@Listens to Baroque while coding murder.exe :newt:  > the government always makes the problems it's supposed to solve much worse

That's an awful generalization that sits at the core of the anarco-capitalist naiveness.

And it leads to curious contradictions.

The argument is that the government shouldn't intervene, otherwise the market can't function properly.

But then it shouldn't intervene even when its inaction actually causes the market to become dysfunctional - like when a single business sucks away resources from everybody else, or it creates a monopoly with high entry barriers for everyone else, or it gets too much lobbying power over democratic institutions, or it concentrates power to the point that the economy is no longer competitive.

It's an awful generalization also because it assumes that every government action is bad, regardless of the action itself. Which is an awful generalization for the same reason why "everything X does is bad" is an awful generalization.

In this case, the government actually identified the right problem (in order to avoid rolling blackouts for everyone, the biggest non-essential consumers of electricity must reduce their consumption during supply shortages), but it implemented the worse possible solution for the problem (instead of suing them or taxing them out of business, and using the tax revenue to expand their strained grid, it bribed them with public money in order to temporarily shut down their gambling den).

Luckily the political doctrine in the US hasn't always been like this. There was a time, a century ago, where the government actually went after corporate abuses, it even enacted the best antitrust regulation of the time that helped keep its economy healthy and competitive, and it invested into big public projects and it created a good welfare safety network that led to the economic boom after WWII.

Nowadays, a President pushing for something like FDR's New Deal, the Marshall Plan or the antitrust regulation of the early 20th century would be seen as an irredimable communist instead. Better let the miners waste electricity on cracking SHA hashes (or bribe them to stop) while everybody else experiences rolling blackouts while it's 40C outside.

I hope that you folks go over this collective anarco-capitalist hallucination soon before inflicting more damage to yourselves and everybody else. 

 @7d199f28 

>That's an awful generalization that sits at the core of the anarco-capitalist naiveness

Now you call me ancap. I'm not. Nor I'm going to read the rest of your wall of text, thank you for writing it anyway. 

 @Listens to Baroque while coding murder.exe :newt:  In short, anarco-capitalist is someone who thinks that all government intervention is bad, and the invisible hand of the market must fix the market itself without any direction from above. Which was already naive in Smith's time, let alone in the 21st century. 

 @7d199f28 I know who they are. I'm not with them.