u/Annual_Necessary_196

Recently, I noticed the concept of libertarian eugenics. David Friedman is one of its modern proponents. He has argued that evolution is inefficient and that humans should be able to intervene in this process, although he opposes state intervention in it.

My concern is that libertarian eugenics go beyond transhumanism. I want to ask libertarians and capitalists about the feasibility and efficiency of this approach. I will start with relatively simple concerns and then move on to more difficult ones.

“If we develop sufficiently advanced genetic engineering, we could have a future in which the genetics of the population are determined not by what genes produced reproductive success for their bearers, but by what genes some people chose for other people to have, with the choice made in either a centralized manner by government or a decentralized manner, probably by parents for their children.”

I support transhumanism. However, currently, we cannot bioengineer already-living humans in the way this hypothetical scenario assumes. Therefore, parents would essentially control how their children are genetically modified. For example, imagine a parent inducing myostatin deficiency in their son to help him win an Olympic sport, while potentially subjecting him to a painful and prematurely shortened life. How would libertarian principles deal with this conflict between parental freedom and the child's autonomy?

“Suppose we conclude that some of the causes of criminal behavior are genetic; perhaps that there is a gene, more likely a group of genes, for psychopathy. Instead of sentencing a criminal to be imprisoned we sentence him to have his genes revised-a brand-new, high-tech version of the old dream of reforming criminals instead of deterring them.”

Obviously, solving a problem such as extreme aggression through genetic intervention could sound reasonable in some circumstances. However, this also raises the question of what private prisons could do if they were given the ability to alter a person's biology. The privatization of the ability to intervene in human freedom and biology seems concerning. What prevents a private company from using genetic modification as another form of punishment or coercion?

“Legalizing the adoption market, permitting adoptive parents to pay a woman for the right to adopt her baby.”

This is more concerning to me because it involves trading children who are already born, rather than embryos or reproductive rights. It could essentially amount to infant commodification or even a form of child slavery, depending on how the system is structured. Of course, commodifying adoption could potentially increase incentives to produce or raise children who are considered more desirable, but that does not necessarily make the system morally acceptable. How would libertarians distinguish a legitimate market in adoption from the commodification of human beings?

“The obvious solution is for the contract by which the baby is produced to include a lifetime license to use the patent within that child's body, just as the contract by which a farmer buys genetically engineered soybeans includes the right to have the resulting plants reproduce their patented genes in the process of growing.”

If I understand Friedman correctly, this would imply that genetic technologies could be patented and licensed in a way that creates obligations extending throughout a person's life. Therefore, if parents wanted to have a healthy child or provide certain biological modifications, they have to purchase a license from a company.

This raises an even more fundamental concern: could a company effectively acquire property rights over aspects of a human being's biology? For example, company restrict where a person can receive healthcare, whether they can receive further genetic modifications, or how their biological characteristics can be used? If so, where would libertarian property rights end and individual bodily autonomy begin?

Final and most dreadfull.

In Biologia e política: eugenismos de ontem e de hoje, David Friedman is described as an “ultraliberal economist,” and the text claims that Friedman proposed a voluntary sterilization scheme in exchange for payment. Furthermore, if someone were to live under some kind of corporate state, a CEO could potentially demand sterilization.

This raises another concern: could corporations acquire the power to intervene directly in human reproduction? A company could, for example, offer substantial payments for sterilization or impose reproductive conditions on its employees. In an extreme corporate-state scenario, a company might even decree that infants with certain abnormalities must be euthanized and require parents either to obey or leave the corporate territory.

So, I want to ask about the feasibility, morality, and reasonableness of libertarian eugenics, as well as the specific positions advocated by Friedman and others that I have listed above. In particular, I am interested in how libertarians and capitalists would address the conflicts between parental choice, individual autonomy, property rights, bodily integrity, market incentives, and the potential for private coercion.

Any business requires investment, and for this, investors are needed. However, capital is subject to diminishing marginal returns. As a result, adding an additional unit of capital decreases the return per investor.

For example, suppose a firm has a single investor who invests $10,000. The investment generates a return of $100 per month. If a second investor also invests $10,000, the total monthly return increases by only $90 due to diminishing marginal returns. The firm's total return becomes $190 per month, which means each investor receives only $95 per month on average instead of $100.

Therefore, existing investors have little incentive to allow additional investors into the business because doing so dilutes their return on investment. As a result, capitalist firms have an incentive to limit new investment, which can contribute to slower economic growth.

Labour-managed firms are different because labour initially exhibits increasing marginal productivity due to specialization, cooperation, and the division of labour. Only after reaching an optimal scale does labour begin to experience diminishing marginal productivity.

Anarchists, I have a problem with your ideas. Logically, you oppose the state, but in general you simply rename it.

Definition: A state is a political organization of society, or the body politic, or, more narrowly, the institutions of government. The state is a form of human association distinguished from other social groups by its purpose-the establishment of order and security-and by its methods: laws and their enforcement.

Workers' councils, syndicates, and enforcement agencies or corporations under anarcho-capitalism are all forms of the state. Calling an organization "voluntary" does not change its nature.

Why, then, do you call yourselves anarchists if you simply advocate for a different form of the state?

[This is not applied to organisationless anarchists like anarcho-egoists]

Description (if you're not familiar with it):

• It emphasizes the individual over any other guiding principle. The individual should live according to their own will, rather than being bound by any political calling. It argues that most commonly accepted social institutions-including the State, property as a right, natural rights in general, and even the very notion of society-are merely "spooks" or "phantasms" of the mind.
• It centers the autonomous, self-sovereign individual and rejects external authorities, moral obligations, and social institutions that constrain personal agency unless those institutions serve the individual's egoistic interests.
• It is based on the Union of Egoists (Stirner's concept): temporary, voluntary associations formed for mutual benefit and dissolved when they no longer serve the interests of their participants. These are not moral communities but pragmatic, non-binding collaborations.

For me, anarcho-egoism is more logically consistent with capitalist beliefs. It allows experimentation with every possible form of organization. It emphasizes absolutely free mobility of labor and capital. It imposes no logical or moral obligations or restrictions on the system. It permits any agreement between individuals and places the interests of the individual above all else.

The dominant structure of the economy is determined not by the state but by whoever provides the best services and the superior business model. Under anarcho-egoism, any possible economic or social system can emerge if individuals voluntarily choose it.

Why don't you support anarcho-egoism? What are your main objections to maximizing individual freedom, voluntarism, flexibility, and competition? Why should the state or any other authority impose restrictions on how society should be organized?

Once, I watched an interview with an anarchist. He said that anarcho-capitalists and right-libertarians are simply anarcho-egoists who have never read The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner. Do you consider that to be true?

I generally viewed Javier Milei’s reforms positively. However, I want to discuss the opposite side of his experiment: the tendency toward neocameralism.

Neocameralism is a system in which the state functions like a high-performance joint-stock corporation, managed by professional executives and oriented toward maximizing efficiency, stability, and investment rather than democratic participation and market neutrality.

One reason for this concern is the Large Investment Incentive Regime (RIGI), established as a cornerstone of the Ley Bases. RIGI grants extraordinary benefits to projects requiring a minimum investment of $200 million. By guaranteeing these benefits for 30 years, it undermines market neutrality and favors large corporations over local businesses.

The regime reduces the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 25% and eventually exempts participating firms from import and export duties. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) receive no comparable advantages and must compete against RIGI-backed firms that can import machinery and supplies duty-free. RIGI primarily benefits projects that were already planned, such as the El Quemado solar park and Galan Lithium, rather than creating genuinely new competition. link

RIGI is concentrated in extractive industries, reinforcing Argentina’s dependence on natural-resource exports. In practice, the largest beneficiary has been YPF, which is involved in roughly 58% of the investment volume approved under the regime. Participating firms also gain broad exchange-rate freedoms, obtaining access to 100% of their export earnings in foreign currency by the third year.

Furthermore, bilateral investment treaties allow investors to challenge Argentine policies through international tribunals such as ICSID. That this grants large corporations leverage over national policymaking. The creation of the Unified Productive Security Command has reinforced concerns, as federal security forces deployed to protect strategic investments during conflicts with local or Indigenous communities. RIGI companies are granted priority access to water resources, even in cases of scarcity.

Concerns about state capture have emerged as well. President Milei has actively cultivated relationships with major corporate leaders such as Elon Musk and Tim Cook. His administration signed an agreement with Google for technological modernization and suggested using Google-developed AI tools to reform the state, raising questions about growing corporate influence over public administration.

Mercado Libre receive support; the company received approximately $298 million in tax exemptions and discounts between 2022 and mid-2024.

Additional controversies involve alleged conflicts of interest. Presidential spokesperson Manuel Adorni faced irregularities in state communications contracts and links between state suppliers and his wife’s consulting activities. The appointment of individuals with strong corporate backgrounds, including a former CEO of Syngenta as a senior adviser, is a concern about a revolving door between government and business.

Anti-protest measures introduced under Milei’s administration. Resolution 943/23 classifies demonstrations that block traffic as “flagrant crimes,” making police intervention easier. The protocol also authorizes the collection of intelligence on protesters and participating organizations. By September 2024, human-rights groups reported 723 people injured, including 50 journalists, and 104 arbitrary detentions.

Finaly direct and open oposition to a workers ownership with use of law.

• Mass suspensions (2024): Over 11,000 cooperatives created between 2020–2022 were suspended for alleged lack of documentation, including 76 worker-recovered enterprises (ERTs), with around 40 losing legal registration.
• Targeted enforcement: The Ministry of Capital Humano carried out raids on cooperatives (e.g., textile groups producing school uniforms), declaring contracts void based on disputed findings about their legal and operational capacity.
• Judicial pressure: Worker-recovered factories remain legally insecure, with no protective legislation advanced; some courts have issued eviction orders against long-standing cooperatives such as La Litoraleña.

Direct bans and closings: link1

link2 | link3 | link4

Obviously, Milei betrayd libertarianism. However, it raise an important question: why is Argentina moving in a direction that resembles neocameralism? Would other countries adopt this strategy?

Remark: I use alienation here not in the classical Marxist sense, but in a legal one. Alienation refers to workers "alienating" or transferring their legal right to govern their own activities to an employer during working hours.

>E. S. Greenberg has produced some evidence which seems to bear out this fourth assertion. Comparing members of US plywood co-operatives with workers in conventional firms in the same industry, he found that the co-operative workers were more likely to explain poverty in terms of individuals' unwillingness to work, oppose measures to equalize incomes, and oppose public welfare provision.

This is extremely interesting research because it suggests that support for welfare, redistribution, and regulation may not simply result from being dumb or short-sightedness (as some libertarians and capitalists claim), but from workers' alienation from their work. In worker cooperatives, where alienation is eliminated, workers appear less supportive of redistributive policies/regulations and even oppose them.

The elimination of alienation also have several positive effects.

First, it reduces monitoring and agency costs. When workers are not alienated, they have a stronger incentive to monitor their own performance because their income is tied to the firm's success. Workers also have a local collective interest in ensuring that everyone works effectively. link1 | link2

Alienation can also stifle creativity by treating workers as passive order-takers. Without alienation, workers have stronger incentives to innovate and share ideas. Empirical studies suggest that producer cooperatives often have more effective training programs than capitalist firms and can function successfully with relatively fewer unskilled workers. Participation in governance and profit-sharing also encourages workers to share private information with management and each other. This reduces information costs and agency problems, as workers are more willing to share productive insights when they know those insights will not be used against them. link3 | link4

During economic crises, alienated workers have little incentive to support the firm, increasing the risk of failure. Worker-owners, by contrast, are often willing to accept temporary wage reductions or contribute their own resources to help the firm survive.

The elimination of alienation also encourages greater participation in firm activities and investment in firm-specific human capital. Labor-managed firms tend to have lower turnover and absenteeism rates, allowing them to preserve valuable skills and knowledge that would otherwise be lost in a high-turnover capitalist firm. link5 | link6 | link7

Finally, alienated capital is mobile and often indifferent to local conditions. Worker-owners generally live in the communities where production takes place, which make them more concerned about pollution and other negative externalities. link8

However, the reduction of alienation also weaken class consciousness. If workers become less supportive of welfare, redistribution, and income equalization, this challenge the collectivist foundations of many socialist theories and encourage a more individualistic outlook.

Questions for capitalists:

1. Do you accept that capitalism creates worker alienation in this legal sense?
2. Would you support institutional or governmental reforms within capitalism that reduce alienation?
3. Why or why not?

Questions for collectivist socialists:

1. How would you respond to evidence suggesting that workers in less alienated workplaces become less supportive of redistribution and welfare policies?
2. If the elimination of alienation leads workers to adopt a more individualistic outlook, does this challenge the collectivist case for socialism?
3. Would you support a socialist society built on a strongly individualist philosophy rather than a collectivist one? Why or why not?

I find an interesting party. They oppose the current neoliberal order and promote progress, as well as the restoration of some elements of the old welfare system. I want to ask both sides: do you support this points? Which one is good, which is bad, and what would you change to improve it?

21 point of the party (Translated into English).

1. Unification of citizens on the basis of the right of self-determination of peoples.
2. Equality of rights for all peoples in relation to other nations.
3. Provision of land and territory for the sustenance of our people.
4. The government shall be charged first with providing opportunities for livelihood and a way of life for all citizens.
5. All citizens must have equal rights and obligations.
6. The first obligation of every citizen must be physical work. Individual activity must not counteract the interests of the community, but must operate within the framework of the whole for the benefit of all. Consequently, we demand:
7. Abolition of unearned income (income not derived from work or labor). Ending rent-based exploitation.
8. Elimination of all war profits (including profits made by companies benefiting from war in our region).
9. Nationalization of all formerly associated industries (trusts).
10. Distribution of profits from all heavy industries.
11. Expansion of old-age welfare on a large scale.
12. Creation and preservation of a healthy middle class; immediate communal ownership of large warehouses and their leasing at low cost to small businesses; maximum consideration of small businesses in contracts with the state, county, or municipality.
13. Land reform, including laws permitting the expropriation of land for public utility; abolition of land taxes; and prevention of land speculation.
14. Firm action against those whose activities are harmful to the general interest. Common criminals, usurers, and similar offenders are to be punished with imprisonment without leniency.
15. Replacement of civil law with a common law oriented toward the collective interest rather than a materialistic world order.
16. The government shall be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of the education system, enabling every capable and industrious person to obtain higher education and subsequently enter leading positions. Educational programs in all institutions must conform to the experiences of practical life. The concept of the state must be introduced in schools from an early stage of understanding. The education of intellectually gifted children from poor families shall be funded by the state, regardless of their position or profession.
17. The state shall promote national health by protecting mothers and children, outlawing child labor, encouraging physical fitness and strongly supporting organizations involved in the physical development of youth.
18. Abolition of mercenary troops and formation of a national army.
19. Legal measures against disinformation, terrorism, and their dissemination through social media.
20. Freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state.
21. For the execution of all of the above, we demand the formation of a strong central authority in society, with the central parliament holding authority over the entire country and its organizations. The establishment of state and professional chambers shall ensure the implementation of national laws across the various regions of the confederation.

Recently, a capitalist posted on this subreddit about Singapore, and I want to discuss this point.

Singapore cannot really be called state socialist because there is no comprehensive state planning. However, many of its reforms could be considered market socialist in nature.

Talking about specific laws and policies:

Tax deferral (QEEBR): Employees can defer income tax on gains from qualified share options, reducing cash flow pressure when exercising options.

Corporate tax deductions: Companies can claim tax deductions on ESOP-related expenses.

Budget 2025 enhancement: From YA 2026, holding companies issuing new shares under EEBR plans can also claim tax deductions.

Historical ERIS incentives: Earlier schemes provided major tax exemptions on equity gains, especially for start-ups, showing long-term support for employee ownership.

Exemption from shareholder limits: Employees receiving shares under ESOPs are excluded from the 50-shareholder cap for private companies.

Financial assistance exception: Companies are allowed to provide financial assistance for employee share plans despite general restrictions.

Prospectus exemptions: Employee share offers are often exempt from full MAS prospectus requirements if certain conditions are met.

Treasury Share Usage: The Act (Section 76H) allows companies to repurchase their own shares and hold them as "treasury shares" to fulfill ESOP obligations.

The overall effect is a major expansion of employee ownership in Singapore.

There are dozens of studies showing the benefits of cooperative ownership of the means of production:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FXbK8OXw3JRv3p9qMQrN6IkrLMNkgQ6t/view?usp=drive_link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OwRRcqrRlJ4I5wCiT7rCQcZOGsMYKYBG/view?usp=drive_link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y37ltEoYxaWr7zCmOQ_fbiM8fm-XyfnB/view?usp=drive_link

These actions align directly with a materialist point of view. As capital expands and concentrates, the rate of return on capital tends to decline. One of the best ways to reduce negative effects such as excessive savings, insufficient demand, underinvestment in knowledge and labor, economic myopia, economic rents, and principal-agent problems is to expand employee stock ownership and worker-owned firms within the economy.

This can provide superior X-efficiency, allocative efficiency, and Keynesian efficiency, thereby stimulating long-term prosperous growth.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hlvs0GTtNKxtWP3YLqMJWzazzGlWj4iR/view?usp=drive_link

So, from your point of view, is Singapore’s path toward market socialism feasible? Why or why not?

Why is the marginal product of capital not equal to the interest rate? What does the marginal product of capital actually represent?