President Vito

[nyuanshin]

Libertarians like to compare the state to the mafia, but this is unfortunately not accurate: if it were, we'd be a lot better off. Everything the state does wrong stems from its trying to be benevolent. The mafia isn't benevolent -- helpful if you have certain kinds of problems, but not benevolent. The state is very good at breaking things, or

Comments

[airstrip]

Actually, I'd like to point out that one of our failures in society is that a lot of entities are destructive because of the people who run them but we lack an ability to actually take a bat to those people. For example, the CEOs of the automakers arguably should face hefty personal liabilities but we can't, by law, do so without making them agree to it first.

[nyuanshin]

I've actually never understood why it isn't standard for the CEO's contract to include clearly delineated personal liabilities for mismanagement: why would anyone want them to not be heavily invested in the company's success?

[nyuanshin]

(Or, perhaps better, why their pay isn't directly tied to company profits.)

[soulchanger]

Lots of management and CEOs are offered things like stock options, but the theory is that supervision by a board of directors provides a better incentive scheme than simple profit-sharing. Perhaps the board has interests that are not related directly to the profits of the company during a particular CEO's tenure.

[airstrip]

Bad pun: we can call the kneecapping "the president's 'Vito authority'".

[nyuanshin]

You think I didn't have that in mind when I chose the title? XD

[tinymammoth]

Moldbug explores this theme in more detail:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/magic-of-symmetric-sovereignty.html

[nyuanshin]

Moldbug is a gasbag who never uses one sentence when a score will do. Which is a shame because he'd be really interesting if only he could fix that personality defect.

[tinymammoth]

I agree. Maybe he'll influence someone else who can actually write coherently.

[nyuanshin]

I don't know if you were paying attention to the blag-o-spheer back when Steven den Beste was in his heyday, but I knew someone who used to artfully condense the guy's epic posts down to a few sentences on his own blog. If someone came up with a comparable "Moldbug Digest" ("reading and compressing him so you don't have to") I might actually bother to read it.

[queueball]

In my experience, when libertarians compare the state to the mafia, they do so as you have done -- the mafia come out looking good. I can only think of one specific example, a short piece by one of our editors a few months ago, but I've a feeling I read something by David Friedman along the same lines.

[nyuanshin]

It's true, it's true -- I sometimes use the hypothetical "Libertarian" as my whipping boy for rhetorical purposes, in somewhat the same spirit that hardcore Marxists would rag on democratic socialists. I spent enough time in the trenches of the LJ libertarian community and various libertosphere blogs years ago to know that I could find and justify any stereotype by cherry picking, but it's still admittedly dirty. My only defense is that I do it to confuse the hell out of people who think they disagree with libertarians