No, we’re not talking about different people, we’re talking about different political structures and incentives.
In many cases, when government enters the economic space, it breaks down structures and institutions that regulate behavior in other ways. This makes it very hard or impossible to go back.
For example, when government created social security, it started a process which helped destroy support networks that existed to do the same thing. Mutual aid societies, extended families, even housing changed. Savings habits changed. Even attitudes towards moral choices (the virtue of thrift, for example) were watered down.
Now there is a culture of dependency on government. Private safety nets are gone. Family structures have changed. So it would be very, very hard to go back.
The same can be said for private fire services. Had the government never been involved, we can imagine all sorts of ways in which the needs for fire protection would have evolved through voluntary transaction. But it would require changes in attitude, the existence of evolved support structures and markets, etc. None of that exists today, so there’s no easy path to a free market fire service for large communities.
Small communities which never had public funding for fire services did evolve their own programs. My uncle was a volunteer fireman in his town, and I rode along on more than one call to a fire. The cost of the fire truck and other equipment was raised through donations, but the culture of the small town really frowns on people who won’t add their support. Peer pressure ensures a supply of volunteers. Neighborhood fire watches and reporting systems evolved and are effective.
Now, I’ll grant that this approach only works for very small communities, but my point is that if the federal government decided to create federal fire departments in every town and parachute in federal employees to run them, the whole culture of volunteerism would vanish. The fire department would become an entitlement, and the community would disconnect from it and instead just lean on it and make demands.
If you take the time to look, you can see market-oriented solutions to problems that government purports to solve anywhere where the government isn’t involved. Just have a look at the evolution of the internet, which has been relatively free from government interference. The explosion of information has led to better search mechanisms. The chaos of the original internet has evolved into many structures that serve small communities - like the SDMB.
The worry about the accuracy of bloggers and other bad information has led to the rise of trusted content aggregators and a very robust review culture that is far better at telling me which products are good and which are bad than the CPSC ever has. The risk of fraud and financial loss has led to the rise of Paypal and other intermediaries who protect consumers and smooth the flow of money. Fly-by-night retailers and scammers have an increasingly tough time of it as people learn to use vendor reviews and trusted sites to point them to businesses that have good practices.
I could go on. An entire economy has been created on the internet, and an entire social sphere, with hardly any government involvement at all. The result has been a robust, dynamic system that rapidly evolves to meet our needs, with surprisingly strong controls against fraud and coercion. It’s not perfect, but I can’t imagine a government-regulated internet being remotely as good.
If the government demanded that web sites be licensed and inspected for diversity requirements, ADA compliance, and accuracy of content, that web programmers have government licenses and certification, and that web standards would be approved by the government and their use mandated, we would have hobbled the internet in so much red tape and expense that it would be a pale shadow of itself. And none of those other institutions would have developed. If the government certified and licensed all web resellers, there would be no review culture because it would have been displaced.
If government controlled the internet as much as it controls brick-and-mortar business, we might be having a discussion where the ‘crazy libertarians’ would be saying that anyone should be free to open up a web business without interference, and you would be arguing that it’s impossible and that we’d be swamped by crooks and charlatans because the government is the only thing preventing it. And you’d be right - at that time.
