Bleeding Libertarianism

For thousands of years in Europe, if you visited a doctor and were running a fever, he would bleed you. He would use leeches or a knife and drain out some blood, then send you on your way.

This did no good, of course, and probably harmed the victim patient. More to the point, one would think that doctors would eventually notice this fact. After all, they'd bleed some patients to no avail, and other, unbled, individuals would recover. And occasionally the doctors had to infect the site of the bleeding, which would be obvious.

Yet doctors kept on bleeding people. They did this because they had a theory - a simple, attractive and plausible-sounding theory that said "if X do Y." They (in my opinion often willfully) ignored the fact that bleeding had no better results than just leaving the poor sap alone.

Thus unto libertarianism. We've seen what happens when you mix libertarianism and an industrialized society - the Gilded Age of monopolies and people dying on the street. The Gilded Age sucked so mightily that we got socialism and communism out of it.

But yet libertarians persist. They have a theory, and will pursue it unto the ends of the earth. From james_nicoll comes word that the current CEO of Sears is sacrificing his company on the altar of "competition."

Competition among divisions works in some companies, like GE. But nobody walks into a "GE Store" looking to buy a jet engine and ends up picking up an MRI machine as well. People do walk into Sears looking to buy a power drill and end up picking up a shirt as well.

If you are running one retail business with various departments of merchandise, cooperation is required. Somebody's got to be the loss leader to get people into the store. The Sears model as described makes about as much sense as having milk competing with beef in a grocery store, and both of them having to argue with the refrigeration department over who got billed for cooling.

The bleeding must continue until the patient recovers.