Correct, it is always possible to act more responsibly than the law requires, but in the current situation we are not fully protected from a corporation in error. They can declare bankruptcy and walk away.

But this is not the subject of your question.
Your question is : What if a business violate NAP and refuse the judgment.

For Monsanto, this is clearly a violation, any arbitrer would clearly see the violation.
So either Monsanto accepts the judgment and so will pay the victim.
Either Monsanto does not accepts the judgment, and would have a moral sanction, be ostracized, discriminated.
Customers and partners would stop making contract with them, because they would know that no government would protect them if Monsanto refuse judgment.
Also, private police would refuse to protect them from aggression, because it is not in their interest to serve customers against the law.

A stare-you-in-the-face difference between a corporation and an association of investors in the free market, is that any free association has the same rights and responsibilities as single individuals, while corporations, using the coercion of the state, have less responsibility and more rights. One important detail is the cutoff responsibility to pay creditors in case of trouble. It is right there in the word limited in the company category, or Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung in german.

There are a bunch of Harvard Business cases that go into this in detail, but unfortunately they are not free. The best evidence, though, is that over the last two decades, over 1 billion people in the world have been pulled out of poverty (http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-billion-people-have-been-taken-out-extreme-poverty-20-years-world-should-aim). More than any other government program has been able to accomplish. And none of it was due to minimum wage laws.



In fact, the only differences between the two is that liberals have been fighting for workers to either get some high minimum, or zero, while others have been fighting for workers to also get everything between that high minimum and zero. Just because there is a minimum wage doesn't mean that everyone is earning that minimum wage. Some are forced to earn $0 an hour, or work in the grey market, getting pain in cash under the table, without any legal protections.

As for the "race to the bottom" idea, sure, if the current situation is wildly inaccurate and propped up by unsustainable minimums. But the bottom isn't zero. Note that white collar jobs have no minimum wage laws, yet everyone in those positions still gets WAY more than $7.50 an hour. Likewise, factory workers in India and China get way more than their minimum wages too. The race to the bottom only goes on until everyone is employed. Then it's a race to higher wages, as more workers are needed, but fewer and fewer are available.

Stop right there!

Corporations are a product of the state. Monsanto and others using copyright or patent laws to shelter themselves are the worst kind of evil. Who enforces their bullshit? The state of course! In a free market businesses can still get large and cumbersome, but at least it would be to a point. They'd be much more at the mercy of their customers and competitors to keep them in line.

I like to start with the absolutes of things like it's absolutely wrong to deprive someone of their property or life without their consent. Like NAP. And then I go from there. That absolute, which gives people the freedom to create and own things without the threat of someone else coming by and claiming a right to their stuff is what expands to things like Libertarianism and AnarchoCapitalism, and makes things like Resource Based Economy and Zeitgeist Movement seem very violent by comparison.


Not only do I think so, there is plenty of evidence for it. US and Europe have minimum wage, a whole lot of people earn that minimum wage, and there is a whole lot of unemployment, because you can't hire people for less, and thus less productive jobs are left unfilled. China has minimum wage, but workers in China and India earn more than that, and their unemployment is very low. It used to be that they had a ton of unemployed and extremely low wages, but as more and more companies outsourced to those countries, building more factories and offices and hiring more and more people, the number of available workers decreased. Used to be that every time a factory opened in China, there was a huge line of people outside the fence looking to get hired. Now when factory opens, there's no one coming, and companies have to look for people themselves. This meant that companies ended up having to raise their wages more and more, to try to entice workers from other companies to come work for them. As a result, they now have much better working conditions than the sweatshops that existed decades ago, and pay much higher wages and benefits. This actually became a problem in India, since over the last decade, workers actually got used to working for only a year, and then switching to another company for an up to 20% raise. Now wages in India are not very competitive at all (as high as in many other, even developed, parts of the world), and it's hard to retain employees for a long time, because they keep expecting there to be something better elsewhere, despite the economic expansion boom there slowing down rapidly. So, yes, China wage growth had nothing to do with government intervention, besides government deciding not to be as restrictively communist any more, and allowing a whole lot of foreign capitalism to come in.

Don't forget that this exact same scenario happened in India, South East Asia, and parts of Africa, too, so it can't just be Chinese government at work.


By the way, in regards to this


socialists are the ones who focus on employers, and think in terms of work and capitalism as those evil rich employers who must be constrained for the good of the workers.
Libertarians think of this scenario from the worker's point of view, not the "evil" employer's. Specifically, if the worker that employer currently has is earning $5 an hour, and I am desperate for a job and am willing to do it for $4.50, I should be able to, instead of that job having a minimum wage barrier that keeps me from getting that job despite me needing it more, and as a result keeping me starving on the streets.
Or, put another way, you guys think "I should have the right to get paid some minimum amount regardless of the quality of work I do," while we think "I should have the right to a job if I need it more than the other guy, without legal restrictions preventing me from getting it 'for my own good'".

There were a couple of points, not just one.  Sorry, I'll try to make it al ittle easier for you.

1. Microsoft became as large as it is/was because of government (via intellectual property laws).
2. Microsoft could afford to give away free web browsers (because they were so large).
3. For some reason, some individuals see #2 as a problem, but not #1, which led to #2.

I'm saying government power shouldn't be used to protect and establish monopolies.  Seems strange to call upon government to break up a monopoly that it's responsible for creating.

Furthermore, you stated that "anti trust laws forced MS to remove IE from Windows".  Even if we assume that #2 were possible without #1, what's wrong with #2?  Why is it a crime to give away software for free?

Yes, it truly is bizarre, baffling, and downright illogical how the government works when we start thinking about it a little bit.

Without state there is no such thing as harmful monopoly. Either you provide value and make money, either you don't, loose money and die.

If the company is harmful to the point of initiating force (conflict with NAP), then, this become a government.
So then, the question is how to prevent that from happening.

Rothbard talk about private police and court, but this is a whole chapter of a book.
Since NAP is violated, the libertarian is in right to defend itself against it with force. But he would most likely use a private police for that.

If the company does not recognize violation, then, there is a private court to decide of the matter.
Such private court arbitrers are assigned by the 2 parts voluntary.
Each arbitrer has an incentive to not cheat, because this would affect his reputation, and thus diminish his customer base.
Such private court existed between merchants in the middle age, down to 1920.
In 1900, voluntary arbitration took hold in the US.
He takes a very long example in ancient Ireland, where tribes had a leader, but he could be attacked by everyone in court, and could not impose force against subjects.

I can't make justice to Rothbard, he discusses about that very deeply for a long part of "For a new libery", but that's the general idea.

Some reading about Bell http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/1994/11/cj14n2-6.pdf

Trailer :
Here is goes how they prevented others to make their own network.

Telephone, television, water pipe or electricity, the strategy is the same : creating scarcity by law, then distribute "fairly" to the big guys. You bet you don't have competition with bad monopoly companies.

The state established the intellectual property laws that allowed Microsoft to become a monopoly in the operating systems market.  They were giving away IE for free, which is their prerogative and not a threat to anyone's safety or a violation of anyone's rights.  They weren't forcing anyone to use it.  Lots of applications, utilities, and operating systems themselves are free.  Should Microsoft sue Ubuntu for making operating systems available for free and use the force of government to force me to pay for an operating system?  I use gmail for free.  Should someone that wants to charge me for webmail service have the grounds to sue Google and force me to pay for webmail?

If a company is both bad and in a monopoly, you don't have to search very far to find that the cause is government itself that protect them.

The allocation of TV channel, cable and water conduct and even electricity cable, is business of the state.
Most of these infrastructure is financed by the tax payer, and you are severely restricted to own your cable or channels by law.
These is property of the state, granting themselves the right to decide how to allocate "fairly" the scarce shared resource that a private party is forbidden to provide.

This create an artificial scarcity that only big companies (or with good enough connection) can afford, protecting them from competition.
You have nice story about such monopolistic crappy companies, like Bell, where the state helped them to kill their competitor by preventing the development of their own network. (either with legal restriction or subsidies to bell)

Quoting Rothbard

The only business that can give rise to a monopoly are those benefiting of network effect (telephony was in this case).
Preventing competitor by law of intellectual property the monopoly of developing this to Bell did not helped.
But even with such attempt after the patent expired, competitors were attacking Bell but Bell was then protected by the state with tax payer money and politicians.

Now let's see Myspace, MSN ? these benefited from network effect but died after all, not helped by the state. (well I think I already made this case some month ago on this forum :p)

Most monopolies are established and protected by the state.  Eliminate the state and there are no longer rulers protecting their monopoly.  In fact, in a statist society it's the state itself that often attempts to establish a monopoly on a particular service.  There would be nothing preventing multiple companies from providing me with these services in a stateless society and there would be nothing preventing me from choosing from multiple cable tv or internet service providers in a free market system.

There is absolutely no idealism involved in Chinese minimum wage laws.

The Chinese government mandates a minimum wage solely because it is clear that if they leave the employers to pay whatever the labor market will bear in the short run, there will be bloody revolution as it turns out to be less than the labor market will bear in the long run.   The same is true in the US; we're just a bit further away from it for the moment.

Why to care about a big company ?
A big company on a free market only means they make greater and cheaper products.

It is not like they have the power to force anyone to buy their stuff. If they can, I'm interested to know how.

A corporation is a legal entity created by the state.  Therefore, there are no corporations in a stateless society.


Me too.  I'm all for liberating the working class from fiat.  I think everyone in the working class should convert a portion of their earnings to sound, honest money.  Also, no one should be forced to do anything against their will or be held as a prisoner, unless they have harmed someone else or their property.


Okay, but can the philosophy of anarchism evolve?  If an anarchist is someone that believes there should be "no rulers" in place, ruling over him, then there is no power in place to force him into an economic system he doesn't want to participate in.  Socialist anarchists can cooperate with each other and form a socialist society and capitalist anarchists can cooperate with each other and form a capitalist society.  The world is big enough for more than one economic system.


I've always assumed he was for a revolt that called for the working class to take over the reigns of power rather than eliminate the reigns of power and become the new rulers.  They would then use that power to establish a socialist economic system and force that system on capitalists as well.

You really expect things to go on forever the way they are without disruption? disruption is a given, if what we get after is RBE or a madmax scenareo is another history. Disruption will happen as a natural result of our current system.

So, American Libertarians are Libertarians, who believe in the free market, including believing that the free market will be enough to raise wages to sustainable amounts without the need for government intervention (which, ironically, is how China wages have increased from practically nothing, to relatively good wages they have now), and Hong Cong Libertarians are not libertarians, but are pro-democracy socialists?


Ah, so the difference is that Hong Kong libertarians actually have gripes with regards to freedom of speech and assembly, and American libertarians are free enough, and should shut the fuck up about it and not protest (or, put another way, America should become like Hong Kong in regards to libertarian protestors). Okay.

In a stateless and capitalist society, individuals still retain the right of self defense, control of property, and association with whom they please.
These rights have the potential to form a stateless "regulatory power".