(oh yeah, the classic Napoleonic: canned foods)

Nuclear energy, GPS, Computers, The Internet …

All but space travel are currently privatized and supplied because of profit motives.

The private space industry is coming. Just in time to fill the gap created by the ailing National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Are you going to wait for the Free Market to do it for you, dreamer? These guys will crush their competition, using all the tools of monopoly and collusion their money can buy. Hell, companies had private armies in the old days. Now they have lawyers, lobbyists and propagandists. They used force against the Indians, and their workers and each other, and overseas they used it against the wogs and fuzzy wuzzies and the entrepreneurs from France and Holland and Spain they competed against. The law was an instrument to keep the poor controlled and to help enforce lawsits and contracts for their benefit. They invented the “Free Market”, they tamed it and controlled it for their benefit, do they think they cared about what you or Ayn Rand think? Do you think they could even understand it?

It is true, even big companies sometimes go broke because they can’t compete with others; Eastman Kodak comes to mind. But there is no mechanism to guarantee this will happen, any more than there is a guarantee an evil government will be voted out or toppled by insurrection. It is the nature of economic and political power that it gives you the resources to resist natural economic or political corrective forces. It is an innoculation against justice. It’s why people want power and money in the first place.

Nobody was a Libertarian in the last third of the 19th century. In fact, no one then would have known what a “Libertarian” was. Ayn Rand would have been a dangerous anarchist to them, and so would you. They were doing what businessmen did, and always had done since the days of the East India Company or the Dutch Republic or the Roman Grain Factors.

This is the point I’ve tried to make, people with economic power do not care about Libertarian Principles, in fact, to the Robber Barons, it would have looked like something out of the French Revolution. “I am a gentleman of property and this wild-eyed fanatic wants to shut me down because he doesn’t like my perfectly legitimate and traditional way of doing business. Who does he think he is?”

Your Libertarian principles are going to have to be advertised, legislated, codified, challenged democratically and legally, thoroughly litigated, and probably changed by that process beyond your recognition. And your ideas will be opposed by men with money, power, friends in high places and a retainer at Pinkerton’s. It will be a never-ending process, which is exactly what history is all about. That’s why the business environment is different now than it was a century ago, and that environment was different from a century before that.

You talk about post-colonial America as your model, but we were a primitive frontier, one of the few places in the world where common people could own their own land, because there was so much of it and so few of us, and the Indians were conveniently driven off. The only other places like it in the world were in South Africa and Australia. It wasn’t economic freedom that built those economies, it was horses, iron and gunpowder.

In Europe, and here a half-century later, a form of capitalism had already taken root that was challenging the landed aristocracies (it manifested itself here as a Civil War, the Industrial and Commercial North against the Agricultural and Feudal South). As Conservatives love to point out, the Civil War wasn’t just about slavery, it was a competition betyween different kinds of capitalist organization, each which considered itself the only true source of liberty and freedom.

And just what was living in Colonial America really like for the bulk of the people? You know the winners write the histories. I have a feeling it was no libertarian utopia. One third of the free, white, property-owning males preferred the Crown, one third preferred independence, and one third were opportunists who didn’t care, they just wanted to be left alone and to play both ends against the middle.

Your calls to “reduce the power of the state” are just words, you don’t go to a guy with power and tell him to reduce. He’ll rip your head off. And you don’t short-circuit that power by getting rid of the rules. If you abolish the Empire you get feudalism, it has happened over and over again throughout history. You have to do it with laws and votes and legislatures and courts and it will be fought and opposed tooth and nail every step of the way. Economic rights are like political rights, they are not god-granted, or even obvious to everyone, they are fought for, in the street and on the battlefield, in the universities and the pulpits, and later in the courts and legislatures and at the ballot box. The real capitalist is not opposed to the government, or even in cahoots with it, he owns the government. He’s going to laugh in your face and have you arrested.

Your ideas are just not workable, any more than the ideas of the Fabian Socialists and 19th century anarchists were workable. Socialism could only be fully implemnented through force, and I suspect it will be the same for your brand of “freedom”. Although your ideas may some day contribute to the politico-economic organization of the future, it won’t turn out the way you expect. The past is barely remembered and the future is unpredictable, and even if you get exactly what you want now in politics, in a generation it may turn out very different as everyone scrambles to carve up the new pie.

Your revolution will be just like all the others, you will start by dismantling all the institutions you don’t like, setting up your own, and crushing everyone who gets in your way. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Setting percentages and quotas does the same thing as wars, artificially drives needs exempt from profit.

Your libertarian ideas are demonstrated to be completely phony every day, in big and small ways. The hedge fund insider trading is a huge blow to libertarian nonsense, WorldCom, Enron, the pharmaceutical companies.

If one has the ability to see and think one can rid themselves of the simplistic notions of adolescence.

A very big “if”.

It wasn’t hard for White to tell which railroads fell into which category.

One problem nowadays is that there’s a fuzzy line between companies that are using state power to get ahead (receiving special favors or tax breaks, or creating legislation to wreck their competition or give themselves a monopoly), and companies that have people in Washington out of self-defense, to protect themselves against the other sort. Staying above the fray entirely is getting very difficult. Microsoft’s political activity was almost nonexistent until the government attempted to destroy them. Not any more. I don’t consider that progress.

The solution is what it’s always been: Reduce the power of the government to influence the economy.

As for the crooks not being able to compete, White makes it obvious that without special government favors the transcontinentals wouldn’t have made it. The companies running profitable railroads where a real need came up would have.

When there was need for a transcontinental link, cooperation and organization between companies would have created one. Few people realize that most of the vast and complex electrical power grid in this country was privately developed in a similar way.

Freedom isn’t about efficiency, if what you mean by “efficiency” is minimum complexity and maximum linearity. If there were only one brand of everything in a store, it would certainly be a lot more efficient than dozens of versions of the same basic product.

Free markets are not “easier” than top-down totalitarianism. Nor are the principles self-evident by any means. Good Lord, nobody knows that better than me, who has tried to explain them for years. But the graph of market freedom and standards of living is practically a straight line across many nations. This is at least compelling empirical evidence. You don’t need to be a chemist to know that aspirin works.

The point is, how do you distinguish between “businessmen who made their own way and businessmen who thrived on government power and favors”? Do you ask them? Do you send out inspectors? Is there any way to do it constitutionally? Will the bad guys simply disappear if you do away with government altogether?

And if you do manage to successfully distinguish between them, how do you encourage the genuine ones and discourage the others? By regulation and law? With lawyers, guns and money?

They all claim to be legitimate entrepreneurs. These are not frivolous objections. These are valid questions. After all, if Libertarian priciples were self-evident to all, and naturally superior in practice, then they would arise and spread naturally because they would be intrinsically more efficient. They would crowd out the Crony Capitalists.

Wouldn’t the crooks not be able to compete with the true capitalists, and the free market then quickly weed them out? That’s not what Theodore Roosevelt concluded, in fact, he found just the opposite. Real businessmen could not compete with the Robber Barons and the Trusts.

True economic justice may take different forms to different people. But I think we can all agree it does not emerge spontaneously from the chaos of commerce and industry. Left to itself, you will get an economy presided over by what are essentially criminal gangs. Sort of what you have now in Russia and China, and which I believe is now evolving here.

I don’t point to the transcontinental railroads as a pinnacle of government-funded achievement. Obama does.

“In a little more than two decades, three transcontinental railroads were built with government help. All three wound up in bankruptcy courts. And thus, when James Jerome Hill said he was going to built a line from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound, without government cash or land grant, even his close friends thought him mad. But his Great Northern arrived at Puget Sound without a penny of federal help, nor did it fail. It was an achievement to shame the much-touted construction of the Erie Canal.”

- The Story of American Railroads by Stewart H. Holbrook

Ayn Rand wrote extensively about railroad history back in the late 1950s, based on the research she had done to write Atlas Shrugged. In that book, there was a huge difference between businessmen who made their own way and businessmen who thrived on government power and favors. Through most of the book, the latter were actually much more successful and getting a lot richer than the industrial heroes.

“Most people would see no difference between businessmen such as J. J. Hill of the Great Northern and businessmen such as the Big Four of the Central Pacific. Most people would simply dismiss the difference by saying that businessmen are crooks who will always corrupt the government and that the solution is to let the government be corrupted by labor unions.

“The issue is not between pro-business controls and pro-labor controls, but between controls and freedom. It is not the Big Four against the welfare state, but the Big Four and the welfare state on one side—against J. J. Hill and every honest worker on the other.”

- Ayn Rand, “Notes on the History of American Free Enterprise,” 1959

P.S. Here’s a link to a transcript of the interview you linked to if people don’t want to take the time to listen through it. Richard White, at least what he says here, is right on the money.

Heres’s a perfect example of how something that can’t yield a profit and for which there is no demand can still be sold if you force and bribe people and get the government to subsidize it.

I heard another interview of this writer, who when asked, “Well, didn’t America need a transcontinental railroad system anyway?” He responded, “Yes, but not for another 30 years, and by then it could have financed itself and turned out profitable for everyone involved.”

“It establishes a kind of networking between politics and business that persists to this day. Essentially for me, corruption is quite simple: It’s the trading of public favors for private goods, and that’s what happens repeatedly with the railroads and the federal government.”
…
“What he realizes is that lobbyists themselves have limited ability to gain what they want if they operate only in Washington, D.C. They have to appear to be channeling real public desire for whatever it is they’re advocating. So what Dodge does is go back out and organize publicity campaigns, so he makes it appear that what Union Pacific wants and the Texas Pacific wants is what local people want. But all of this uproar of popular opinion has really been organized by Grenville Dodge. … This is AstroTurf.”

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/11/137497772/how-trains-railroaded-the-american-economy

Listen to the interview with the author, its only about
8 minutes.