserves to undercut the competition, selling at a loss to drive most of the others to bankruptcy in a battle of attrition. once the competition is sufficiently degraded any stragglers can be taken out with military force if necessary.
Companies A, B and C the three largest companies, form a coalition because they realize if they take out the competition, they will be able to corner the market and generate more revenue for themselves. first they use their capital reserves to undercut the competition, selling at a loss to drive most of the others to bankruptcy in a battle of attrition. once the competition is sufficiently degraded any stragglers can be taken out with military force if necessary.
Companies A and B the two largest companies, form a coalition because they realize if they take out the company C, they will be able to corner the market and generate more revenue for themselves. first they use their capital reserves to undercut the company C, selling at a loss to drain company C's capital in a battle of attrition. once company C is sufficiently degraded they can be taken out with military force if necessary.
Company A, the largest of two companies, realizes if they take out company B, they will be able to corner the market and generate more revenue for themselves. first they use their capital reserves to undercut the company B, selling at a loss to drain company B's capital in a battle of attrition. once company B is sufficiently degraded they can be taken out with military force if necessary.
Company A is now the de facto government
On step 2, ABC dosen't need to fight themselves, they'll just merge.
yeah, and in that scenario the fighting becomes internalized, with different executives and their cliques vying for power within the company
Yeah, but then that's just skipping to the last line with A (the merged ABC) being the de facto government
Theme for our supreme corporate overlord that has Highlander'd the whole competition in our future lolbertarian dystopia. May we offer tribute and receive blessings in kind. (Probably not though)
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=uWm39TmNi3w&si=nOMSf21womdrKiGP (apologies to link bot)
Love to casually drop the phrase, "thousands of other security companies" in my explanation of why there won't be warlords.
Also, what's stopping them from doing this now? The state is too powerful? One organization seized enough power by force that they can now stomp out any competition that challenges their authority? How about that.
Also, what's stopping them from doing this now? The state is too powerful? One organization seized enough power by force that they can now stomp out any competition that challenges their authority?
Yes, but that organization is actually BREAKING THE RULES which were established by our sanctified Founding Fathers. Normally, everyone obeys the rules, so Anarcho-Capitalism can work. Its just that now we're being occupied by an ontologically evil conspiracy of quasi-human master manipulators who have tricked us into the Woke Ideology of Far-Left Socialism. And only by rising up, overthrowing our lizardfolk overlords, and reestablishing the natural, just, and equitable rule by Old White People can we recreate those initial primitive conditions of utopian self-governance through free association.
Fortunately, unlike the rest of those sheep, you and I have overcome the state's vile brainwashing through pure reason and independently arrived at the conclusion that the people who are often depicted as godlike in government buildings are based, actually.
Just two grand alliances spanning the entire Colonial Era world in overlapping multiple defense treaties.
One rogue actor in a small Mediterranean state pops a visiting dignitary. The state marks this as an act of war and threatens to invade the tiny Mediterranean country. This triggers a domino of allegiances, as all the regional neighbors are drawn in.
But it gets more complicated, because the war can't play out in Serbia. A war in Serbia means a war with Russia, which means Germans need to mass-mobilize to counter the less-developed-but-far-larger Russian army. And they can't do that if they've got a war on their Western front with Russian ally France. So... QUICK INVADE PARIS! GO GO GO!
The international equivalent of a Mexican Standoff with hair triggers, but also machine guns and mustard gas.
Serb shots Austrian aristocrat, so naturally Japan takes over islands in Oceania, that's elementary!
Vietnam shouldn't have contracted with the French private security force. That's just a bad consumer decision on Ho Chi Minh's part.
These are the guys telling you that communism only works on paper.
Human nature when communism: ITLL NEVER WORK
Human nature when....this: well you see....
Someone in one of the other libertarian threads said like "70% of people in libertarian societies work as private security, investigators, lawyers, and bureaucrats" and I've been thinking about that a lot. It's like how the American founders assumed everyone would be a lawyer with a slave plantation.
"70% of people in libertarian societies work as private security, investigators, lawyers, and bureaucrats"
I don't know how much truth there is to that. But it feels right. Also - my belief is that the most vociferous, annoying and possibly toxic libertarians are nearly all men.
No, I don't mean that's what libertarians work as now. I mean in their overly complex hypothetical societies they seem to be these complex conflict resolution systems involving various private courts and private security that are always more bloated and inefficient than anything that exists in normal capitalism.
Most non-human primate societies have to dedicate more than half their time to social bonding exercises like mutual grooming, because if they don't, simmering disputes boil over into violence. The ability to offload some of that effort into abstraction--ethics and systemic altruism--was probably one of our early evolutionary successes. This whole plan is basically "what if we stopped doing that?"
Its not talked enough about how the enlightenment was pulling from a literal slave society (Athens)
Turns out women don't like the idea of a society where their personal safety and security is entirely reliant on individuals with no actual oversight or consequences from their actions. How strange.
men be like "What reason could you possibly have for not believing that everyone will be polite and reasonable to you all the time?"
risk of warfare, which is financially untenable
Winning a war can be very lucrative, actuallyThere's also the "for who?" question. Tons of people make money off wars no matter who the winner is; an idea so glaringly obvious that it made it into one of the new Star Wars movies.
same people who claim this say capitalism is good because it rewards risktaking & innovation. we take business risks and always try to maximalize profits, but a hostile takeover with guns is just too much
utter clown ideology
Losing a war is also lucrative depending on whose side you’re on, see occupied South Korea. War is a great business! These people are deeply unserious
I'm in love with all the ancap dunking these last few days. I forgot about most of this shit since my lolbertarian phase. Absolute toddler levels of comprehending the world
I was just thinking this. I adore the ancap dunking that's been going on. It's wonderful.
Most of the time, this word is used to describe the more right-wing ones, not to say the moderate ones are any better
And its worth noting that they gleefully appropriated a historically leftist term for their own reactionary aims:
One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy... ‘Libertarians’ ...had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over...
-Rothbard, from "The Betrayal of the American Right"
So the term "libertarian" could've stayed fine, at least until
Vowsh came...
I thankfully mostly avoided a libertarian phase simply because my personal experiences growing up in relative poverty told me that corporations are a fuck, and not with any real scientific or economic arguments to counter them, but now with a couple dozen books under my belt, it's hilarious to look back on these arguments and realize that none of these people have any idea of what the real world looks like outside of hypothetical and extremely unstable economics models given to them by greek statue youtube channels selling $50 merch shirts. blazing by very sussy assumptions about how the world works without even briefly considering that those assumptions could possibly be untrue.
another commenter pointed out how if you read about how the buildup to WW1 happened, the paragraphs above are shown to be total nonsense
There can't be any warlords, see, because all the warlords will stop it.
Already wrong from the first sentence, lol.
One company isn't afraid of larger firms. The largest one. They'll expand their monopoly position and dominate unless the others start merging. Then you get just a handful and they fight each other.
It's called a gang and it's how this shit goes down when you leave capitalism in place and then leave violence as the means of resolving disputes.
So it’s “rules based international order” except between armed corporations instead of armed countries. I can’t see how that would ever lead to problems /s
This is a bunch of wild assumptions, the system breaks entirely as soon as any one of them fails.
This is basically describing how feudalism would work if the King didn't lay down rules on lesser rulers and said "You can just all defend each other out of mutual interest :) ". One lord would slaughter their way to be the new king, then lay down some rules.
feudalism would work if the King didn't lay down rules
they somehow designed a worse Holy Roman Empire, it's amazing
Motherfucker has literally never seen, hear, or contemplated a single cyberpunk story. MGS4 was literally about this.
Libertarian: you see all you need is a mutually agreed upon organizing structure between independent parties
Me, an idiot: like a government?
but we signed a contract!!
