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From: faustus@ucbcad.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Re: Libertarians and economic democracy
Message-ID: <93@ucbcad.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 7-Feb-85 01:19:53 EST
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Posted: Thu Feb  7 01:19:53 1985
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> > If we're going to do away with big government I'd rather
> > not have IBM fill the vacuum, though we could do worse.
> 
> This isn't the first person I've noticed who seems to think that if
> we can get big government off of our backs, IBM (or ANY huge corporation)
> will just be able to 'step in' and fill the power vacuum.  Sort of
> like Baron Greenback: "... and in the resulting chaos, *I* will step in
> and take over the world!"  I've often wondered just how he was going
> to go about that.  No problem!  Nature abhors a vacuum, right?  Wrong,
> obviously, since 99.9999...% of the volume of the universe is full of
> vacuum.

Bad argument...

>     So I ask: Which of the functions of government which would be 
> discarded by libertarians would a huge multinational corporation be
> able to take over?  (With profit, and without losing dozens of class
> action lawsuits?)  Or is this 'IBM filling the vacuum' stuff just
> empty rhetoric?

Probably very large companies with a lot of unskilled labor (IBM isn't
a good example here) would want to set up corporate cities for their
workers, where they had a lot more power than the government does now
over citizens. There are a lot of reasons why this would be a good idea --
they could keep track of what their employees were up to, they could pay
them much less as they are also paying for their room and board, and so
forth.

The libertarian will of course say, "But nobody compels them to work for
that company". But when you are talking about a number of very large
corporations like IBM, which would probably grow larger if government
regulation were eliminated, in many places either you work for them or
you don't work at all. I'm not saying that this is the same as "lack of
freedom", but just a very strong incentive.

If IBM were the only menace, that wouldn't be so bad. What worries me
is that what tends to fill the vacuum are groups like the Mafia (not to
mention foreign governments). Of course, this is more of an argument
against anarchies as opposed to Libertarias.

	Wayne