Charlie Stross wrote:
>
> On Tue, Nov 20, 2001 at 01:31:33PM -0500, Mike Lorrey wrote:
> >
> > The problem, of course, is that while perfect capitalism has never be
> > statutorily allowed to be tried,
>
> Eh?!?
>
> Something a lot of Libertarians seem to avoid thinking about is the
> fact that the minarchist night-watchman state with unhampered capitalism
> that they crave *has* actually been tried. And found wanting.
>
> 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.
I would say that this is what would occur when debt was treated as a
criminal offense (as was normal during this period) and industry was NOT
required to pay for it's negative externalities, as would be normal in a
libertopic economy. Fix those two things and Britain could have made a
go of it. Furthermore, labor movements are also not anti-libertarian per
se, so long as they do not use force to monopolize their labor markets.
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