The dumbest objections against statelessness #4

"Monopolies would take over!"

Feb 26, 2025

The circular reasoning fallacy of the state apologist could not be more evident than in the unfounded presumption that monopolies would take over without government.

Really? Such people live their lives believing that government’s job is to prevent and break monopolies, while also witnessing monopolies and wealth disparities increase as government interferes more with corrupt regulations and economic intervention. I wonder how they survive in the world.

“Monopolies would be even worse without government!”

This ad hoc fallacy is used whenever we point out government hypocrisies, whenever we demonstrate that government doesn’t do what it justifies its existence on doing. Government is supposed to tackle crime, yet crime seems to correlate with government overreach. Government is supposed to break monopolies, yet the more totalitarian a government, the greater the monopolies. Government is supposed to redistribute wealth as a good socialist state would, yet wealth gaps seem to widen, and filthy-rich multibillionaires seem to spring into existence out of nothing.

Why is that?

Statist apologists will say that government is doing all it can, out of the kindness of the hearts of its unaccountable corruptible politicians. If some instances of evil still remain, it’s something we must accept, because statelessness would have been worse. This is nonsense, for the following reasons:

First off, it is the statist apologist’s burden to prove that the state (government) is better than statelessness, since statelessness is the default state of being (no pun intended). Until we get a scientific methodology, complete with control groups and flawless sampling methods, we can’t make such an assertion. The unprovable claim that “it would have been better without government” is unfounded and without evidence, so it can be dismissed without evidence; even though we have evidence to disprove the need for the state.

Second, there are no excuses for government ineffectiveness. Government has absolute power of perceived superstitious “authority,” and therefore, it could truly break all monopolies if it wanted to. It could truly improve healthcare for all, and it could truly curb crime totally, at least all of organized crime. The monopoly of state violence is enough to brutally vanish all evils it pretends to stand against. The fact that all these evils are not only allowed but deliberately exacerbated by government shows that the state is not interested in curbing crime or economic disparity; quite the contrary.

“How are evils exacerbated by government?” I hear you ask…

Monopolies are created by government’s corrupt politicians who are lobbied (bribed) to regulate favorably for their donors. Besides, the fact that a centralized apparatus of monopolized power exists means that it is available for hire to the highest bidder. This is why we have monopolies and oligopolies: the apparatus of government becomes a tool for hire to the highest bidder, and then used against the majority of people who lost the bid.
Organized crime emerges naturally as a result of government’s needless prohibitions, such as alcohol, drugs, prostitution, guns, etc. If these things are used by consenting adults, then they are victimless, and so their prohibition becomes immoral, inefficient, and uncivilized; not to mention that prohibition goes against the will of the people. The alcohol prohibition era in the US taught us all we needed to know about how prohibitions of victimless activities breed, incentivize, and grow organized crime. I won’t expand here as to why. Advanced people should already be able to see it by now.
Healthcare, just like any service, becomes inefficient and ineffective when in the hands of an unopposed and unmotivated monopoly (the government). The reason is incentive. I shouldn’t have to explain any more on this. But imagine how bad you’d be at your job if you knew you could never be fired, reprimanded, or penalized in any way for poor performance.

Therefore, you can’t just arbitrarily say “X would have been worse without government” without first proving your wild assertion. Second, you must consider the true causation behind X problem that government fails so miserably to solve, even though this is the one job government allegedly has.

“Corporatism would take over!”

So, you admit that government doesn’t work in preventing monopolies, since we do have corporatism today under increasingly interventionist government. If anything, government exacerbates corporatism through lobbying and favorable regulations that favor the ultra-big by crushing their competition. The government apparatus creates opportunities for corruption that would not exist otherwise.

My proposal for statelessness doesn’t guarantee anything (unlike government) but it’s more likely to not have monopolies due to free relentless competition. Competition is all the regulating force we need. Competition is what makes self-regulation and self-governance possible. Competition is what makes huge corporations bend to the will of Twitter mobs, eBay reviews, Google testimonials, and Uber stars. Competition is what makes Amazon reviews so powerful as to make huge companies kowtow to the demands of perpetually unsatisfied customers. Competition is what makes social listening and reputation management a powerful feedback tool for the biggest businesses to consider what their customers want. And this requires no government intervention at all. If anything, government intervention only makes things worse.

Competition is what incentivizes you to be a better person to the people around you. If you were people’s only choice, then you’d probably be tempted to exploit them, or treat them less than you would had you feared their alternatives; your competition. You’d definitely not feel the need to be good to them, that’s for sure.

People who don’t understand how competition works have never run a business, or have never tried to compete in a competitive labor market. They are likely welfare abusers, useless parasitical academics with an entitlement to eternal funding (even worse than welfare abusers), or government employee parasites with a sure-thing job, with no incentive nor motivation to offer any value to anyone.

Beware of people who are not humble enough to acknowledge their competition. They will never try to improve themselves, nor their value offering to others around them.

“Who will control corporations from getting too powerful?”

This is the most self-defeating argument in the history of arguments. The person who makes it assumes that he has control over government just because he is allowed to choose between two identical generic candidates every few years - candidates who are always unaccountable no less, whether they break campaign promises, or plunge their plebs into war, poverty, corruption, medical tyranny, and all sorts of state abuses.

This state apologist imagines he has the power to influence an unopposed, unaccountable, and absolute monopoly of power. Yet he is blind to his power to influence private businesses that are in direct competition with each other, and thus value the opinions of their customers more than any government would value useless votes that go to generic demagogues rather than actual policies.

Even today, in the minimal free market we have left, oligopolistic corporations still value public opinion enough to give you refunds, product recalls, discounts, and offers. They waste immense resources on social listening and market research to figure out whether their customers are happy. This is not because they are benevolent: no one is benevolent. But take away people’s incentives to be good - via violently enforced monopolies such as government - and you guarantee that they will be evil.

If you believe that your opinion matters to a monopolistic government, then your opinion - under the same mechanism - would have immensely more influence in a free market of numerous competitors trying to outcompete each other through improved customer care, quality, and price.

The only safeguard we need in a free market is competition: having alternative options and being free to vote with our money every single day is much more powerful than the illusion of influence via ballot voting.

The virtue of competition

Competition keeps everyone in check because it forces you to be humble.

Competition works as long as we (as a whole) don’t willingly relinquish our liberties to monopolize policing, money supply, and lawmaking; artificial scarcity creates monopolies, and therefore, kills competition.

Policing, money supply, and lawmaking are all risk-mitigation services that can easily be provided by a free market, cheaper and better. The only thing required is that people who want a service (policing, money supply, and lawmaking) want it enough to put their money where their mouth is, to have skin in the game. If you vote every time you spend, this is infinitely more effective, direct, and meaningful than ineffective and unfair ballot voting.

With ballot voting, people who don’t have skin in the game get to vote for people who do.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, controlling government. Your vote means nothing to it. You vote for people, not policies, which is archaic and barbaric. Even if the majority wanted one vague candidate over another, he becomes corrupted or compromised, or the election is rigged, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Protest all you want: the monopoly of violence of “just doin’ my job” brutalizers will put you in your place.

Free markets kill monopolies

Government pretends to want to solve monopolies when it actually is the sole reason monopolies exist.

Without any coercive, centralized government interfering in a free-market economy, it would be highly unlikely for a monopoly to emerge, let alone be sustainable.

Why?

Because relentless competition means there’s an equal playing field without the opportunity for a big business to buy out and hijack government regulatory violence to its advantage, thus crushing its competitors at the expense of the consumers.

Besides, for every business approximating monopolistic behavior, free-market competition comes in to create new demand for new fairer competitors, since there are no government-imposed barriers of entry (corrupt regulation, licensing, compliance, etc).

Self-regulating forces of competition are the only regulation we need.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your time. All my work here is free.

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