This is obviously not true in monopoly/oligopoly situations such as the gas company, the cable company, the cell phone service company, software companies, and drug companies. It is also obviously not true when the customer has already done business with a company and is bound to do business with the same company in the future in order to avoid massive transitional costs, whereas the company does not worry at all about the transitional costs – for example, anything related to “technical support”, or tenants with respect to real estate companies. It is also obviously not true in situations where the business’s resources are distributed worldwide and the customer’s options are limited to a particular time and place. Nor is it true, obviously, in situations where bankrupt businesses are propped up by the government while bankrupt consumers are not, as is the case in the United States and various other well-known countries.

All these things should be completely obvious to anyone living on planet Earth, which you may recognize as the planet located several parsecs from whatever planet features businesses that were all founded less than a week ago and therefore “are relatively powerless with respect to their customers”.

So, it certainly does make sense for the public to have a coercive mechanism to protect themselves. Big or small, central government or public organizations or unions – doesn’t matter, whatever works better.

Now, the businesses, of course, will try to corrupt this mechanism to achieve their objectives, and that’s the challenge here.

The reason businessmen act in the interest of their customers is that they are relatively powerless with respect to their customers, and thus have to work in their customers’ interest in order to retain them as customers.

If you want politicians to act in the people’s interest, you have to reduce their power relative to the people. That is, you have to strip the government of much of it’s coercive power.

However, since the power to coerce is the only thing government brings to the solution of any problem that is unavailable to business, this boils down to saying that you should simply reduce the scope of government, to only those problems which actually demand the power to coerce to be solved, AND which are sufficiently serious that leaving them unsolved really is worse than handing that power over to someone.

This, of course, is the problem facing limited government activists: In order to get limited government out of politicians, you have to HAVE limited government. Once you’ve lost it, getting back to it won’t happen through the action of politicians, but would have to be imposed on them from outside.

Elections are a way of doing that, but evidence suggests that elections are barely capable of reducing the rate at which government assumes more power, and don’t exert enough leverage over politicians to compel them to actually reduce that power.

There’s some evidence that you can reduce the scope of government through ballot initiatives, though.

Of course, the disastrous convergence of the state and the peculators comes to the same thing.

Systematic bribery could, indeed, bring about smaller government if the private sector, indeed, saw smaller government as a good thing.

What, like Nigeria and some other sub-Saharan African nations? As I understand it, state funding is so low that most officials must rely on bribery to support themselves and their families.

Introduce our hypothetical libertarian to some Nigerian spammers. . .

Synopsis: Persuading extremely powerful entities to act against their own interest without any attempt to enforce your mandate is quite difficult.

The answer “Stop doing bad things” was not, as I recall, well received.

Yeah, right. Genuinely noble and disinterested types who became politicians and got themselves elected. Prudish prostitutes. Yeah, this happens all the time.

Hey, a whole new Werther’s piece, and, I suppose, slightly relevant to this topic. Don’t miss it.

Of course, the way out is to install another interest in the legislators – their interest in using their posts to get better positions in the private sector. Systematic bribery could, indeed, bring about smaller government if the private sector, indeed, saw smaller government as a good thing. The problem here is that the evidence is all the other way – the private sector loves big government, they just don’t love paying taxes. Halliburton or Boeing or Raytheon, etc., would have long been tossed on the scrapheap without government contracts. And the best way to raise entry costs, in a lot of sectors, is to maintain regulations. Etc.

The upshot is: conservatives will always bitch about large government, and always elect people whose self-interest is to expand the government.

It would be hard to make a good argument that such a class doesn’t have an interest in maintaining its power, even harder to make such an argument for the elected.