Calling All Libertarians!

Great Debates
81

Smartass said:

But disallowing force and fraud is also imposing a moral “consensus” that conflicts with the moral codes of some individuals. Some people have no moral objection to stealing, cheating, or using violence, and are willing to take the risk of suffering those things at the hands of others. Sure, most people agree that peacefulness and honesty are good things morally, but they’d say the same about compassion and social responsibility. Why should government necessarily mandate the one and not the other? Saying “All citizens must refrain from the use of force” or “All citizens must abide by their contracts” is no less an act of moral coercion than saying “All citizens must share some of their goods with others.” Imposing moral codes on individuals is just part of what societies do, and Libertarianism is not free from that.

I don’t agree that when it comes to solving problems, there’s absolutely no middle ground between supporting bad government and ceasing to support government at all. People can also demand that government stop doing the thing that’s failing miserably and try a different approach. Our laws and the people who make them are changed all the time in response to citizen demand; I’ve personally been involved in one or two (very small, but successful) efforts to change a government’s policies. Yup, it takes a long time and a lot of work, but perhaps things that affect a lot of people in important ways shouldn’t be changed at the drop of a hat. I have enough faith in people to think that they’ll eventually put in the necessary effort to change the government’s approach to the things they really care about.

So according to Libertarian principles, disaster relief should be paid for by private insurance premiums? Okeydoke, let’s run the numbers and see what comes out. (This is the part I always like best; guess I’m just a policy wonk at heart. :)) I did a brief search on “flood damage” and came up with the tidbits that there was $1 billion worth of damage in Florida from the 1999 hurricane season, and $6 billion worth of damage in North Carolina from one 1999 hurricane alone. Admittedly, 1999 was a bad hurricane year, but on the other hand those numbers didn’t include the costs of rescue and evacuation, emergency food and shelter, etc., nor flood devastation in any other areas. Let’s be very very modest in our estimates and assume that the devastation caused to individuals (leaving businesses out of the scenario) by floods could be satisfactorily handled for $5 billion per year for the entire country—including not only the costs of compensation, rescue and relief efforts, and rebuilding for the policy-holders, but necessary overhead (training and paying helicopter pilots, advertising, office staffs, etc.) and enough profits to make it a paying proposition for the insurance companies. This figure looks extremely low—I’d guess I’m off by at least half an order of magnitude—but we’ll go with it as a very modest estimate.

Now, where are we going to get this money? There are about 275 million people in the US, or say one hundred million families. If every family paid $50 in flood insurance, we’d have all our costs and profits covered according to the above estimate. Is every family going to think they need even fifty dollars’ worth of flood insurance? Not hardly. Well, if only one in ten families paid $500 for flood insurance annually, that would still cover it. Is every tenth family in the whole country going to take $500 out of their income every year for flood insurance, considering everything else they need to spend money on? I seriously doubt it: think of the thousands of families in each of hundreds of cities who have no realistic use for flood insurance at all, as well as the thousands of people who might actually be in danger from floods but don’t know it, don’t care, or are willing to take the risk. We’ve got a serious shortfall.

So okay, there’s a terrible hurricane and a devastating flood. Even assuming the insurance companies have enough money to pay for rescuing and compensating all their policy-holders (and—cough—people who are quietly left to drown don’t submit nasty expensive claims or file nasty inconvenient lawsuits—and in the midst of a devastating flood, who has time to notice whether the companies’ helicopter pilots are acting more for the benefit of their policy-holders or their stockholders?), the comfortably rescued and compensated citizens are now cheek by jowl with a slew of starving, homeless, and penniless ones. The self-interest of this latter group has undergone a huge shift: suddenly it makes a lot more economic sense to use force and fraud on their more prudent neighbors and take their chances with the law. (Heck, some of them might start stealing just so they’d get hauled off to a nice dry jail cell.) More property loss, more non-productive social turmoil, more drains on law enforcement and the criminal justice system.

Even without rights infringements, this is a perfect example of externality problems. Take the case of Paul and Marcia Libertarian, who bought flood insurance when they moved to Riverville even though there hasn’t been a flood there in seventy-five years and hardly any of their neighbors carry personal flood insurance anymore. Well, it turns out to have been a wise choice, because the river did flood this year and there’s hardly a house left standing. Prudent Paul and Marcia and their family are rescued, sheltered, and compensated for their property losses: let’s hear it for the efficiency of the market! What’s more, their neighbors (unlike the criminal hoodlums of the previous paragraph) all remain true to the same Libertarian principles and are resolutely prepared to drown, starve, or freeze rather than entrench upon Paul and Marcia’s inalienable property rights. Unfortunately, most of the survivors are now about twice as poor as dirt and can barely scratch out a subsistence living, much less contribute to the needs of the community in rebuilding roads and schools and supporting local businesses. If Paul and Marcia want a decent life for themselves and their family, they’re either going to have to make a hugely inequitable investment in rebuilding (and they probably couldn’t afford what it would cost anyway), or sell their house (and who will want to buy property in a dead town like Riverville now?) and move. Poor Paul and Marcia have been blindsided by a market externality: the insurance premiums they paid didn’t take into account the fact that insurance compensation is much more effective when coverage is universal. They paid the insurance company a fair price for the costs of rescue and resettlement, and that’s what they got; but now they’re also going to have to pay a lot more to start their new life, just because their neighbors chose not to pay for the same thing. The other folks in Riverville certainly didn’t violate anybody’s rights by choosing not to buy flood insurance, but it sure ended up costing Paul and Marcia a bunch of money in the long run.

And we haven’t even looked at the costs of dealing with earthquakes, fires, and tornadoes, all of which are going to require their own insurance premiums and all of which are going to cause huge problems for the underinsured and everyone around them. Is this ultimately better and cheaper than mandating universal contributions for disaster relief and providing universal coverage, even if it’s not optimally efficient? I’ve seen no reason to think so, and I don’t think that repeating the mantra “markets good, government bad” is going to change that.

Kimstu

82

Smartass: you recommend I learn more about L,ism? How? Speak to any 2 L.ians and you get 2 diff answers. And of vourse, you respond to my cases as “the contract will take care of that” or whatever. You try to pin down a L.ian on something, then they pull some other thing out of the blue sky and say, “well, this covers that”. And why the hell should ignorant, illiterate parents decide their kids are going to be illiterate & ignorant, too?

And I’d be happy to learn more about how L-ism works in the real world. Just point to the 10 best L-ian Countries out there…, OK, how about the 10 best of all time?..The 2 best?..ANY? Nope, it never has been tried, because: 1 it does not exist, L-ism has too many meanings to mean anything, and 2.Because it depends on people acting in “enlightened self interest”, and people don’t.

And Beirut IS a “l-ian” state, sorta. You get exactly the Gov’t you want and are willing to support/contract. Of course, it is almost total anarchy, but is that not what purest L-ism is?

And then you talk about “community decisions & covenants/ contracts”, and if I say I do not agree to what “the community” wants- you say MOVE to another community that HAS what you want. But if I say, well then, if you hate the USA so much, move to a better country, you say THAT is not a covenant/contract.

83

Just to jump in with a few comments on this thread…First, I think this point about externalities, already brought up by kimstu, cannot be overstated. The idea that the market magically works everything out (Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”) can be criticized on a number of points, but one of the most important is that it relies on certain assumptions that are sometimes way-not-true. And, in those cases, one needs something like government to set things straight.

For example, say I own a beer company in Tennessee and am polluting the river in producing my beer, thus affecting those folks living downstream…say the fishermen trying to earn their livelihood and the families who enjoy swimming in the river. If you in Wisconsin buy my beer, you will pay too little for it because neither of us is absorbing all the costs incurred in producing it…Some of it is being borne by third parties, not part of the deal. Of course, all transactions probably have some third party costs, and I am not saying all of them can be completely corrected, but when they get severe, as they do in the case of environment issues such as this, then one needs something like a government to either regulate pollution discharge or force the company to compensate the people or to pay to clean up the river, or whatever. The market ain’t gonna magically take care of it! (And noting that an externality such as this is a “violation of rights” of the people living downstream and that libertarians believe in maximal rights for all and not allowing people to violate other people’s rights sounds good…But I don’t see how it translates into a solution. Whether you look at it in terms of violations of rights or externalities, you need some sort of collective entity such as government to solve it.)

Another question (for Smartass), where do you get the evidence that leads you to conclude that government does things so God-awful inefficiently? I hear a lot of complaining on this issue…but little in the way of real evidence. A lot of the inefficiencies that people see in government happen, sometimes to an even larger extent, in corporations. (Believe me…I work for one!) In fact, much of the savings that privatization of various services was supposed to bring have not in fact occurred (or have occurred at the cost of considerable deterioration of the services). A related example: I know a doctor in Canada (where the government provides the health insurance) who pointed out that their office of several doctors has one person who spends a fraction of her time on billing issues. He noted that in contrast, an office this size in the U.S. would have to have several people spending full time dealing with billing under our “efficient” private insurance system with its zillions of different forms, billing policies, etc!

I’m not saying that government is wonderful or that we don’t have to continue to fight like the dickens to keep it accountable to us citizens, but by golly, it is OUR government, so let’s work at making it work better rather than just surrendering to the seductive logic that everything will work out better if we just leave it up to the “magic of the marketplace”!

84

Kimstu:

Agreed. The libertarian view of this is that it is a necessary evil. As such, it should be minimized. The purpose of libertarianism is to have government impose morality on its citizens as little as possible and to leave as much leeway as possible for people to live according to their own moral codes.

People often observe that government does restrict some freedom and does cost a certain amount of money. This, in and of itself, does not justify any restriction of rights or level of taxation. Libertarians try to draw the line as close to the freedom side of the argument as possible.

What if the affect is to hurt a lot of people? You want to delay stopping this harm? Why?

Also, you seem to be thinking from the paradigm that only one solution is correct, or that multiple solutions cannot be attempted at the same time. If solutions are not implemented centrally, multiple approaches can be attempted simultaneously.

I have enough faith in people to think that they’ll eventually put in the necessary effort to achieve those goals that they really care about. Libertarianism attempts to make this easier. Having to act through government makes it more difficult.

No. Libertarianism does not prescribe solutions in advance. According to libertarian principles, disaster relief should not be a governmental function. Or in those cases where it must be, it should not be a federal function. Insurance is an example of how unexpected events are dealt with without calling on government. It is not presented as the one solution to all such problems.

Central government thinking leads people to ask, “How will this problem be solved? How will that problem be solved?” Since libertarians do not expect each problem to have one predictable solution, we cannot answer the question to your satisfaction. We say that in a libertarian context, the people are allowed to come up with solutions as they see fit, that market rules will dictate that competing solutions will tend to become increasingly effective and efficient. And then you say, “How would this system solve x problem?” We don’t know. We only know the solutions that come to mind for each of us. Chances are, someone else will think of a better solution. Whoever has the best solution will likely be most successful in the market.

Let’s consider your flooding example. Flood insurance is generally provided by the government instead of private insurers. Why is this? As it turns out, some areas are prone to frequent flooding; others are not. Insurers charge higher premiums based on the expectations of disaster. For those who need flood insurance, the premiums would be too expensive to be affordable. So, government has stepped in and subsidized flood insurance.

Now, if you decide to live in a flood-prone area, are you taking more or less risk than someone who decides to live in an area that is not flood-prone? Does it make sense that those who do not live in a flood-prone area should assume part of the risk for those who choose to? This is, after all, the result of federally-subsidized flood insurance. If you brush your teeth daily, and I do weekly, does it make sense that you should have to help pay for my dental bills?

In terms of the yearly flood damage. Have you considered how much of that damage is repeat damage? That is to say, how many of the people whose houses are rebuilt are living in a place where floods are expected every few years? By subsidizing flood insurance, the government has made it financially feasible for people to live in a place where their houses will be destroyed every 10 or 15 years and to just rebuild each time. If they had to bear a proportionate amount of the risk, they probably would not choose to build their houses in these kinds of places.

If we did not have so many people continually rebuilding houses in flood plains, do you think the need for disaster relief would go up or down? Do you disagree that people are more likely to take unreasonable risks if they don’t have to pay the consequences?

I think that discussions of externality problems are interesting, but this is not an example of one. What you are describing is artificial distribution of risk. Questions of real externality issues are complicated and difficult to evaluate under any governmental paradigm. Your desire to evaluate them according to your own paradigm does not lead to the conclusion that your paradigm is better.

We have no way of knowing what is optimally efficient. However, when your policies lead directly to people taking unreasonable risks, and total disaster trending upward, I would say that the policies are ultimately doing more harm than good.
Danielinthewolvesden:

This isn’t surprising. Libertarianism doesn’t claim to have the answers. We believe that restraining government allows more potential solutions to surface and to be implemented simultaneously. Since markets tend to lead to continuous improvements in efficiency and efficacy, we expect that over time solutions will become better and better. However, when you ask an individual what the solution to a problem is, all he can give you is the solution he imagines. He fully expects someone else to have alternate solutions that may be better.

Why should you decide? Why does the fact that you think ignorance and illiteracy are unacceptable mean that everyone must think the same way?

I thought I was the SmartAss. Look at it like this, all the alternative plans being posited as better than libertarianism are based on some degree of socialism. Libertarianism is practically opposite to socialism. How about if you point out the 10 best socialist countries out there? Of all time?

By many measure of success, the U.S. is more successful than other countries. What is the difference between the U.S. and, say, Germany? Well, Germany is more socialist, the U.S. more libertarian. Is it so surprising that we think libertarianism is the correct direction to go in?

No. Libertarianism is based on the idea of having a government which protects the rights of all citizens equally. Libertarians do not support anarchy. The primary objection to libertarianism is that we think that protecting individual rights is the only legitimate function of government.

My libertarianism may not be pure enough to approach this question correctly, but I will give you my personal view. Decision-making should be as decentralized as possible, with primacy going to the individual. Some things cannot be accomplished on an individual level. However, these things should not be moved higher up the governmental hierarchy than is absolutely necessary. Thus, I should decide what religion to practice or not practice. My family should make home-buying decisions. My community should decide school-related issues, etc.

Look at it like this: If you live in a community of 100, a state of 10,000, and a country of 1,000,000, (assuming you have one vote) then you have much more relative influence on decisions at the community level, less at a state level, and practically none at a national level. Doesn’t it make sense then to have decisions that affect your life as close to the community level and as far from the national level as possible?
jshore:

You’re example addresses true externalities. Libertarians do not claim that government should never get involved in such situations. The externailities you describe involve violations of others’ rights. As such, the government should hold you responsible for the damage. Thus, you should pay the price for harming others. Libertarians would expect this to be handled on a case-by-case basis based on the situation and the nature of the violations. We do not support preemptive punishments by means of massive regulation. In other words, we prefer to wait until you have hurt someone before we punish you. On the other hand, if you do hurt someone, we expect you to be punished and to be required to make amends.

If the externalities do not involve rights violations, then there’s no problem to solve, is there? If it does involve rights violations, then of course you need some sort of government to address it. We are not anarchists. But we don’t believe massive regulatory agencies are particularly good solutions. And we don’t believe in punishing people who have violated no one’s rights.

An excellent example. The difference? Corporations must compete with other corporations. Thus, if your corporation is more inefficient than mine, then I will be more successful. Over time, we will both become increasing efficient because of our desire to compete successfully, with or without government intervention. On the other hand, government has no competition, and thus no incentive to be more efficient.

If privatization involves granting a monopoly to some company, then nothing is gained. On the other hand, if competition is not actively prevented, then it will develop over time and improvements will result. Obviously, this won’t happen overnight.

Have you thought about how much of this paperwork is the result of government regulation of the industry?

I agree that we should work to make our government better. In my opinion, the way to improve it is to reduce the government to its Constitutional limits and return more power to individuals, who can achieve their goals because of the “magic” of the free market.

-VM

85

Smartass said:

Of course, even if some solutions are implemented centrally, multiple approaches can still be attempted (as with the combination of private insurance and federal disaster relief). Surely you don’t imagine that anyone here is supporting a Soviet-style marketless economy with total centralized control? No way; we merely don’t agree with your assumption that markets operating alone will always produce better solutions than a combination of markets and government.

Hey, I’m just trying to work with what you give me. I started this by pointing out that the government largely handles disaster relief because large-scale comprehensive disaster relief is so expensive that it’s not a paying proposition for corporations. You replied that it might be made profitable if government stopped messing with it, and muttered something about insurance. I argued (admittedly from a small amount of data, but I tried hard to compensate for that by understating the costs of the problem) that it’s completely unrealistic to project that the same amount of relief that the government now provides would be covered solely by voluntary contributions to for-profit insurance companies. You now seem to be saying, “Well, after a few good floods people will learn their lesson so the costs will go down. Besides, other unspecified solutions will emerge.”

Gosh, how reassuring. However, during the generations that people are learning that lesson (assuming you can really count on ever thoroughly educating all successive generations of a population not to take dangerous risks), probably thousands of flood victims will die, be reduced to poverty, or turn to crime. It seems to me that your Libertaria is very likely to look even more like a police state (with large numbers of law enforcement officials required to protect the persons and properties of wealthy citizens against the desperate rabble) than what we’ve got now.

Of course, if we have the same private dental insurance company, that’s exactly what I do; the actual cost of my dental care is less than the premiums I pay while the actual cost of yours is higher, so I am indeed helping pay for your new teeth. Overall, I think that’s a pretty good way to handle many of a society’s needs; and I don’t think it’s an intolerable infringement of anyone’s rights to have some of that sharing built into a universal social contract, instead of requiring individuals to maintain hundreds or thousands of separate voluntary contracts to attain the same ends.

Huh? What I just described was a case where the relationship between the price and the true value of a good was changed by a factor not taken into account during the price-setting: namely, whether or not other people also purchased the good. I have seen similar situations described by economists as “network externalities”: e.g., if you buy a telephone, your purchase becomes more valuable to you if other people also buy one, because a telephone’s more useful if lots of people have them. Would you be kind enough to explain to me slowly and carefully why my example of private flood insurance that becomes less valuable when very few other people buy it is not an equally valid example of a network externality?

Okay, let me get this straight. jshore points out a situation in which a government solution is actually more efficient and inexpensive than a market one…and you conclude that the reason has to be that the market’s being interfered with by the government?! Wow. And I thought Libertarians were supposed to be open-minded.

Well, I’m starting to get the feeling I’m repeating myself, and causing other people to do the same. And since some posters apparently smarter and better-informed than I have shown up arguing some of the same positions, I think I’ll bow out now and save the bandwidth for them and those who want to debate them. I’ll still look forward to learning more from reading the thread while it lasts.

Before leaving, though, it behooves me to thank the posters who took time and trouble to answer my questions, particularly Smartass, Libertarian, and Gilligan. I may not be convinced, but I’m certainly better-educated. In case anybody’s interested, here are some of the conclusions I’ve come to in the course of this debate:

"Freedom" perhaps has a more powerful emotional appeal in the abstract than the concrete. Nobody wants to be seen as an enemy of freedom or in favor of restricting freedom, but as a society we are so used to having a great deal of freedom that we’ve come to interpret it as meaning the absence of any coercion rather than as an alternative to de facto powerlessness. It’s ironic that we should think of starving people as being more free than wealthy people who are legally prohibited from letting others starve, but that’s what the emotional connotations of “freedom” mean to us.

Wealth is not finite, but people are. When we look at all the countless varieties of diet soda and electronic toys available in shopping malls, it seems very reasonable to assume that no matter what we ask for, somebody will eventually come along to sell it. We forget that there isn’t actually an infinite number of entrepreneurs to take advantage of all the opportunities offered by our societal needs, and that entrepreneurs will naturally compete for opportunities to make higher profits and ignore opportunities for lower ones. Sure, there may be some profit to be made by opening a second convenience store in an inner-city neighborhood to undercut the monopolistic prices of the store that currently dominates that market; but if there’s a bigger profit to be made in selling a new sex toy or microbrewed beer to affluent consumers, that first market niche can remain unfilled for a very long time.

Government plays a much more vital and beneficial role in society than I generally realize. Antigovernment rhetoric is such a commonplace throughout our society that (like most of us, probably) I’m used to dismissing government as primarily a source of problems. It isn’t till I start to explore issues such as the ones raised in this debate that I discover the surprising number of valuable effects of governmental institutions. I was particularly surprised to see how many of the “market successes” touted by Libertarians, in areas such as consumer movements and information technology, rely on federal and international efforts. I formerly had no idea, for example, of the centrality of EPA research in the anti-styrofoam campaign discussed in some earlier posts, nor of the important role played by the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Information Technology Laboratory and the FCC in setting technological standards. (Those of us who remember the more “libertarian” days of computer technology know that incompatibility was a much bigger problem back then; and of course the famously “libertarian” Internet originated in the Department of Defense!) Markets are tremendously efficient in some ways but tremendously inefficient in others, particularly in their readiness to ignore a long-term advantage in favor of a short-term one; there’s a lot to be said for having processes at the federal level to counter that tendency.

Much more citizen effort is needed to fix the many failures of government. All those nice benefits of large-scale coordination tend to get overlooked beside the many glaring inefficiencies and waste of the governmental process. Sure, this is partly because everybody enjoys complaining more than complimenting, but mostly it’s because the problems are real, severe, and frustrating. Almost none of us are doing as much as we should to fulfill our citizenship responsibilities of learning, teaching, and voting about important issues and the best ways to handle them. (And don’t complain that you just don’t have the time: do you think you’ll have the time to fill out two hundred insurance forms annually, do background checks on the dozen companies offering to sell you their food safety inspection service, attend the meetings of the town sewage and air quality and traffic signal and school construction committees, and read the prospectuses of three hundred basic research nonprofits explaining why their projects will be vital to your children’s future? You’ll have to, if government’s not there to handle any of those functions.) Yes, it’s absurd to think that we can really have a successful large and complex society without a good deal of centralized control; but Libertarians are actually doing us a favor by galvanizing us to realize what the government does well and fix what it does badly. Don’t know where to begin? Start out by taking a look at Project Vote Smart or the League of Women Voters and identify issues or candidacies that seem particularly important to you. Now get out there and make a difference!

Kimstu
“oh-h, say can you SEEEEE…” [fade out on background of waving flags]

86

Kimstu:

You’re almost at the core of how markets work. If solutions are wanted, then they will emerge. Markets will meet wants or needs that people are willing to pay for. Thus, if people want protection from disaster and are willing to pay for it, then the markets will offer various ways of achieving this protection.

Also, if people want to care for the poor, markets will produce solutions. This freedom to experiment with various solution strategies and to have various solutions attempted at once, in competition with each other, is the strength of free markets. It is the reason why, when you go to buy a TV, you have lots of choices rather than just one or two. It is funny to me that you think of this strength as a weakness. Your general contention is that there are some things that government just does better. I am certainly unconvinced of that.

And people accuse me of being apocalyptic. You are never going to understand libertarianism until you stop thinking of options as being mutually exclusive. This is only true of government solutions. Market solutions are able to be more fine-grained. Thus, there may be some areas that are just to risky to build houses. Others are a little risky. Still others are in the middle. If risks are small, I would expect standard insurance to cover disasters. If risks are large, I would expect few people to live there. If risks are in the middle, I would expect some sort hybrid solution, depending on what rewards come with those risks.

With a big difference. There are several competing companies offering this kind of insurance. This means that there is competition and choice. You are not required to have dental insurance.

I do. We have differing opinions. The advantage of my position is that it doesn’t place any legal requirements on you. The problem with your position is that it does place requirements on me.

If you don’t agree, that’s fine. But there’s no need to be ridiculous. I cannot believe you honestly think that this is what libertarianism is about.

Remember: Markets increase efficiency, not decrease it.

It is government functions that result in endless paperwork.

But this factor is taken into account in price-setting. That is how insurance works. If it were not taken into account, insurance companies would not be able to stay in business. This is why non-federally subsidized flood insurance is so expensive in flood-prone areas.

Insurance is not more useful based on how many people carry it. It’s less expensive based on how many other people carry it.

I did not conclude anything. The point is this: You cannot point to something as being a valid example of markets at work when it is that heavily interfered with by the government. There are other problems with this comparison–I stuck with the simplest one.

The key factor in markets is not profit; it is competition. Do you make decisions based solely on profits? Or do you make them based on the sum of your values? Market participants are not profit-seeking robots; they are people–in fact, you are one of them. Your scenario assumes that no one makes a decision based on anything other than profit. If that were true, then a libertarian society would indeed be the hell that liberals often describe. But then again, if that were true, so would any other society.

That is why I feel comfortable saying that in a libertarian society, people would not be left to starve. There will always be people who are more interested in doing good than in achieving riches. It is possible in a libertarian society to start a company solely for the purpose of helping the poor, and for that company to never earn a profit, if that is not what the owner is interested in. The key advantage, as opposed to the central government model, is that it is possible to have a bunch of companies like this, all with different ideas about how to solve the problem. In this way, there is competition and choice.

Libertarians do not maintain that organizations of this type are evil on their face. Without government funding, such organizations would still exist as necessary, and probably would not be so prone to produce research that is politically slanted.

This is not a function of markets, but of people. Markets care not for long- or short-term advantages. What you are actually saying is that people often ignore long-term advanatages in favor of short-terms ones, and we need parents…I mean, government…to protect us from our short-sightedness.

I guess we should all consider ourselves lucky to have people like you who are willing to violate our rights in order to keep us from making bad decisions.

That may be the most ridiculous statement I’ve ever seen anyone make with respect to libertarianism. If markets were that inefficient, nothing would ever work.

Now you’re talking. How 'bout not having governments do what they do badly?

And by the way, I don’t appreciate the implication that libertarian ideas are un-American. I seriously doubt you are more patriotic toward the USA than I am.

-VM

87

Sorry for the misunderstanding Smartass, I was just poking a little fun at my own civics-class exhortations (which I still sincerely mean, however! :)). I did not intend to imply that you don’t love your country.

Kimstu

88

Well…okay, then.

-VM