> Britain, 1770-1870 or thereabouts. It's near as dammit the minarchist
> state they keep banging on about. No income tax, night-watchman goverment,
> a navy (the main military force) than ran at a profit (by enforcing
> blockades with confiscation of blockade-runner's assets) and so on.
>
> It was a roaring success for business -- but it wasn't a very nice place
> for ordinary people to live and it sowed the seeds of its own collapse.
> Clue: the pollution was so bad that massive public works had to be created
> to deal with it (read up on The Great Stink of 1853 if you don't believe
> me). Second clue: social conditions were sufficiently bad that *England*
> was where Marx expected the communist revolution to break out. Third
> clue: the libertarian "utopia" of imperial Britain was dismantled from
> the inside out by its own people.
As usual, opponents of the free market are arguing against something
that doesn't resemble what free-marketers actually want. That's why
I tried a few weeks ago to define it--check the archives. One thing
I remember very clearly is that a free market demands an effective
court system that fairly prosecutes torts--including pollution.
Mounting pollution can only exist on public land--and capitalism
explicitly rejects the very idea of public land. "Social problems"
again are indicative of the absence of capitalism: English courts
enforced the rights of the upper classes but not the rights of the
lower classes. In a capitalist system, a beggar has a much right
to his dollar as a baron, and the courts enforce that.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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