That was an eye-opening moment for me (and also part of why I find this notion that China is so massively oppressive to be amusing)
Ironically, I left China with the impression that it's what libertarianism in action would look like. All you have to do is look at the sidewalks covered in parked cars and the people squeezing around them.
That is assuming your libertarian world has sidewalks.
True dat. They're not communist, they're hypercapitalist. Complete with the growing problem of massive income disparity because the Maoist "social safety net" is being dismantled like gangbusters. Peasants in the countryside arguably have it better than many of the
liurenkou (internal illegal immigrants to the cities) because at least they have subsistence farming. The
liurenkou may earn more money, but have way more necessary expenses like housing and food to worry about. And because they're in violation of the
hukou system, they're subject to the same sort of abuses and exploitation you'd expect illegal immigrants to face. Shanghai is a glaring example of that. You can have a dude in a gleaming new Lamborghini driving next to some wizened little old grandma on a rickety bicycle carrying about two tons of rubbish on her back, hoping to make a few yuan at the recycling plant so she can afford dinner. And both of them are driving past a dude begging on the sidewalk with no arms, legs or face because of an industrial accident. Who gets ignored by a bevy of twenty-something young women wearing designer Italian clothing which cost more than most Chinese make in a year. It's some seriously messed-up shit. And it's a source of social instability that scares the ever-loving bejeezus out of the Central Committee in Beijing.
It's not really fair to compare something like China that has widescale corruption and abuse from the government with a system designed to minimize the ability of the state to do such things.
Although I imagine people would park haphazardly on the sidewalks and everywhere else in libertarianland due to the complete lack of zoning laws or city ordiances and relative scarcity of public parking.
Except that you can't just say "it's the governnment that's the problem" in China. It's the lack of effective central control of the government that's part of the problem. It's the local magistrate that colludes with a factory owner to deny labor rights to his workers. It's the mayor that takes kickbacks from developers to evict peasants from their land so a new high-rise office building can go up. It's the local PSB chief that takes bribes to overlook sweatshop factories that make Foxconn look like a workers' paradise.
But keep in mind that in these cases, the local government is a facilitator of abuse, not the motivator. The motivators are all the
private profit-seeking individuals exploiting the hell out of the system to make a buck. In a pure libertarian system, those people are still there. Only now instead of having to bribe officials, there's simply no officials to deal with (or get in their way).
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