There’s limits to property rights even among the most extreme voluntaryist political philosophers. Rothbard, a famous anarchocapitalist, wrote extensively about why property rights don’t extend to slaveowners.
Unlike private households and businesses, public companies only exist due to licenses from the state. These include limitation on liability, protection for many types of property, and much, much more. The protections even extend to securities regulations; since public companies aren’t privately owned, there is a misalignment between incentives of owners and managers. The state sides with the owners by using force on managers to prevent them from acting in their own self interest, and instead to act on behalf of the shareholder public.
The NAP cannot extend to public companies as they are not privately owned and can only exist when granted rights by the state. A lot of work has been done by libertarians on the topic of how monopolies are formed; it’s not due to private markets.
I don’t think I argued that there weren’t limits to property rights. Did I?
> Unlike private households and businesses, public companies only exist due to licenses from the state.
There are a few problems with this. To start, private business and private households also exist due to licensure from the state. The distinction between public and private is a matter of technicality, not categorical difference. The monopoly that the state holds on the initiation of violence applies categorically to your ability to purchase a home and pay taxes, and it applies to large tech companies.
The second problem is that public businesses were as a matter of fact private before they were public. So instead of offering shares to the public on government regulated, public markets that anyone can participate in, they could just be private instead.
Humans can be born without a license, and frequently are. Same with private businesses. Public companies cannot exist without a license. Just because birth, household formation, and private business are heavily regulated in some times and places does not mean they always are. We humans were all stateless tribes once, and some of us still are.
Regarding your second issue, we’re in agreement. Yes it’s true under capitalism that with the heavy regulation of private individuals and firms, everything becomes the public sphere. Your house becomes a public place where your actions are subject to judgement.
> Same with private businesses. Public companies cannot exist without a license.
Being public just means that you are selling shares to anyone on a public market. Those markets don't need a license or regulation of any sort to exist. I'm confused as to why you're trying to draw such a sharp distinction between public and private companies in terms of government regulation. Regulation of a stock market and public companies who participate is no different than regulation of private businesses. You can't really divorce the two in a sensible way within this context.
> We humans were all stateless tribes once, and some of us still are.
A tribe is a form of government (I'm not sure that the usage of state makes a difference here versus government but maybe it does make a difference for you?) and your behavior is regulated within your tribe.
Sometimes I think people confuse individual choice or individualism with how humans exist, but humans are pack animals. Always have been. So we're always within a regulated tribe, democracy, religious cult, or other form of government. Even your example of a human being born without a license seems like an unimportant technical detail that doesn't have a basis in reality, because your license would just be you conforming to the rules of your social group. Being formally issued by some people wearing funny hats in an "office" doesn't make a difference except for the purposes of management and efficiency.
States are parasocial, not social. It might feel like state officials are your friends, the president is like a father, and your representative is like a respected community leader you’ve known your whole life. But those relationships aren’t based in natural social human behavior; they require a media ecosystem. Arguments that humans are social and therefore statist doesn’t hold water.
Public markets cannot exist without regulation, for complex reasons you can read about elsewhere. Private markets can exist without the state and do; whether it’s drug markets or decentralized crypto trading apps. The distinction is important to understand for people working in blockchain especially; people have tried to import ideas from corporate governance with general failure. The most successful daos measured by impact are molochdaos, which are designed to be controlled by a small number of private actors. Publicly owned daos such as dash and makerdao have consistently run into issues related to governance, such as decision capture by private organizations, low voter turnout, poor returns to capital, and more. Even now in the case of MakerDao the main driving force is a single developer, Rune, while the dao mostly acts as a discussion platform for his ideas. His endgame plan even will result in the dao governance from having minimal control over the core protocol. Understanding the difference between public and private would have prevented a lot of mistakes.
How are you defining a public market? Because it seems quite clear to me that a public market can exist without state regulation. The original discussion point was:
> public companies only exist due to licenses from the state.
Which seems pretty clearly false to me unless you are defining a public company as a company in which it "has a license" from the state, but then that falls flat on its face because the vast majority of businesses have to have some licensure of some sort to operate. That could be a restaurant being required to pass food safety inspections, it could be a hotel and requirements to be ADA accessible, or various other "licensures", let alone the actual business licenses needed to be filed either at the state of federal level in order to operate.
To bring this back into focus, being irate at "big public tech companies" because they "have a special license from the state" as was implied is quite silly.
> States are parasocial, not social. It might feel like state officials are your friends, the president is like a father, and your representative is like a respected community leader you’ve known your whole life. But those relationships aren’t based in natural social human behavior; they require a media ecosystem. Arguments that humans are social and therefore statist doesn’t hold water.
I think there is merit in arguing that states work because of a shared fiction, in which a media ecosystem is, while not necessary, certainly of great benefit, but I think the key point here is one of scale, not form.
I don't draw a sharp distinction between a 25 person democracy and a 25 person tribe or community. Whether that should change as you scale to 25,000,000 people is a more interesting discussion I think.
Public markets are equity markets that any member of the public can participate in. They cannot exist without regulation due to the owner/agent problem. It’s not just a theoretical problem; daos that have tried to have public markets only regulated by code have run into the same issues. Private markets can exist without regulation since private assets are held by individuals or small groups that are able to coordinate effectively.
It is reasonable to be upset at the use of force by the state to protect big tech companies that are using this protection to violate human rights. We might like the idea that the system functions differently, and perhaps some powerful individuals could institute temporary reforms, but as long as a monopoly of force exists it will be abused due to incentives.
There’s a huge difference between a 25 person “democracy” and a 25m person democracy. Firstly in common modern parlance democracy means a set of institutions with a distributed power base. That’s why Germany is democratic and China is not, even though both appeal to the “will of the people” and both have elections. Obviously a 25 person group will not have these institutions and cannot be democratic. Second the small group is based on fundamental human social relationships, while the second one is necessarily parasocial. You can personally know everyone in a 25 person group; you cannot for a 25m one.
> Public markets are equity markets that any member of the public can participate in.
Yes!
> They cannot exist without regulation
No! In fact, early crypto exchanges are examples of unregulated public markets. But we also know that this is incorrect because you can just imagine a world where the government doesn’t regulate these markets. The owner/agent problem you are describing can be solved without the use of government - you just find a different third party.
> It is reasonable to be upset at the use of force by the state to protect big tech companies
Sure but the criticism wasn’t “the State should stop big tech companies from doing bad things” it was:
* The big tech companies are not private; they are public companies that rely on state force to maintain their monopolies. Just as an example, intellectual property laws rely on the state for enforcement.*
Which is nonsense because being “public” and “licensed” isn’t relevant to the protection of the State here.
> China is not, even though both appeal to the “will of the people” and both have elections.
I lost track of what we were really discussing here but China does not hold elections in a way that resembles what we mean by an election. Chinese citizens don’t go to the voting booth, the appointment of the CCP ruler isn’t up to the public.
Crypto exchanges are trading digital assets, not equities.
Public markets need state intervention because the application of force is required.
The point regarding democracy is that you cannot call a 25 person tribe a democracy just because they vote. “What we mean by an election” is about diverse institutions of power such as multiple parties, independent media, freedom of political speech, etc.
Just because an object can possess a property does not mean it necessarily has the property. Regarding Bitcoin, it does not necessarily require a regulated market (proof: existence of Bisq). Same holds for private households; instead of relying on force for enforcement, you can rely on trade via the non aggression principle- “I won’t steal your property if you don’t steal mine” prevents us from requiring force to settle disputes. This does not hold true for equities because of the owner/manager problem among other issues; there’s a lot of research on equities markets and why they require regulations you can read if it’s interesting to you.
It doesn’t matter whether the state says Bitcoin is an equity or not; it isn’t one. States frequently make all sorts of false claims.
Regarding democracy, in modern parlance it’s a set of institutions; a 25 person tribe is too small to support those institutions; accordingly a 25 person tribe cannot be democracy in the modern sense.
Unlike private households and businesses, public companies only exist due to licenses from the state. These include limitation on liability, protection for many types of property, and much, much more. The protections even extend to securities regulations; since public companies aren’t privately owned, there is a misalignment between incentives of owners and managers. The state sides with the owners by using force on managers to prevent them from acting in their own self interest, and instead to act on behalf of the shareholder public.
The NAP cannot extend to public companies as they are not privately owned and can only exist when granted rights by the state. A lot of work has been done by libertarians on the topic of how monopolies are formed; it’s not due to private markets.