What to tell your libertarian friends

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• What is libertarianism
  
• Tax cuts in the US only led to higher inequality, not higher investment or higher economic growth
  
• Libertarianism doesn't recognize market failures
  
• Externalities pollution
  
• Positive externalities: fundamental R&D
  
• Drugs: opioid epidemic
  
• Healthcare Looking for a unicorn (free market healthcare)
  
• For profit education
  
• Financial crisis
  
• It leads to predatory capitalism
  
• It fails to distinguish between business friendly and market friendly policies
  
• The parasite economy article
  
• Resolving to individual solutions that only the wealthy can afford, the article about private generators
  

[stpioc]

The free market type libertarians often have no eye for this:

In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It), Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, explores how the discipline of work has itself become a form of tyranny, documenting the expansive power that firms now wield over their employees in everything from how they dress to what they tweet. 

Anderson’s most provocative argument is that large companies, the institutions that employ most workers, amount to a de facto form of government, exerting massive and intrusive power in our daily lives. Unlike the state, these private governments are able to wield power with little oversight, because the executives and boards of directors that rule them are accountable to no one but themselves.

Although they exercise their power to varying degrees and through both direct and “soft” means, employers can dictate how we dress and style our hair, when we eat, when (and if) we may use the toilet, with whom we may partner and under what arrangements. Employers may subject our bodies to drug tests; monitor our speech both on and off the job; require us to answer questionnaires about our exercise habits, off-hours alcohol consumption, and childbearing intentions; and rifle through our belongings.

If the state held such sweeping powers, Anderson argues, we would probably not consider ourselves free men and women. Employees, meanwhile, have few ways to fight back.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. As corporations have worked methodically to amass sweeping powers over their employees, they have held aloft the beguiling principle of individual freedom, claiming that only unregulated markets can guarantee personal liberty. Instead, operating under relatively few regulations themselves, these companies have succeeded at imposing all manner of regulation on their employees. That is to say, they use the language of individual liberty to claim that corporations require freedom to treat workers as they like.

The United States of Work | New Republic

[Admin]

And don't forget this..

When Google bought the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google founder Sergey Brin said that privacy would be the company’s “number one priority when we contemplate new kinds of advertising products.” And, for nearly a decade, Google did in fact keep DoubleClick’s massive database of web-browsing records separate by default from the names and other personally identifiable information Google has collected from Gmail and its other login accounts.

But this summer, Google quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand – literally crossing out the lines in its privacy policy that promised to keep the two pots of data separate by default. In its place, Google substituted new language that says browsing habits “may be” combined with what the company learns from the use Gmail and other tools. The change is enabled by default for new Google accounts. Existing users were prompted to opt-in to the change this summer. 

The practical result of the change is that the DoubleClick ads that follow people around on the web may now be customized to them based on your name and other information Google knows about you. It also means that Google could now, if it wished to, build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct.

Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking - ProPublica

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Free market works nice in economics101 textbooks, under a phone book of preconditions that are never met in reality. 

Libertarians argue that this might be so, but government simply waste resources as there is no competition to keep wasteful behavior and practices in check. 

Yes, however, there is a good deal of waste in the private sector as well. For starters, big corporations also work much like big bureaucracies, creating their own waste. 

The less competitive and transparent markets are, the more the scope for wasteful behavior becomes. In US healthcare, there is massive price gouging by companies, massive overhead cost and waste, rent-seeking behavior etc. Compare that for instance to this:

If we are to be truly fiscally conservative, then single payer would be the only option that would be discussed. Medicare has a 3 to 5 percent overhead. There are no multi-million dollar executive salaries. There are no stockholders.  There is minimal money spent on advertising and certainly none spent on lobbying. A simple glance at costs over the last few decades show very little rise in physician salaries but a giant leap in administrative overhead. Physicians have been overburdened with unfunded mandates and reporting and meaningless administrative hassles that take up the majority of our time and the joy out of medicine.

Why are fiscal conservatives opposed to single-payer healthcare? | TheHill

[Admin]

Tell them it's not ok people die because they can't afford insulin. Apparently that's not self-evident..

Insulin is a life-saving drug for diabetics. Since 2002, the price has more than tripled and some diabetics can’t afford it. People have died rationing their doses, and some are turning to other countries to buy it at a cheaper price.

Open Insulin is making insulin in a lab to prove it can be cheaper

[Admin]

The neo-liberal revolution started at the end of the 1970s, and from there on

• The rich increasingly appropriated the spoils of economic growth, profits and stock prices soured
  
• Median wages stagnated and are further under pressure as a result of spiraling healthcare and education cost
  
• Economic growth declined
  
• Economic insecurity and anxiety increased as labor was attacked from all sides, unions, collective bargaining rights, minimum wages all under attack through legislative efforts, out-sourcing and relocation of business
  
• Happiness declined
  
• The US became less and less meritocratic
  
• Economic concentration and power increased
  
• Life expectancy actually declined the last couple of years, unique in the Western world
  
• Deregulation led to unopposed corporate power producing disasters in the healthcare sector (with spiraling medical cost, medical bankruptcies, avoidable debts and the opioid crisis), financial instability and crisis as the main consequences.
  

[Admin]

Daniel O’Day, the chairman and CEO of Gilead, was grilled by Democratic lawmakers on Thursday. Although Gilead is the leading US manufacturer of HIV drugs, only about 18% of the 1.1 million people in the U.S. at risk for HIV infections are currently taking its prevention drug Truvada. Democrats contended that that means preventable infections are occurring every day because of Gilead’s business model. Gilead charged $800 a month for Truvada when it was introduced in 2004. It now costs nearly $2000 a month and has earned Gilead about $36 billion since it was approved in 2004. “How can Gilead do this?” Oversight Committee chair Elijah Cummings, D-Md., asked O’Day. “This treatment was developed as a result of investment made by the American taxpayers.” Cummings then answered his own question, saying that “the problem is that Gilead, the company that now sells the drug, charges astronomical prices.”

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) originally filed a patent application for Truvada in 2006, after it discovered the drug’s ability to prevent HIV infection in a federal primate lab in Atlanta. “How can our system allow a company to take a drug treatment that was developed with taxpayer funds and abuse its monopoly to charge such astronomical prices?” Cummings pressed O’Day. Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., also piled on O’Day. “You’re the CEO of Gilead. Is it true that Gilead made $3 billion in profits from Truvada in 2018?” she asked. “The current list price is $2,000 a month in the United States, correct?” she continued. “Why is it $8 in Australia?” “There’s no reason this should be $2,000 a month,” Ocasio-Cortez insisted. “People are dying because of it and there’s no enforceable reason for it.”

Ocasio-Cortez bathes in Republican tears: GOP congressman triggered by attack on Big Pharma – Alternet.org

This is how US capitalism works:

• The drug was developed with public money but Gilead now has the patent which it uses to astronomically hike prices and (tens of billions in) profits
  
• As a result most people at risk can't afford the drug, which is putting them at danger.
  
• Executives are making a killing, so do shareholders, at the expense of vulnerable people
  

[Admin]

Noooo?! Public policy regenerating a deprict town center, that can't be, right?

Just over a decade ago, Mulhouse, a town of 110,000 people near the German and Swiss borders, was a symbol of the death of the European high street. One of the poorest towns of its size in France, this former hub of the textile industry had long ago been clobbered by factory closures and industrial decline. It had high rates of poverty and youth unemployment, a shrinking population, and more than 100 shops empty or boarded up. The centre had become associated with gangs... 

Today, Mulhouse is known for the staggering transformation of its thriving centre, bucking the national trend for high street closures. In the past eight years, more than 470 shops and businesses have opened here. Mulhouse is unique in that 75% of new openings are independents, from comic book stores to microbreweries and organic grocers. It is one of the only places in France with as many independents as franchises. And it is one of very few places in France where more shops are opening than closing...

Mulhouse has shown it takes at least a decade to turn things around. The town, under its former rightwing mayor Jean Rottner, decided boarded up shops were just the most visible symptom of deeper rooted problems. The city’s €36m (£31.5m) investment plan over six years tackled several issues at once, including housing. Town centre residents were among the poorest as higher earners moved to houses on the outskirts, leaving properties vacant and run down. The idea was to create somewhere where people feel good, to re-appropriate our town centre as a kind of agora, the place where everyone can meet Mulhouse set out to rebalance the housing mix. 

Generous subsidies for the renovation of building fronts expedited a facelift of more than 170 buildings. Security and community policing were stepped up. Transport was key – with a new tram system, bike schemes, shuttle buses and cheap parking. But making the town’s public spaces attractive was just as important, with wider pavements, dozens of benches, and what officials deemed a “colossal budget” for tree planting and maintenance, gardening and green space. Local associations, community groups and residents’ committees were crucial to the efforts. A town centre manager was appointed to support independents and high-street franchises setting up.

From bleak to bustling: how one French town solved its high street crisis | Cities | The Guardian

[Admin]

And Mulouse isn't a weird exception, public policy regenerated Medellín as well

[Admin]

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is planning to change how it calculates the health risks of air pollution resulting in far fewer predicted deaths from pollution, The New York Times reported Monday. The shift will reportedly make it easier to roll back the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan. The EPA's had initially calculated that repealing and replacing the climate policy would have resulted in an additional 1,400 premature deaths per year. The new analytical model would significantly reduce that number, making it easier for the Trump administration to defend further rollbacks, according to the Times.

EPA to implement change reducing number of predicted deaths from air pollution: report | TheHill

Hey, just fiddle the numbers a bit in the name of deregulation and free markets and forget about the real consequences, right?