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Comment by int_19h | Hacker News Reader

The usual claim in right libertarian circles is that monopolies only arise because they can bribe the government into passing laws that enable them to exist.

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The usual claim in right-libertarian circles is that it is only possible for monopolies to arise through government action (bribery is sometimes a means to encourage that action, but its not always intentional or that kind of specific corruption, but it is, in most libertarian explanations, always government action.)

And for this purpose, “government action” excludes protection of what the libertarian in question thinks of as proper property rights, which almost dogmatically have no adverse consequences.

There exists already anti-trust laws to deal with monopolies.

Why does there need to be another new law that, instead of punishing the monopolistic companies, gives them the right to maintain their monopolies as long as they promise not to discriminate on filtering their traffic?

Why can't the government pursue these literal monopolies using the DOJ with existing laws?

Or everyone is happy with the monopoly.

Yep, the Peter Thiel school of thought. But people like that tend to not stay libertarian in any meaningful sense for long; to quote Thiel himself, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible". That's how you get neo-reactionaries, basically.

You only get neo-reactionaries out of people that define their freedom as including their abilities to coerce others, and then get frustrated that said "freedom" is being impinged. They think they're morally right because they've defined away the coercion.

Personally, around the time the whole Unqualified Reservations / NRx thing was starting up, I considered myself a libertarian with more rightist sympathies. Reading UR and its classification of left versus right is actually what pushed me back into seeing that my philosophy is more aligned with the left. Axiomatic framing and fundamentalism simply doesn't work (cf Gödel). Systems need to be judged on their effective results regardless of their implementations' terminology.

The problem with right libertarianism, IMO, is that private property rights (as opposed to personal property / "right to that which you're using") broadly necessitate coercion. The notion of abstract ownership of, say, a piece of land that you have never even visited in your life and that you do not currently occupy - which is necessary to e.g. lease it to someone for actually to live on it or otherwise do something useful with it, and then collect rent from them for that use - requires coercive force to prevent people from just using it without paying said rent to you. This is also why any realistic model of a right libertarian society requires government large enough to provide this coercion as a service.

How exactly do you define a piece of land being occupied in your argument? Your example is obviously clear cut. But what about the 'extra' area of a residential lot not actually holding a house or otherwise used for much? Or unused rooms of a house, for that matter?

Doesn't that still require your definition of coercion to prevent my neighbor from using it for what he wants? Or to prevent a new party moving in and setting up their own shelter there?

To me, the right libertarian conception of property rights is not the problem per se. It's when that is taken as an axiomatic framework and claimed to justify all the emergent behavior that happens on top of it.

Or the flip side, local ISPs that a government can't block.

Monopoly ISP in your region the Government can't stop? Fine, start your own, The monopoly can't stop it either by lobbying.

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