whakahekeheke

re: posthumanism

1. Well the only other organization that produces an index of economic freedom is Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal (which I doubt you’ll like much better), and that has a very high correlation with the WB/FI one. However, the World Bank/Fraser Institute index is widely cited, in the peer-reviewed economic literature, by aid organizations and by governments. Both their methodology and raw data are public, and I personally know (and trust) a number of economists who work on the report. There is also the International Property Rights Index, which is produced by a number of NGOs and aid advocacy groups, as well as the Freedom in the World Index, created by Freedom House and funded by the US government. These all have high correlations with the WB/FI economic freedom index.

2. I don’t think that local action and voluntary organization and charity could likely “entirely bear the burden” right now, because they have been empirically crowded out by government monopolization and cartelization. That’s why don’t want to just ‘abolish child welfare and all health coverage’ or something but rather transitionally decentralize it and allow in transition those organizations to emerge of the kind that spontaneously existed before the state destroyed them.

We do have modern examples of things emerging resembling those organizations - consumer-governed, nonprofit healthcare co-ops such as the Group Health Cooperative based in Seattle which covers ~600,000 people and HealthPartners based in Indiana that covers ~1.2 million people. The efficiency difference between these co-ops and government Medicare/Medicaid is enormous, despite the numerous restrictions put on them by the state.

And again I’d just point out that increasing prosperity and economic growth make these problems much smaller.

3a. You can certainly apply the same thing to corporatism (ie. “crony capitalism”), but that’s because corporatism is by definition corporate collusion with the state. As the exemplar of corporatism Mussolini stated: “Corporatism… is the merger of corporate and government power.” And if you look at literally any destructive monopoly or oligopoly in economic history, it inevitably colluded with or was subsidized by the government. That’s why we have the modern insurance industry cartel, the modern military industrial complex, the modern auto industry oligopolies, the modern media oligopolies, the modern oil industry, etc - it’s all demonstrably the result of corporate-state collusion and would be impossible without the state side.

3b. I haven’t heard any argument that logically presents a case for the state from first principles, that challenges the notion of voluntarism being better than statism. All systems have perceivable imperfections.

The difference between the humans who run the state and everyone else is simply the kind of power they have. The popular ideology of “the state” massively decreases the marginal cost of coercion for those who control the state. This increases the total coercion possible in society and gives them an effectively arbitrary monopoly on mass coercive power. They are not subject to competition or maintenance of their disparate power by individual interaction with other human beings. That’s why the incentive structures are important - people without the ideology of “the state” are subject to real-time direct competition and continual voluntary exchange and interaction. Government officials are not. They’re all still human. Corporatism is when nominally private companies collude with or benefit from this coercive power, which is how much of the modern global economy works.

Alright, I’ve got work to do. Thanks for the questions. I’ll try to get to more of them later.