User blog comment:GrandMethuselah67/Character Sheet: Malcolm River/@comment-4867780-20161014010956/@comment-26322734-20161016210200

Don't get me wrong. The government doesn't interfere with the market (at least not most of the time) because it's evil. More often than not, it's trying to help whatever market issue exists at the time. And a lot of the time, it does...in the short term. An example of this would be the 2009 bail-outs that got America out of its recession. Another example is the bank bail-outs of the 1930's and the New Deal, which got America out of the Great Depression. Each are cases in which the government stepped in the market and successfully got the American public's collective heads above the water, but each caused long-term trends of corporate welfare, which distorted the market in favor of corporate interests.

Really, the role of the government depends on which libertarian thinker you ask. Libertarians like Malcolm believe the government generally has no role in the market or in private citizens' lives, except national defense. Libertarian thinkers like me believe the government can help the market, but has the overall role of, and only of, preserving the free market (incentivizing corporations to behave ethically through tax breaks and tax penalties), keeping citizens safe from foreign threats, and preserving the environment.

"...so ethical egoism is a philosophy that puts cool principles above people's health/life ?"

Ethical egoism is a philosophy that puts the concerns of people's health/life only onto those whom it may concern or, perhaps, their constituents should they choose to concern them.

In other words, in ethical egoism, nobody is responsible for your health/life or well-being except for yourself.

That's all. Unless, of course, you personally think that other individuals should be held accountable for the well-being of others involuntarily. In which case...eh, to each their own.

"...which means a free world would be a world where the dumb and lazy masses can self-destruct their asses off without any kind of interference, while swarms of sociopathic corporations feast and fatten up on their personal misery and crumbling lives."

Woah-woah-woah, there. Slow down. I have said repeatedly that ethical egoism is all about freedom of choice. You've even quoted me saying it. That means that the "dumb and lazy masses" can choose whether or not to buy from the "sociopathic corporations". And the corporations in question will be penalized by the free market for their business malpractice.

In a free market, there's nothing saying one can't form a non-profit organization composed of concerned citizens to raise awareness for and work against a corporation performing business malpractice or selling harmful products. But ultimately, it's up to the consumer to decide whether or not they want to buy that product or service.

"So you do agree that in pratice, a free-market is a world where the big eat the small, the bigger eat the big, and the biggest are so obscenely rich and omnipresent they are virtually untouchable, and their societal weight is so massive CEOs are even more powerful than official governments ?"

I said maybe. I said this, because, in practice it rarely happens. Especially taking into account things like elasticity. In fact, if the free market did work in the way you seem to be concluding here, the 7.29 million small businesses in the U.S. would not exist because their bigger competitors would have, through larger finances in resources, bought them out and small businesses wouldn't account for 99.7% of businesses in the U.S because, as you said, the bigger businesses would have assimilated them, crushed them, or bought them out. Mind you, this is with government intervention in favor of big business. Imagine how high the number would be without it?

Meet Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie is one of the millions of immigrants that had migrated to America in the Guilded Age (1850's-1900's) with absolutely nothing. Carnegie, in this case, had only a new and efficient way to create steel.

Mind you, in his time, there were already massive steel businesses that had existed since long before the then small business that was then the Carnegie Steel Company. But through the then free market, the Carnegie Steel Company out-competed the big businesses in the steel industry and became a leading corporation within the industry.

Did the other steel corporations try to buy Carnegie out? Yes. Did they probably try to sabotage him? Yes.

Are they sill relevant, still somehow existing in some form or another to this very day? No.

And that's what the free market is about. What ethical egoism is about. It's about being responsible for yourself, being reliant on yourself, and being successful by your own agency.

"Especially since the consummating masses are so apathic and malleable in comparison, as Microsoft confirmed once again in our very real world."

Funny you'd mention Microsoft. They filed for bankruptcy recently (as I've cited before). That's the market at work ;)

"The more we dig into the ramifications of ethical egoism, the more it looks like a Cyber Punk dystopia ^ ^; I mean seriously, read the trope again and you will find EE's tenets all over the background."

Cyberpunk is often written by those who, at most, are Marxist or who, at least, have socialist sympathies (and thus have biases against ethical egoism and laissez-faire capitalism). They come from a school of thought called collectivism (who holds that it's one's moral responsibility to exist for the good of everyone, rather than the self), and collectivists and ethical egoists are sort of ideologically at odds. It's like an ideological cold war.

But what socialist thinkers, critics of capitalism often complain about when they say capitalism is really something that all libertarians and ethical egoists are against, Crony Capitalism.

You said earlier that corporations can become more powerful than governments? That's incorrect. That is because the government is a class of individuals whom exist solely to have power. There are documents, constitutions, or if you live in a theocratic country, divine rights that give governments power over people. Corporations have no such thing.

Laws set forth by the government aren't voluntary. Buying anything from a corporation is voluntary.

Think about it. What power does money have? None, except the power that the government gives it.

The government is really a monopolistic corporation. It collects profit through taxation (another thing that's involuntary), and provides goods and services through that profit (services such as welfare, military, etc.) The thing about the government that divides it from all other corporations, however, is it's monopolistic. You have no choice but to pay the government, get government-provided services from the government, etc. In other words, interactions with governmental services are not voluntary, but coerced. Granted, we'd be worse off without them, but them's the facts.

See why some ethical egoists are against the idea of government entirely?

Now. A cyberpunk dystopian nightmare would be impossible in a free market because of the Non-Aggression Principle. How is a corporation going to become so impossibly and monolithically powerful if its power depends completely on the choice of consumers, who can simply...well, not buy from them? How is consumerism sustainable if literally anything can persuade a consumer to get something different, from the price to something their psychic said to them the other week?

Free market means free. Freedom not only for corporations, but consumers, and each private citizen making up the two categories individually.