I once knew an extreme libertarian. For him, only the police and military were the only legitimate government roles. Even streets should be privately built and tolled. I regret that I never asked him about externalities. Cap and trade is one example, but an even better one is charging for the right to pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink.
Imagine we abolished the FDA. All drugs are at your own risk and you cannot trust anyone. Of course, some manufacturers might gain a reputation as trustworthy and you would stick to them. Or try. How do libertarians feel about copyright and trademark laws? I guess they like them since they love private property and they are that.
Forget Libertaria; where can I go in the real world to get free water? Is there a government anywhere that will not charge me even for the water I need to live, and that will not shut off my water service if I don’t pay?
Debating’s easy when one stacks the deck. It wasn’t private companies that put lead in the water in Flint, Michigan and Washington DC, it was those pesky governments. Indeed, the DC crisis brought to light misreporting by water agencies around the country, and “scientifically indefensible” claims by the CDC.
As for health care freedoms, suppose the single payer decides not to cover gender reassignment? Or requires gay people to go through conversion therapy as a precondition to obtaining care? Or denies coverage altogether to smokers or drinkers? Or immigrants? Or African-Americans? One can just as easily postulate that those pesky governments will not always be reasonable, and the question becomes, what do the people affected do when there is no alternative?
Then I suppose they can defy the law. Governments are rarely able to impose their will totally and absolutely. But just taking away government programs takes away options, and thus liberty.
People who want single payer health care seem to believe that the people holding the clipboards and rationing medicine have exactly the same values they do, and never consider what might happen if they don’t.
And your example is on point - people who need gender assignment surgery in Canada often pay through their own pocket to have it done in the States, because their own Province either disallows it completely or rations it so heavily that the waiting lists can be years long.
Of course, if the States also had the same single payer coverage, where can you go?
In theory the government has to answer to the people. If the people want something covered politicians can add it to their platform as something they will see done.
Not to mention we have plenty of examples of single payer systems (See: most OECD nations) and these fears don’t seem to be a reality.
If it is private companies providing care the people have far less ability to control what is or isn’t on offer.
And the argument you’ll get back (and which was successfully used in Canada) is that once you have a public system and a private system, all the best doctors will go to the private system and the rich people will get great care, and the rest of the public will get the dregs.
That happens to be the same argument opponents of school choice use. If you allow choice, the rich will sort themselves out into better schools, leaving the poor kids and the worst teachers behind.
So I have no faith that a public/private combination system available to everyone will be stable. But if it is, it’s certainly preferable to single payer. Canada’s health care system is now ranked 30th in the world, and I can tell you as someone who is getting older and has had to interact with the system more and more, that reputation is well deserved.
On the other hand, the two-tier systems like Britain’s NHS are also not doing very well. The most successful systems (such as Singapore’s) have a common characteristic in that they try to make everyone have skin in the game in terms of health care costs.
I think a system of single payer catastrophic coverage with a means-tested deductible and a completely private health system with gap insurance for other treatments would fix a lot of these problems. That’s essentially what dentistry is in Canada, and it seems to be one of the healthiest parts of our health care system, and has managed to avoid the cost explosions we’re seeing in the rest of the health care industry.
Lots of different nations have different health care systems. I don’t know which is best personally, nor do I know how to remove the negatives while maximizing the positives. William Hsiao has probably written a lot of good info about how to build the best health system possible, he helps design a lot of health care systems.
Also in the US we have medicare for the elderly, that is a two tier system and lots of people are content with the public medicare system.
Externalities are a result of a failure to adequately recognize property rights.
There is nothing market-based about a tax. Let’s leave the word “market” for voluntary interactions, and not allow statists to adopt it like they did the word “liberal” because it has a positive connotation.
So, we do need a Duke of the Air or Ogwash Oxygen Inc. to charge rent on polluters? I’m not clear on how enriching the Duke or Ogwash helps Joe Poorboy’s asthma, but maybe you’ll explain all this in a follow-up.
Please explain your market-based solution for how individuals can charge polluters for the damage they do to the air and water that passes through/over the individuals’ properties. Do they just send an invoice? Why would the polluter pay such an invoice?
Cap and trade looked like a market-based system when first proposed, and libertarians gravitated to it not as a libertarian solution, but as a solution that was at least better than having government set absolute limits on a per-business basis or direct which technologies must be used. The argument was that just setting a cap and letting the market sort it out was a better way to go than having governments make all decisions.
Then when various cap and trade programs were actually implemented, we realized that they were far from regular markets, that government was still heavily involved, and it became a giant corrupt rent-seeking operation in practice.
You could blame libertarians for being too utopian about it and looking at it from a high level back then. They never factored in how much corruption and state control would be there, but since hundreds of billions of dollars are involved, they should have.
Just to be clear, the corruption associated with cap and trade is mainly cheating by businesses, not corrupt governments.
But, yes, straight taxes on pollutants, e.g. a simple carbon tax, were always a better solution than cap-and-trade. That much was always clear, both to environmentalists and to intelligent libertarians. The problem is that that was politically impossible, mainly because it would impose a huge penalty on big polluters.
I’m not going to wade through a 50-page document. If you can synopsize it in a paragraph or two, at least sufficient to motivate me to skim the 50 pages, fine.
If not, I’ll have to assume that either you don’t understand Rothbard’s idea, or that there’s no idea there to understand.