I searched and searched my post for what might have led you to draw that conclusion, and I am lost.
Let’s see, if the driver is using the road without the owner’s permission, then the government arrests him for trespassing. If he is speeding on the owner’s road, then the government arrests him for breach. In either case, the criminal is removed from society. Since, in general, all such initiators of force are removed from Libertarian society, I cannot understand drawing the conclusion that Libertaria would be “swamped with crime”.
Amazingly, you find the proliferation of dumb people to be a preemptive concern for your own self-determination, but not a concern in a context where those same pathetically dumb people decide which politicians will dole out your rights with scribbles and whims. That’s what’s happening right now.
Moreover, you haven’t defined the mystical quality that imbues elected politicians and their appointed bureaucrats with the sense and scruples to decide the fate of those dumb people any better than they can themselves. If such a large percentage of people are dumb, then it stands to reason that a goodly portion of them in your present society in fact end up governing you! You seem to assume a priori that governors are saints and geniuses who will do what is in the best interest of all, when the track record suggests that many governors are self-serving scoundrels who know that dumb people are easily manipulated; hence, campaign after campaign of promises to make the schools better, reduce taxes, end poverty, and make society safe. I don’t know how old you are, but these promises have been made toward every election since I can remember.
I don’t think you ever established that a crime wave would start. In Why Crime Declines, Bruce Benson, DeVoe Moore Distinguished Research Professor in the department of economics at Florida State University, cites a 1980s case study of the effects of private security in “Starrett City, a 153-acre complex in a high-crime area of Brooklyn, with 56 residential buildings containing 5,881 apartments and about 20,000 racially and ethnically diverse but largely middle-income residents. Starrett City had only 6.57 reported crimes per 1,000 population, compared to 49.86 for the 75th precinct in which Starrett City is located.”
In a policy paper called Private Police: A Note, the Ludwig Von Mises Institute points out the common sense reason why people naturally desire protection as reasonably close to their own interests as possible, i.e., they value their property. Citing a typical jewelry store, the paper notes, “The theft of its wares is a crime under the law. But the jewelry store does not rely exclusively—or even primarily—on the majesty of the state’s enforcement of that law for its own security. The jewelry store engages the services of manifold private protection outfits: it takes out an insurance policy on its gems, which are kept under a locked glass display case, which can only be opened by an employee, who is under the ever-vigilant eye of video monitoring equipment, and who watches the customers with the aid of convex mirrors, and keeps the store’s cash in a locked vault, which is in a back room, which is in turn locked at closing time, and the store’s alarm activated as the employees leave and the armed night watchmen arrive. All of these are provided by private companies in the business of providing “security,” and all of which should give pause to those who consider the enforcement of law uniquely the franchise of the government.”
Actually, private ambulance service is alive and well already, and competes quite effectively against municiple services, except where those municipalities exercise their government monopoly muscle. American Medical Response, Careline, and MedTrans are three of the biggest (source). Most private ambulance services get their revenue, not from the patients they transport, but from the hospitals they transport the patients to. For example, Kaiser Permanente in Denver paid AMR $600 million dollars over five years for its services in 1998. In fact the competition between AMR and Phoenix-based Rural/Metro was so good that it resulted sometimes in two ambulances being sent to the scene in Aurora, so that the city felt compelled to step in and stop one of them from responding. The city said it caused “confusion”.(source).
Aside from clearing up the misconception of how private emergency medical response works, I’d like to address in general the idea that, given people’s dumbness (which hypothesizers seem to posit as ubiquitous in Libertaria but minimal in America) their carelessness for their own welfare means that they will stop providing themselves health care, police protection, and no doubt food. If they are too dumb to know that they need the most basic of human services, then there is no reason to believe that they are smart enough to eat. You could argue that food distribution would dry up because people won’t be willing to feed themselves until they are starving.
Don’t forget that, implicit in the very implication of a hypothetical Libertaria, you have already posited people who have the good sense to hire a government. You are basically saying that people have reasoned thus: “Well, I paid good money to have my rights protected, now I believe I will lay down and die.”
I refer you to a page on Liberty Haven’s website with links to, oh, a couple hundred articles on why charitable medical care is less likely to kill people than socialized care. As Kenneth McDonald points out in one of the articles, *The True Charity *, “Helping other people to independence is the true charity.”
Actually, forcing prudence on people is expensive to almost everyone in almost every way. In a policy paper called Why Health Care Costs Too Much, the Cato Institute observes that the “increasing share of medical bills paid by third-party payers (insurance companies and governments) and the disastrous consequences are documented. Patients overuse medical resources since those resources appear to be free or almost free. Producers of medical equipment create new and more expensive devices, even if they are of only marginal benefit, since third-party payers create a guaranteed market. Attempts to rein in those costs have led to a blizzard of paperwork but proven ineffective in controlling costs.” This is primarily because, as the same paper notes, there is no incentive to economize. “Because patients pay an average of only 23 cents on each dollar of medical expense, there is only a weak linkage between any consumer’s use of medical resources and the payments made by that consumer. When the direct linkage between use of medical facilities and payment is broken, medical consumers lose their incentive to economize on their use of medical resources.”
A major third-party player is Medicare. Medicare was enacted in 1965. "It wasn’t long before it became plain that the cost overruns on Medicare were going to be spectacular. Between 1966 and 1968, everything went up; hospital bills, doctors’ fees, laboratory charges, insurance premiums, and even–though more modestly- nurses’ and orderlies’ wages. (At Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, for example, nurses’ wages went up 100 percent between 1959 and 1969; but over the same period interns’ salaries went up 1650 percent!) Over the decade of the 1960s, hospital charges rose four times as fast as all other items in the Consumer Price Index; physicians’ fees rose twice as fast. And that increase was heavily concentrated in the brief period after the introduction of Medicare. The rate of inflation of hospital costs, for example, increased from an average of 6.9 percent between l950 and 1960 to an annual average of 14.8 percent between March, 1966, and March, l970. By 1969, some hospitals were charging as much as $150 a day for basic care–in effect for little more than a bed, food, and attention from a nurse when she had a moment. John de Lury, of the New York sanitation workers’ union, gave a state legislative hearing a harrowing illustration of what the full cost could come to:
"A ten-year-old boy was admitted to the hospital at 3:20 A.M. The boy died at 10:34 the same night. The family of this child was charged $105.80 for drugs, $184.80 for X rays, $220.00 for inhalation therapy, $655.50 for laboratory work. The total bill for the child was $1717.80.
"With the government reimbursing whatever hospitals and doctors charged, the cost of both Medicare and Medicaid spiraled out of control. Less than ONE YEAR after Medicare came into operation, Congress had to increase by 25 percent the Social Security tax budgeted to pay for it. The actuarial estimates of both utilization and cost presented to Congress by the Administration when the program was under construction proved to be hopelessly understated. Cost overruns, projected over the next twenty-five years, added up to a stupendous $131 billion.
“Medicaid was soon in worse trouble than Medicare. Two reporters, generally sympathetic to the program, wrote that “starting in late l966 Medicaid hit New York’s medical marketplace like a flash-flood.” In January, 1967, the federal budget, assuming that Medicaid would be in operation in forty-eight states by the end of the year, predicted that it would cost $2.25 billion. A year later, however, although only thirty-seven states were receiving Medicaid, the actual cost came to $3.54 billion.” (source)
Are you saying that if you lead your own life responsibly, that you are, by that action, “punishing” someone else?
Sorry, I don’t buy it. As Dr. Leonard Peikoff observed at a Town Hall Meeting on the Clinton Health Plan in 1993, “The right to life, e.g., does not mean that your neighbors have to feed and clothe you; it means you have the right to earn your food and clothes yourself, if necessary by a hard struggle, and that no one can forcibly stop your struggle for these things or steal them from you if and when you have achieved them. In other words: you have the right to act, and to keep the results of your actions, the products you make, to keep them or to trade them with others, if you wish. But you have no right to the actions or products of others, except on terms to which they voluntarily agree.”
Remember that in Libertaria, you are free to socialize any aspect of your life that you desire with other volunteers who feel the same way you do. What you are not “free” to do is force others into your schemes. In Libertaria, freedom is defined as the absence of coercion and fraud.
Sure. I guess. But it also seems reasonable that you cannot plan for other people any better than they can for themselves; further, it seems reasonable that they know what aspects of their own lives require that they seek out expertise elsewhere. Unless, of course, they’re more stupid than spit. And if they are, do you like the idea that they’re in fact electing the people nowadays who will plan your life for you?
Let me try again, if you don’t mind giving another answer.