In last week's post I glossed over a certain distaste I have in regards to a Silicon Valley-type takeover of a city; something’s that’s not simply a potentiality, but rather a reality. The reason I glossed over it is because despite my advocating for a libertarian takeover of a city, I wanted to make it clear that it’s not my desire to do so with the help of tech overloads, despite the idea being presented as “privatization.”
As wary as I am of the people who claim to be our rulers now, I’m just as nervous when thinking about being governed by these tech giants, many of whom seem to lack the ability to understand human empathy and personal autonomy.
And this is not something to be wary of simply in terms of city oversight. It’s likely, maybe even inevitable, that we see a shift towards what will be posed as the “privatization” of multiple entities. And while, to a libertarian, that might initially sound appealing, it’s important to think about who would be leading such an effort: giant corporations who aren’t on our side.
When the idea of vaccine passports first came onto the scene the Biden administration quickly diverted the cause to being led by the private sector. Yes, the same private sector that libertarians like to espouse so adamantly. And while I’d like to believe that a flood of negative public feedback would result in private companies eventually doing away with the idea of vaccine passports, the last year or so has me thinking otherwise.
Additionally, it’s becoming more and more evident that a corporation's success is oftentimes closely tied in with how close its partnership is with the federal government; Amazon and Walmart thrived in 2020 while local small-businesses experienced destruction, both financially and physically. Meaning, government “diverting to the private sector” is seemingly just code for “they’re going to do what we want, but it will be under the guise of them acting as sovereign and private entities.”
In the post I referenced at the beginning I made a case for libertarians to gradually begin permeating a police department so as to have it run in a way that allows for it to protect private individuals and private property, while neglecting the suppressive forms of policing. A particular type of privatization, if you will.
However, let’s say that Google lays out their own plan to Congress that entails their vision of “privatized” policing, and that Congress gives it a thumbs up. The headlines will read something like “ the privatization of police is now a reality,” and almost certainly some libertarians will applaud the effort, thinking they’ve gained some sort of legislative win. But, considering it’s Google overseeing the privatization, it being a win would be highly unlikely.
It’s no secret that Google collects our data. And it’s also no secret that the execs at Google don’t possess a libertarian ideology. So at a time when libertarians have been referred to as “insurgents,” it seems as though a police force that’s run by Google — an entity that can easily tell what a person’s political beliefs are through their social media posts and search habits — would almost certainly result in a negative outcome for the hypothetical libertarian cheering on the “privatization” of policing.
Again, I believe this comes down to the concept of time preference. Silicon Valley possesses the means to essentially snap their fingers and create experiments and sometimes even results. Some of these potential experiments — “privatization” of certain entities — are ones that libertarians have been clamoring for for some time; we’ve been trained to almost always view the term in a positive light.
But these are high time preference results, ones that are being achieved by organizations that don’t possess the same worldview as we do and who certainly don’t have individual autonomy very high up on their list of priorities.
So what we have coming could very well test and/or trap those of who desire personal liberty and autonomy. Because even though the means of quickly achieving certain private alternatives we’ve long espoused are more available to us now than what they’ve ever been, the unfortunately reality is that most of the the people who possess these means don’t have our same principled ends in mind.
It’s important, then, to be cautious in not immediately jumping on board with something that in name appears to be ideologically aligned with our worldview, because the name could very well be a disguise or an even worse version of what we’ve already got.
And so the plan of action is to do our due diligence in researching, as well in being skeptical of, any high time preference “solution” that presents itself to us, while simultaneously living a low time preference life through creating the alternatives we desire instead of merely hoping that they arrive.