Let’s be clear we don’t know exactly what would happen, but we can predict based on what happens in plutocracies generally. What we do know is that Libertarians tend to equate wealth with virtue and poverty with laziness and vice. They also refuse to admit that wealth is a source of power, and that people should be allowed to constrain that power. Consequently we can assume that the general trend would not be good.
Poor people could get employment that was radically unsafe and harmed them because nobody could make employers think this was a bad idea, and there are always more poor workers to use up. This is what happens in unregulated industries.
Workers would have to obey bosses totally or starve, because bosses like power with their wealth – and bosses club together while making unions illegal.
They could buy food that poisoned them because there would be no restrictions on selling it, and no requirements to list ingredients, and food business would love this, and agitate for it all the time.
Farm subsidies would be eliminated putting small farmers out of work, and allowing their farms to be taken over by ‘big agriculture’ and possibly increasing the price of food. One of the main drives of capitalism has been to displace people from self-sufficiency and offer them the choice of wage labour or poverty – or both – as this increases the power of wealth.
Poor areas would get even more pollution than they do now, because wealthy people could dump it all on them, and there would be no recourse.
Poorer people would be continually hassled by privatised police forces that worked solely to impose the whims of those who could afford them – and there is no recourse again.
Police could kill poor suspects with even more ease as there would be no regulations to stop them, and relatives probably would not have enough money to hire a rival police to fight it out.
Probably everyone who could afford police and law could kill anyone who was poor. It might even become a sport.
Random people would probably be sent to prison as private prisons would make money from them without restriction, and they could pay the private police forces to collect workers for them.
Education would not be free or cheap as restrictions on education helps maintain class lines. If you are poor give up all hope of education for your kids. Or you could be taught at charity schools about being respectful to business and knowing your place when a rich person passes by.
Science counts for nothing, unless it increases wealth, so there may be free range on ‘consensual’ human experimentation – on paid victims with commercial in confidence clauses and penalization for speaking out.
Only knowledge that supports the ruling elite, or which sells advertising, would be widely available to poor people, so the poor would have little understanding of what was causing their problems. Informing them about reality would make you a class traitor, and you might disappear.
There would be nothing like the GI bill, so no reward when you go to war to protect markets and cheap labor.
People would say the poor are always with us, and that attempts to do anything to improve people’s opportunities would corrupt them.
Charity would be about forcing people to give respect to donors, because its not like you deserve support – your inferiority is shown by you needing it, and you have to encourage donors by boosting them.
Poor people in ill health, or orphans, might be locked up in institutions to force them to work, for someone’s profit – this how charity used to work.
As class/wealth lines would intensify, there would be less mass production, because there is no point in trying to sell stuff to people who can’t afford it. Money would be better made selling one-off vanity products to the rich.
Libertarianism is not anarchism, never forget that.
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Adendum
In late 2021, in response to this post, someone asked me why I would assume there would be no rules about what can be sold, and protecting people against harmful or bad work environments in libertarian society, They also pointed out that forms of what I was pointing to already exist, and that other societies, such as communist societies are very bad.
My response is:
In my experience, libertarianism is most often presented as an anarchist, or small State theory. However, it does not seem to function that way in practice – which is why I say it is not anarchist.
Let us be clear, if by anarchist, you mean a ‘stateless society’ then that is how humans have lived for most of human existence, so anarchism is quite possible. However, capitalism has never existed without a State or without making a State – so anarchist capitalism does not seem possible
Libertarianism, like neoliberalism, seems to favour quite a strong state which supports the wealth elites and puts them first, because, the nature of capitalism is that who can pay the most usually wins. This could be considered the secret doctrine of capitalism. Certainly there is no level playing field, as some people have massively more wealth than most of us put together.
There are all kinds of rules in the current free market state, but being made by the wealth elites, or their bought representatives (as these are the only people with access to the State or the law), these rules are unlikely to favour (or protect) ordinary people and much more likely to favour retaining the power of wealth. They are also likely to try and structure the market to benefit the existing victors. You can see a little of this in the way ‘big tech’ companies receive criticisms which could apply equally to established companies, but are not applied.
The more wealth is allowed to gain control, then the worse this situation is likely to get. Hence my stretching of what is happening now.
I agree that other systems can also be bad, there is no reason not to agree.
I also agree that everything I talk about is already a problem, but we have had 40 years of endless free market talk, and so this is likely to be a problem of capitalism, and a problem of government to the extent that capitalists own and control the government in this reality as much as they would, perhaps less than they would, in the Libertarian reality. They make the huge governments that are the problem, but they also like smaller governments which cannot stand up to their superior wealth and power.
Small farms are dying precisely because of the capitalist state and the power of the capitalist market. Owners of small farms are not leaving for fun, but because they have to.
Neither of us would accept it if a communist told us that according to Marxist theory the State would wither away so we just had to have faith while it got stronger and more authoritarian. So I equally refuse to accept that free market theories produce small states and community self-governance, when they certainly do not appear to.
Capitalism appears to almost always produce plutocracy, and capitalism does not seem to favour anarchy or community as anything other than misdirections or misplaced nostalgia for what it has destroyed, but pretends it can bring back.
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