There are so many problems with this. You started out fine with don’t steal. I have problems with the rest of it:
- You cannot possibly go through life exercising your freedoms without bumping into other people’s freedoms. And it will always work out that those with the most power, whether it’s economic or otherwise, will tend to exercise their freedoms at the expense of the freedom of those without power. You see this happening with big companies squeezing the life out of individuals, whether it’s through not paying their employees a living wage, or destroying or poisoning rivers or even the oceans. IF you want to argue that governments do this also, yeah, they can. But at least we have more control over government.
- While I agree that money from taxes is not always spent to benefit those who pay taxes, and is more often than not, not spent effectively, I agree. But there are things that cannot be achieved without taxes that are public goods. Argue that taxes are too high, or that more of the money should go in one direction and less in another, I hear you. But taxation in a modern nation is necessary for infrastructure, for education, to monitor air and water quality as well as food quality, and as a check against people’s and big companies worst impulses.
- One of the worst disasters to ever occur was the privatization of prisons. Running prisons for profit created these huge conflicts of interest where people were jailed for profit for even minor crimes, and economic crimes (ie. being poor).
There are certain realities that libertarians refuse to look at, where competition doesn’t work or is not possible, where the public good is sabotaged instead of helped through leaving those things up to private enterprise. While I believe in capitalism in principle, far too often I’ve seen the damage that corporations do when they are allowed to operate unchecked. My own family was driven to poverty by medical bills, something that the government would never have allowed to happen in most other modern industrial countries.