… and leading directly on from how the state uses cameras to mess people around, here is another story (from the same source – top right column again – June 3rd) about a capitalist-supplied camera that helps motorists, and also anyone they might otherwise fail to notice and drive into.
Simply, on the very front of the car, some capitalists have attached a camera that can see sideways in both directions. Inside the car, there is a screen showing the (two) results to the grateful driver.
At the home where I grew up, and where my mum still lives, driving out past those high hedges and that high wall and across that very narrow pavement into the road was and is still a perpetual worry, with much craning of the neck forwards and asking of any front seat passenger to help by doing likewise. I do not use a car now, but when I did, I used constantly to think how handy such a camera would have been. Well, if I ever get another car, I may be able to have just such a camera on it.
Apparently these gadgets are already very big (metaphorically speaking – they are of course literally tiny) in Japan, where they were first devised and have first been made available. Japan is a land, I would guess, with many awkward little corners and hard-to-negotiate exits. As is ours.
The state is not your friend. Business has to be, or it goes out of business.
And, of course, the periscope for looking over jams, and the remote helicamera to fly to the next intersection and see if there is any cross traffic, or any cops hiding.
Not necessarily. In fact, I sometimes wonder how many of the regulars here actually work, or have worked, for a good-sized established company (say about 3-4,000 direct employees, been in business over 20 years, sort of thing).
Corporations can be and frequently are just as daft and grasping as states, and they can do this and still remain in business – you just have to be slightly less daft and grasping than the worst of your competitors. Given the chance, they can interfere and control with just as much abandon – states want to attain and then maintain a position of control, and so, amazingly enough, do corporations.
Corporations generally are more operationally efficient than states, at least assuming they face sufficient competition, but they are in no sense morally or ethically superior nor are they any less prone to stupidity, greed, corruption or hideous incompetence.
EG
It’s allowed! Whoo-hoo!
A person may not drive a motor vehicle if a television receiver, a video monitor, or a television or video screen, or any other, similar means of visually displaying a television broadcast or video signal that produces entertainment or business applications, is operating and is located in the motor vehicle at any point forward of the back of the driver’s seat, or is operating and visible to the driver while driving the motor vehicle…
[The above] does not apply to… A visual display used to enhance or supplement the driver’s view forward, behind, or to the sides of a motor vehicle for the purpose of maneuvering the vehicle.
…[Corporations] are in no sense morally or ethically superior [to governments]…
Are you daft?
Voluntary organizations that provide useful products and/or services in exchange for market prices are “in no sense morally or ethically superior” to gangs of jackbooted thugs that ask nothing of me without first putting a gun to my head?
I know you are a regular reader, how could you have missed this most vital point?
Because it’s nonsensical. The free market only exists because a non-corporate regulating body with ultimate authority (i.e. the state in all practical cases) enforces it. Left to themselves, corporations don’t want free markets, they want captive markets, cartels and cosy arrangements with each other.
Corporations, like states, are run by people. They both want to be in a position of control, and given the opportunity the corporation can and will do questionable and sometimes illegal things to achieve this. They are just as prone to corruption, intimidation, incompetence and threat as states, but, because they are currently regulated to a greater or lesser degree by the state they don’t have the ability always to get away with it or, frequently, put themselves in a position to do it. At least in most of the developed world.
It is to me plain, predictable and (painfully) obvious how corporations would conduct themselves in an anarcho-capitalist society. They would be just as unaccountable and arbitrary as states, if not more so, given the opportunity to get themselves into a position of dominance. Since there would be no state to regulate them or prevent this happening, it is likely to happen sooner or later (probably sooner). This is why, although I am on the libertarian side of conservative, I have no sympathy whatever for the idea of anarcho-capitalist libertarianism.
There are numerous instances in history of how large parts of society were controlled by corporate interests – this is basically how late medieval Europe worked, with its guilds and corporations. The modern state evolved out of that, and to be frank I doubt very much if modern capitalism would ever have come into existence without a regulating state to control the vested corporate interests.
Like I said, the corporation is generally more operationally efficient than the state, PROVIDED it has enough and capable competition, but left to itself in a position of overwhelming power or control and/or without meaningful competition it is at least as bad as the state (leaving aside totalitarian states).
[Aside – People complain here, with justification, that the state is wrong, opporessive and dictatorial to create a national identity database and mandate the carrying of ID cards. What, I wonder, would be their reaction if a private security corporation responsible for policing a libertarian society wanted to do the same thing? It’s wrong when the state does it, but if a private monopoly or oligopoly does the same thing then that makes it ok?]
The combination of a rigorously enforced free market under a reasonably limited state works. Take the free market out of the equation and you have a command economy, which we all know doesn’t work. Take the state out of the equation and your free market disappears under a mess of cartel and monopoly, which doesn’t work too well either.
EG