this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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Yes, competition is good, but these ball garglers only want to make competition illegal so they can capitalize on monopoly.
Absolutely. So much of the libertarian argument for capitalist competition fall apart when faced with the reality of monopolies and oligopolies that control the markets. It's honestly such a farcical ideology.
That's a nice straw man you've got there. Where did discussion about libertarianism come from? Are you implying that Trump is somehow libertarian (that joker was booed relentlessly at the LP convention) or that the US is in any way libertarian?
The libertarian argument is that antitrust exists to fix problems the government itself created.
For example, why does Nvidia dominate AI. It's not because they bought all competition, AMD and Intel exist. It's not because their hardware is better, AMD and Intel have access to the same fabs. The main reason is CUDA, Nvidia's GPU compute API, which is protected by copyright, as in, government protectionism. Many libertarians don't believe in IP law, figuring laws against fraud are sufficient, and those that do think it should exist want dramatically shorter protections (e.g. 5 years for patents, 10 for copyright). And then there's the argument of whether copyright should even apply to APIs like CUDA, and many libertarians would say no. If AMD and Intel could create CUDA compatible devices, Nvidia wouldn't have nearly the lead it does.
Also, a proper libertarian government would have so little overlap with the economy that a CEO visiting the White House wouldn't really be a thing because there's nothing to gain from that visit. Presidents shouldn't be selectively tarriffing products, in fact that should be illegal since it's direct market manipulation. If we do tariffs, they should be broad impacting all imports from all countries. The only selective tariffs that should exist would be from something like a carbon tax, where products are forced to pay for pollution generated in their production.
I really don't see what libertarianism has to do with this story (neither Jensen Huang or Donald Trump are anywhere near libertarian), but I'm happy to have a discussion about it.