If Pfizer had an enormous coercive apparatus, how would it be different from the government of Justin Trudeau? What would it do differently? I’m sure one can think of something but for the most part it would be quite similar.
Trudeau put almost the entirety of the coercive power of the state in service of several privately owned businesses. Businesses, I need to add, that are not owned by the citizens of Canada. He destroyed an enormous number of domestic enterprises to advance the financial interests of foreign business entities. He delivered a catastrophic blow to the nationalized healthcare, sending people in droves to private medicine. He removed many of the entitlements that citizens are used to. He pretty much abolished the passport as a meaningful concept.
Beyond the rhetoric, this is the reality. Not only didn’t Trudeau strengthen the government, he did the exact opposite. He removed it almost altogether, turning it into the enforcement arm of Walmart and Pfizer. Trudeau is the libertarian dream come true.
We can’t solve a problem if we don’t name it. Trudeau is what the neoliberal weakening of the national governments looks like. Governments and their coercive apparatuses don’t go away. They simply switch sides.
Clarissa's Blog 
As a libertarian, part of why I am so suspicious of government power is that I assume that, despite the rhetoric, the government will not, at the end of the day, act to help the downtrodden but will merely become a tool for big businesses. In public choice theory there is the concept of regulatory capture. The government will create a department to regulate something and that department will be taken over by people working for the industry,
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An issue I have heard of is that the most competent people get recruited by industry. This can leave the regulators staffed by people who don’t have a good understanding of the industry they are supposedly regulating.
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Libertarian isn’t the same as neoliberal, but there are plenty of libertarians who are confused about the whole “muh property” thing and go full corporatist.
They’ll defend property that was acquired or outright taken through coercion by corporations with the assertion that the corporations are being terrorised for acting out their “natural rights”.
A quick invocation of the “non-aggression principle”, which was typically violated by the corporations in question not long after their founding, let alone during recent events, and the brain of the corporatist libertarian resets for another kneejerk reaction.
Even some of the best of the anarcho-capitalists who lean too far libertarian fall into the trap.
Not naming names, but you know who you are, Scandinavian professor of economics in the Midwestern US.
And the trap is simple enough: the libertarian wants to believe in freedom as an absolute without any understanding of how the status quo ante modifies a “default judgment”, and so the libertarian defends the indefensible such as gang sign warfare in the form of corporatist libertarian thought.
But if you want to admire a truly intellectual stillborn thing, look no farther than the Libertarian Party of the United States.
It’s the thing that makes libertarians realise they’re full of bullshit shortly before realising that the way out is some kind of anarcho-capitalism stance or agorism.
If I want a working model of a circlejerk to show to others, the LP stands and delivers.
Libertarian isn’t the same as neoliberal, but there are plenty of libertarians who are confused about the whole “muh property” thing and go full corporatist.
They’ll defend property that was acquired or outright taken through coercion by corporations with the assertion that the corporations are being terrorised for acting out their “natural rights”.
A quick invocation of the “non-aggression principle”, which was typically violated by the corporations in question not long after their founding, let alone during recent events, and the brain of the corporatist libertarian resets for another kneejerk reaction.
Even some of the best of the anarcho-capitalist intellectuals who lean too far libertarian fall into the trap.
Not naming names, but you know who you are, Scandinavian professor of economics in the Midwestern US.
And the trap is simple enough: the libertarian wants to believe in freedom as an absolute without any understanding of how the status quo ante modifies a “default judgment”, and so the libertarian defends the indefensible such as gang sign warfare in the form of corporatist libertarian thought.
But if you want to admire a truly intellectual stillborn thing, look no farther than the Libertarian Party of the United States.
It’s the thing that makes libertarians realise they’re full of bullshit shortly before realising that the way out is some kind of anarcho-capitalism stance or agorism.
If I want a working model of a circlejerk to show to others, the LP stands and delivers.
(It’s probably a bad thing that I’m hearing Adam Ant music in my head now. 🙂 )
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