For #3, I should probably be more specific:
In 2012, the U.S Government spent over $20 million training prostitutes in China to drink more responsibly on the job.
Alright, I was unaware of that, you’re right. But that doesn’t invalidate my point. The government funds some ridiculous research projects.
What do you mean by ‘welfare’? What percentage of illegal immigrants get it?
Of course you are aware that illegal immigrants pay much more into the system than they take out.
I agree – to a point. We need the military in various places to further the interests of the country.
Better pay ‘contractors’ than do the work ourselves.
Yeah, just try to take corporate welfare from oil companies and farmers. See how that works out.
How many of them are not needed?
You’ll have to take that up with Congress.
Operational security often precludes sending someone by Coach.
All of those are necessary.
So… government is responsible for monopolies? And without it, there won’t be any?
No, it reflects what individuals want. Which has nothing to do, many times, with what a population needs, and is often contrary to those needs.
That’s the problem with most “libertarian” doctrines: they mistake the whim of the individual for the will of the population. Reaching nominal adulthood and still thinking your whim rules is the hallmark of the intellectually juvenile.
‘Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.’ – William Penn
If getting the facts that supported your point wrong doesn’t invalidate your point, then there’s something wrong with the way you arrive at points.
I used one bad example, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of others…
Agreed. You’ve used many bad examples so far. 
My top two picks for the generic Libertarian motto:
“I don’t wanna and you can’t make me”
or
“I didn’t write that newsletter”
[QUOTE= rEVOLutionary]
I am against socialism, I am pro-capitalism, and, depending on if I want to be realistic or idealistic, an anarchist.
[/QUOTE]
No-one who is pro-capitalism is an anarchist. This is not a True Scotsman argument, this is a push-back against redwashing by the Libertarian fifth column in the guise of “anarcho-capitalists.” stop trying to co-opt our movement.
Many years ago, I had a friend who was a solid libertarian. He never claimed there was freedom of movement. As a matter of fact, he professed to believe that all roads and all streets should have tolls. If my property went to middle of the street (it doesn’t, but that sort of thing does happen), then I could pave it and charge a toll. Or not, my choice. I could instead put up a fence. As far as he was concerned, collective government had only two functions: police and armed forces. I never asked him about fire protection, water, sewage, but he presumably thought they ought to be private. As far as he was concerned the only rights any of us had were the physical safety and property rights. Why property rights were raised above, say, right to health care, was not clear, but I gather he was just parroting Ayn Rand (whom I have never read).
He got a PhD in mathematics, then went to law school (at which point I lost track) but I googled him a couple years ago to discover: he became a DA in LA; and he is still active in Libertarian circles.
You do know that back in the 1800s, when the market was a lot less regulated that it is now, monopolies were pretty much standard? (Only they got around that by calling them “trusts”)
They’re so cute when they’re young and naive.
Wasn’t Ayn Rand? Based on the ending of Atlas Shrugged, anyway.
Or, in other words, the poor are free to die.
Translation: anyone who can’t afford it doesn’t deserve an education. Way to keep the poor in their place…
Or health care providers will get together in a monopoly and raise prices, since in a laissez-faire market there’s nothing stopping them.
Well, yes and no. There’s quite a few who think they are; they don’t seem able to realize that capitalism needs a government to keep the system running.
The standard libertarian argument is that all monopolies are enforced by the government. Therefore, the way to break up those monopolies is to cut back on government (since government cannot possibly be a solution to the problem).
“Welfare” for illegal immigrants, to the extent that it isn’t an idea entirely made up from whole cloth, actually is a net benefit fiscally.
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Funding for scientific inquiry, including basic science, is also a net benefit to society. To the extent we want to do any such funding, there will be a few instances of apparently “retarded” projects, but their costs is negligible.
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Why do you think you have the expertise to understand what studies are “retarded” and what aren’t? Are you an expert in canine physiology?
At the level we actually provide foreign aid, this basically has no impact on our budget, which means that our foreign aid expenses are really too low, not too high.
Used as a catch-all term, it has no meaning at all.
What makes you think the number of federal workers is “ridiculous”? Do you have any actual analysis to back that conclusion up?
More items that will have zero effect on the overall budget.
Another generalized statement that has zero meaning.
So, pretty much nothing.
Civilian: Yes, yes. I understand completely. In fact, here’s ten-thousand for the investigation, your thousand for catching him, twenty-grand for the DA’s indictment, and three grand for each juror to convict – or just give it all to the judge if it doesn’t go to a jury. Oh, and here’s the name of the guy who killed my wife. Do YOU understand?
Desk Sergeant: Yes indeed, Mister Luster – and may I say my wife loves your great-grandfather’s line of cosmetics. She wears the nail polish all the time. taps fingers and stares
Civilian: Oh! I almost forgot. Here’s a small tip for helping me file this crime report.
Desk Sergeant: Another grand! I’ll have the boys get on it tonight, sir!
You’re very right, and that seems to be a very common (key?) argument of many libertarians.
What you (and they) don’t seem to understand is that, while Smith, Locke, and Hobbes contributed elements of a great theory that was adopted by early Ex-Pats from Europe (most notably England) it saw its practical implementation crumbling by the time the Colonies in America started banding together and it became subverted and perverted and undermined so much by the start of the 20th century that the youngest President of the United States felt the need to break up America’s giant monopolies in order Promote the General Welfare (and, believe it or not, he was a Republican).
Seriously, though, the theory of free-market capitalism assumes full access to full information, unmitigated competition among vendors, and full mobility among consumers. That’s fine when you and I are selling lemonade from our backyard lemon trees at either end of the block, but it doesn’t take into account mass-media disinformation in the wake of Citizens United or collusion between vendors or commodity cartels or sound-bite slinging spin-doctors or international megacorporations or ex-politician lobbyists – or dozens of other factors in the modern world that didn’t exist when the Theory of Capitalism was dreamed up.
For that matter, purely theoretical anarchy and communism work great as well – but real-world implementations are no better than real-world Libertarianism. The problem is that those pesky humans get involved and screw things up.
You’re also right that there are a lot of stupid research projects that get funded. But it’s the job of the scientists to review each others’ proposals and decide which projects deserve funding. After all, it sounds pretty stupid to spend years trying to make rubbing alcohol into a gelatinous form when the liquid version is perfectly fine in the 50-cent bottles. But today hand-sanitizers make millions for the businesses that grabbed that invention.
–G!
One of the great scientists (I thought it was Einstein, but can’t find it in a collection of his quotes) once said,
“We do the research for the sake of research.
It’s up to engineers and businessmen to figure out what to do with our discoveries.”
To be fair (?), unlike conservatives, libertarians are quite serious when they say they want to just shut huge swaths of government down. So I take rEVOLutionary at his word, and imagine that he has quite the long and specific list of government agencies that he’d happily use a magic wand to just wave out of existence, dumping all of its duties and responsibilities onto private entities and the free market. Hell, I just assume he’d destroy 90-95% of them and just be done with it. So I think his statement has plenty of meaning.
Whether it’s a good idea is, of course, another thing entirely.