I changed my mind about what big companies are like and about how capitalist, rights-respecting and law-abiding our society is. I wrote Capitalism Means Policing Big Companies. I lowered my opinion of billionaires in general. And I lowered my opinion of anarcho-capitalism. I see errors in the anarcho-capitalist literature that I don’t want to associate with.
There is a thing I was thinking a lot about recently, that I have never seen written, until now.
The non-aggression principle says that people should not initiate violence or fraud. The libertarians I see online keep complaining about violence (especially when talking about tax) all the time. But they are suspiciously silent about fraud. Or customer manipulation, which is basically fraud-lite. If there is a debate about fraudulent businesses, the only contribution of local libertarians is typically something like “I hope you do not suggest that the government do something about it, because government is funded by taxes, and taxation is violence”.
This asymmetry makes me think that many libertarians are probably quite okay with fraud and manipulation; that they see them as an essential part of the sacred freedom. Perhaps not consciously; but unconsciously, thinking about regulations of fraud makes them angry, thinking about fraud itself does not. Perhaps the idea is that smart people would research everything carefully, and the stupid people kinda deserve it.
(Even when I think about the books describing libertarian utopias, e.g. written by Heinlein, the protagonist is often a super skillful lawyer or amateur lawyer, reads all his contracts carefully, notices all suspicious parts, and can craft his own bulletproof contracts. So there is a strong “fraud—that could never happen to me” vibe.)
From my perspective, even exploiting someone’s stupidity is not fundamentally different from exploiting someone’s weakness. Stupidity is a weakness of mind, and fraud is a violence against mind. I would even go so far that in my utopia, if your advertisement confuses an IQ 80 person to believe something, and then you go like “ha ha, the small print says otherwise”, you should be treated as if your contract literally said what your ad says, ignoring the small print. (The small print can provide additional details, not fundamentally change the nature of the contract.) If you said it, and the other person heard it, own it. If it’s knowingly false, don’t put it in print.
This asymmetry makes me think that many libertarians are probably quite okay with fraud and manipulation;
Yeah. I now think most people with similar views wouldn’t change their mind when presented with the same sort of evidence that changed my mind.
This also applies to pro-capitalist Republicans, who are more numerous than libertarians.
And I’ve noticed something sort of similar applies to a ton of anti-capitalist left wing people: a lot of them think that big companies use lawyers to find holes in the law to get away with being evil while not actually breaking the law. They think we need to pass new laws to prevent the bad behavior of companies instead of believing that companies are routinely violating existing laws. For example, I was debating a vegan from Effective Altruism who hates factory farms but said one of the reasons it’s hard to fight them is they’re careful to follow the law. He changed his mind after I sent him a report from a lefty pro-animal charity investigating and documenting tons of law violations at factory farms. But his default belief was that the big companies that he hates are law abiding. When a lot of the people who are biased against the companies believe the companies largely follow the law, it makes more sense that it’s hard to get people who are biased in favor of the companies to see them as frequently breaking laws.
So both pro- and anti-capitalist people seem to underestimate how much big companies break the law? Pro-capitalists, because they want to defend all companies (they don’t realize how much an essential part of capitalism is that bad companies fail). Anti-capitalists, because they see the problem with companies per se, or market per se, so they don’t care much about details.
Yeah, I would expect that big companies win unfairly by lobbying and changing the laws in their favor, not by simply breaking the laws. But it makes sense that if you can bribe the legislative part of the government, you can probably bribe the judicial part, too. So breaking the law and not getting punished is easier than waiting for the law to be changed in your favor, and gives you more of an advantage against competitors.
I am not familiar with the American justice system, so I can’t comment on it. Here in Slovakia, the justice system is utterly corrupt. We had situations like the mother of a local crime boss was the regional judge, and she always ruled in favor of her son, no matter what he did. There is also a big company famous for winning all big construction contracts from the government, giving all the actual work to subcontractors, and often simply not paying the subcontractors—putting not just the profit but the entire budget in their own pockets. I kinda hoped it was better in other countries.
Cynically speaking, when you break the law as a CEO, you have multiple lines of defense:
you may simply not get caught
the prosecution may decline to prosecute you
your expensive lawyers may find a way to win
you may bribe the judge
worst case, the company (i.e. the shareholders) will pay the penalty, not you
So both pro- and anti-capitalist people seem to underestimate how much big companies break the law? Pro-capitalists, because they want to defend all companies (they don’t realize how much an essential part of capitalism is that bad companies fail). Anti-capitalists, because they see the problem with companies per se, or market per se, so they don’t care much about details.
Yeah. I’ve run into that not-caring-about-the-details-of-things-you-dislike thing before in other contexts. For example, Ayn Rand fans generally dislike Karl Popper (while not knowing accurate criticisms or summaries of his work). I tried posting Popper criticisms on a Rand forum and got negative reactions: people thought it was boring and pointless since they already thought they knew he was bad. I was hoping to show that I thought critically about Popper, and knew more than them about Popper, before bringing up some of Popper’s good ideas, but it didn’t work.
Also anti-capitalists tend to be pro-government. There’s a pro-company, anti-government tribe against an anti-company, pro-government tribe. Liking government gets in the way of seeing the government as enforcing laws poorly and being ~half of the problem. My view (that the companies and government are both bad) doesn’t fit with either tribe.
Yeah, I would expect that big companies win unfairly by lobbying and changing the laws in their favor, not by simply breaking the laws. But it makes sense that if you can bribe the legislative part of the government, you can probably bribe the judicial part, too. So breaking the law and not getting punished is easier than waiting for the law to be changed in your favor, and gives you more of an advantage against competitors.
I see more systemic non-enforcement of old laws than direct bribes or law changes. Fraud was illegal before the US was a country, but a common reaction to new types of fraud is to think we need a new law to make them illegal.
Also, when companies get caught doing fraud (and various other awful things) and it’s acknowledged as illegal, they often pay fines that are far too small to disincentivize bad behavior. I think most elite businessmen and politicians are part of the same social hierarchy that tends to protect their own without consciously realizing they’re doing something wrong.
I am not familiar with the American justice system, so I can’t comment on it. Here in Slovakia, the justice system is utterly corrupt.
I’m American. I think most court cases are biased not corrupt, but we do have corruption too. I think our politicians take more bribes than our judges do. What’s tricky is that systemic bias overlaps with systemic corruption. For example, for-profit prisons lobby politicians and make friends in high places. They seek a greater supply of profitable inmates, then as a downstream consequence the average judge is more biased and worse laws are passed. Then more black and brown people are put in jail. The cause and effect is often indirect without a bribe or kickback for the judge. Direct corruption happens sometimes, and it’s hard to know how often, but at least it’s a scandal once it gets into newspapers, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
My guess is that taking seriously the very concept of manipulation often makes [the type of person you’re talking about] uncomfortable, because it undercuts an ethically load-bearing abstraction of rational agency, and its fuzziness threatens to license paternalism with (what might feel like) no principled limit. (This is a genuinely hard problem.) This cashes out similarly to ‘people who are manipulated deserve it’, but I think isn’t quite the same thing.
I’m not convinced that manipulation should be handled by law (but I am concerned about it – I have several articles about creative adversaries who don’t initiate force particularly when they have big budgets behind the manipulation). But I don’t think that’s the right debate to start with anyway.
I think there is a ton of stuff which isn’t fuzzy, isn’t near a gray area, in which the company clearly violates both the letter and spirit of the law or contract. So we could start policing that and see how it goes. I suggesting focusing on the easier cases first. Also in general ambiguous contracts are (rightly) adjudicated in favor of the person who didn’t write them or have any lawyers or power, so we could also tackle those without getting into the trickier cases. (Unfortunately, even in these clearer cases there is still a lot of resistance to policing companies. But I still think they are easier cases to address than mere manipulation.)
I could give examples if people dispute that there’s a lot of blatant fraud, law breaking and contract breaking in the world.
I would even go so far that in my utopia, if your advertisement confuses an IQ 80 person to believe something, and then you go like “ha ha, the small print says otherwise”, you should be treated as if your contract literally said what your ad says, ignoring the small print. (The small print can provide additional details, not fundamentally change the nature of the contract.) If you said it, and the other person heard it, own it. If it’s knowingly false, don’t put it in print.
This is a bit tricky, because often the fine print is going to adjudicate legitimate edge cases, and people may feel rug pulled if they end up in one of those edge-cases, even if the overall contract wasn’t meaningfully deceptive.
I have wondered if there should be a special symbol or font or something, which implies a higher-than-default-speech standard of reliability, backed by the courts. Anyone marking text with that symbol is committing that what that text says is literally precisely true, and anyone who can demonstrate otherwise can sue for damages.
eg if you call your business “24 hour fitness”, with the symbol, and actually you are closed at night on the weekends anyone who notices can claim the bounty. But without the symbol, that’s just a zany name you picked for your gym.
I think libertarianism implicitly assumes a high-trust society where fraud either doesn’t exist at massive scale or isn’t tolerated at all. There are offshoots that don’t seem to lean towards that, but they’re much less popular outside of D.C. think tanks. There are countless takes on legal system reform, so neither of us can pose that one of them represents the “libertarian position”.
I think the most elegant solution, here, is to say that fraud represents a form of violence, in the same way that taking something important that belongs to someone else and then sprinting off with it represents a form of violence. This is grey and ambiguous, but the same critiques apply to the NAP even in ideal scenarios—“violence” is not a fundamental physical law that can be quantified and thresholded, and treating it as such makes countless ‘not touching you’ behaviors possible, which libertarians want to avoid.
Again, difficult for me to group-steelman a term that encompasses hundreds of mutually-opposed camps, but I think “What happens if you defraud someone is the same thing that happens if you steal from them” is a reasonable solution to what you’re asking.
I think the most elegant solution, here, is to say that fraud represents a form of violence, in the same way that taking something important that belongs to someone else and then sprinting off with it represents a form of violence.
FYI, this has already been said by relevant thought leaders. Rand calls fraud “indirect use of [physical] force” and a “[violent] crime”. Mises calls fraud a form of “aggression” and views it as one of the main things to protect the free market against. Fraud is often explicitly prohibited by the NAP.
The Virtue of Selfishness, ch. 14, The Nature of Government, by Ayn Rand:
A unilateral breach of contract involves an indirect use of physical force: it consists, in essence, of one man receiving the material values, goods or services of another, then refusing to pay for them and thus keeping them by force (by mere physical possession), not by right—i.e., keeping them without the consent of their owner. Fraud involves a similarly indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values without their owner’s consent, under false pretenses or false promises. Extortion is another variant of an indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values, not in exchange for values, but by the threat of force, violence or injury.
Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution in “Political” Crimes, by Ayn Rand:
A crime is a violation of the right(s) of other men by force (or fraud). It is only the initiation of physical force against others—i.e., the recourse to violence—that can be classified as a crime in a free society (as distinguished from a civil wrong).
Human Action: A Treatise on Economics by Ludwig von Mises:
Beyond the sphere of private property and the market lies the sphere of compulsion and coercion; here are the dams which organized society has built for the protection of private property and the market against violence, malice, and fraud.
Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis by Ludwig von Mises:
Men must choose between the market economy and socialism. The state can preserve the market economy in protecting life, health and private property against violent or fraudulent aggression; [...]
I’ve talked with many people who do consider fraud a type of aggression, indirect physical violence or initiation of force, but who still generally don’t apply that to companies like Amazon or Wells Fargo.
There is a thing I was thinking a lot about recently, that I have never seen written, until now.
The non-aggression principle says that people should not initiate violence or fraud. The libertarians I see online keep complaining about violence (especially when talking about tax) all the time. But they are suspiciously silent about fraud. Or customer manipulation, which is basically fraud-lite. If there is a debate about fraudulent businesses, the only contribution of local libertarians is typically something like “I hope you do not suggest that the government do something about it, because government is funded by taxes, and taxation is violence”.
This asymmetry makes me think that many libertarians are probably quite okay with fraud and manipulation; that they see them as an essential part of the sacred freedom. Perhaps not consciously; but unconsciously, thinking about regulations of fraud makes them angry, thinking about fraud itself does not. Perhaps the idea is that smart people would research everything carefully, and the stupid people kinda deserve it.
(Even when I think about the books describing libertarian utopias, e.g. written by Heinlein, the protagonist is often a super skillful lawyer or amateur lawyer, reads all his contracts carefully, notices all suspicious parts, and can craft his own bulletproof contracts. So there is a strong “fraud—that could never happen to me” vibe.)
From my perspective, even exploiting someone’s stupidity is not fundamentally different from exploiting someone’s weakness. Stupidity is a weakness of mind, and fraud is a violence against mind. I would even go so far that in my utopia, if your advertisement confuses an IQ 80 person to believe something, and then you go like “ha ha, the small print says otherwise”, you should be treated as if your contract literally said what your ad says, ignoring the small print. (The small print can provide additional details, not fundamentally change the nature of the contract.) If you said it, and the other person heard it, own it. If it’s knowingly false, don’t put it in print.
Yeah. I now think most people with similar views wouldn’t change their mind when presented with the same sort of evidence that changed my mind.
This also applies to pro-capitalist Republicans, who are more numerous than libertarians.
And I’ve noticed something sort of similar applies to a ton of anti-capitalist left wing people: a lot of them think that big companies use lawyers to find holes in the law to get away with being evil while not actually breaking the law. They think we need to pass new laws to prevent the bad behavior of companies instead of believing that companies are routinely violating existing laws. For example, I was debating a vegan from Effective Altruism who hates factory farms but said one of the reasons it’s hard to fight them is they’re careful to follow the law. He changed his mind after I sent him a report from a lefty pro-animal charity investigating and documenting tons of law violations at factory farms. But his default belief was that the big companies that he hates are law abiding. When a lot of the people who are biased against the companies believe the companies largely follow the law, it makes more sense that it’s hard to get people who are biased in favor of the companies to see them as frequently breaking laws.
So both pro- and anti-capitalist people seem to underestimate how much big companies break the law? Pro-capitalists, because they want to defend all companies (they don’t realize how much an essential part of capitalism is that bad companies fail). Anti-capitalists, because they see the problem with companies per se, or market per se, so they don’t care much about details.
Yeah, I would expect that big companies win unfairly by lobbying and changing the laws in their favor, not by simply breaking the laws. But it makes sense that if you can bribe the legislative part of the government, you can probably bribe the judicial part, too. So breaking the law and not getting punished is easier than waiting for the law to be changed in your favor, and gives you more of an advantage against competitors.
I am not familiar with the American justice system, so I can’t comment on it. Here in Slovakia, the justice system is utterly corrupt. We had situations like the mother of a local crime boss was the regional judge, and she always ruled in favor of her son, no matter what he did. There is also a big company famous for winning all big construction contracts from the government, giving all the actual work to subcontractors, and often simply not paying the subcontractors—putting not just the profit but the entire budget in their own pockets. I kinda hoped it was better in other countries.
Cynically speaking, when you break the law as a CEO, you have multiple lines of defense:
you may simply not get caught
the prosecution may decline to prosecute you
your expensive lawyers may find a way to win
you may bribe the judge
worst case, the company (i.e. the shareholders) will pay the penalty, not you
Yeah. I’ve run into that not-caring-about-the-details-of-things-you-dislike thing before in other contexts. For example, Ayn Rand fans generally dislike Karl Popper (while not knowing accurate criticisms or summaries of his work). I tried posting Popper criticisms on a Rand forum and got negative reactions: people thought it was boring and pointless since they already thought they knew he was bad. I was hoping to show that I thought critically about Popper, and knew more than them about Popper, before bringing up some of Popper’s good ideas, but it didn’t work.
Also anti-capitalists tend to be pro-government. There’s a pro-company, anti-government tribe against an anti-company, pro-government tribe. Liking government gets in the way of seeing the government as enforcing laws poorly and being ~half of the problem. My view (that the companies and government are both bad) doesn’t fit with either tribe.
I see more systemic non-enforcement of old laws than direct bribes or law changes. Fraud was illegal before the US was a country, but a common reaction to new types of fraud is to think we need a new law to make them illegal.
Also, when companies get caught doing fraud (and various other awful things) and it’s acknowledged as illegal, they often pay fines that are far too small to disincentivize bad behavior. I think most elite businessmen and politicians are part of the same social hierarchy that tends to protect their own without consciously realizing they’re doing something wrong.
I’m American. I think most court cases are biased not corrupt, but we do have corruption too. I think our politicians take more bribes than our judges do. What’s tricky is that systemic bias overlaps with systemic corruption. For example, for-profit prisons lobby politicians and make friends in high places. They seek a greater supply of profitable inmates, then as a downstream consequence the average judge is more biased and worse laws are passed. Then more black and brown people are put in jail. The cause and effect is often indirect without a bribe or kickback for the judge. Direct corruption happens sometimes, and it’s hard to know how often, but at least it’s a scandal once it gets into newspapers, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
My guess is that taking seriously the very concept of manipulation often makes [the type of person you’re talking about] uncomfortable, because it undercuts an ethically load-bearing abstraction of rational agency, and its fuzziness threatens to license paternalism with (what might feel like) no principled limit. (This is a genuinely hard problem.) This cashes out similarly to ‘people who are manipulated deserve it’, but I think isn’t quite the same thing.
I’m not convinced that manipulation should be handled by law (but I am concerned about it – I have several articles about creative adversaries who don’t initiate force particularly when they have big budgets behind the manipulation). But I don’t think that’s the right debate to start with anyway.
I think there is a ton of stuff which isn’t fuzzy, isn’t near a gray area, in which the company clearly violates both the letter and spirit of the law or contract. So we could start policing that and see how it goes. I suggesting focusing on the easier cases first. Also in general ambiguous contracts are (rightly) adjudicated in favor of the person who didn’t write them or have any lawyers or power, so we could also tackle those without getting into the trickier cases. (Unfortunately, even in these clearer cases there is still a lot of resistance to policing companies. But I still think they are easier cases to address than mere manipulation.)
I could give examples if people dispute that there’s a lot of blatant fraud, law breaking and contract breaking in the world.
This is also my answer to Eli Tyre who said that fine print can address legitimate edge cases in a sibling comment at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/beDDK8MNxkkB7yfQY/i-changed-my-mind-about-error-correcting-debate-misogyny-and?commentId=MqKthhrMBHhXopwht
This is a bit tricky, because often the fine print is going to adjudicate legitimate edge cases, and people may feel rug pulled if they end up in one of those edge-cases, even if the overall contract wasn’t meaningfully deceptive.
I have wondered if there should be a special symbol or font or something, which implies a higher-than-default-speech standard of reliability, backed by the courts. Anyone marking text with that symbol is committing that what that text says is literally precisely true, and anyone who can demonstrate otherwise can sue for damages.
eg if you call your business “24 hour fitness”, with the symbol, and actually you are closed at night on the weekends anyone who notices can claim the bounty. But without the symbol, that’s just a zany name you picked for your gym.
I replied at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/beDDK8MNxkkB7yfQY?commentId=qj7qfAvbZcs9wBexT
I think libertarianism implicitly assumes a high-trust society where fraud either doesn’t exist at massive scale or isn’t tolerated at all. There are offshoots that don’t seem to lean towards that, but they’re much less popular outside of D.C. think tanks. There are countless takes on legal system reform, so neither of us can pose that one of them represents the “libertarian position”.
I think the most elegant solution, here, is to say that fraud represents a form of violence, in the same way that taking something important that belongs to someone else and then sprinting off with it represents a form of violence. This is grey and ambiguous, but the same critiques apply to the NAP even in ideal scenarios—“violence” is not a fundamental physical law that can be quantified and thresholded, and treating it as such makes countless ‘not touching you’ behaviors possible, which libertarians want to avoid.
Again, difficult for me to group-steelman a term that encompasses hundreds of mutually-opposed camps, but I think “What happens if you defraud someone is the same thing that happens if you steal from them” is a reasonable solution to what you’re asking.
FYI, this has already been said by relevant thought leaders. Rand calls fraud “indirect use of [physical] force” and a “[violent] crime”. Mises calls fraud a form of “aggression” and views it as one of the main things to protect the free market against. Fraud is often explicitly prohibited by the NAP.
The Virtue of Selfishness, ch. 14, The Nature of Government, by Ayn Rand:
Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution in “Political” Crimes, by Ayn Rand:
Human Action: A Treatise on Economics by Ludwig von Mises:
Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis by Ludwig von Mises:
I’ve talked with many people who do consider fraud a type of aggression, indirect physical violence or initiation of force, but who still generally don’t apply that to companies like Amazon or Wells Fargo.