Hi, we’re a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We’re not a newspaper, we’re a content portal.
We’re not a taxi service, we’re a ride sharing app.
We’re not a pay TV service, we’re a streaming platform.
We’re not a department store, we’re an e-commerce marketplace.
We’re not a financial services firm, we’re crypto.
We’re not a space agency, we’re a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We’re not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we’re a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we’re totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don’t apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections… They totally don’t apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we’re talking about everyone else’s intellectual property.
We’re going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We’ve also raised several billion in VC funding, and we’ll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we’ll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won’t believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we’re doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don’t forget to check out our latest innovation. It’s the Uber of toothpaste!
In practice that’s a kind of “no true scotsman” argument though. Libertarians who actually believe in libertarian ideas are really pretty scarce (and I’d say they’re closer to anarchists in thought than most people, though potentially the cool kind of anarchist). Most self-described libertarians either want the government to regulate everyone but them, or they cluelessly take for granted the benefits of the way their world is utterly supported by non-market forces (the house cat analogy).
I don’t disagree with you. It’s hard to say what constitutes libertarian ideals, though, since the term has been co-opted by both communists and capitalists. In my mind, they’re people who advocate for the least possible government infringement on individual rights and liberties while acknowledging that there is a role for government in maintaining a functioning society. I believe this might be “night watchman” libertarianism.
Most self-described libertarians in the US today, at least those who are labeled by the media, are actually full-on anarchists and laissez-faire capitalists.