Jeez, I just listed a few of them. How much support for Obamacare do you suspect you’d find across the wide swath of various libertarians?
Circular argument is circular.
What, this?
What do you think actually would happen, if all that “micro-managing” (which is moderate here compared to some countries doing very well, and absent from no country that is doing very well) were to stop?
What does that last part mean? You sure use purty language, but I’m struggling to understand what that means.
Does it mean “You have more liberty and freedom…whoops, you aren’t capable of making it on your own…so now you want something from me?”
Is that what that means? Is that what it means to be ‘accountable to a democratic model’?
We would have more freedom, and have more of our money back.
Isn’t that enough?
No, considering what that money pays for now.
“Why are there no libertarian countries?”
Because that would be an oxymoron. Libertarians are about themselves, first and always foremost. What is this “country” you speak of? Sounds like some kind of communist plot to me… 
I’ll bite.
- What does that money pay for, and what freedoms have we given up, that justify the continued and expanding role of the state?
Hint: As Sam says above so eloquently, there are some. But I’d like you to articulate what you think they are.
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Double points to you for also articulating what things the <insert candidates/party you haven’t voted for, or will never vote for, in here> wanted to have as part of their platform, that you do not want the government to do.
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Triple points to you for atriculating a coherent reason why it is right and proper for the government to exercise control, spending and authority over point 1 above, but not point 2 above.
People need to stop with the juvenile assertion that every regulation or law is a freedom given up. For most, one freedom given up is another freedom received, or merely freedom transformed.
Regulating health standards at a restaurant means you as a restauranteur loses the freedom to use rancid ingredients to save a few bucks, but for the consumer, it means the freedom to go out to dinner without bringing your own E. Coli testing kit. I don’t want ANYONE to have the freedom to use expired food, only those already safely ensconced in their 1 percenter cocoons don’t have to worry about that, so of course libertarians tend towards the rich and the already-powerful.
What they won’t admit, or can’t even fathom because they are trapped in their bubbles, is that the vast vast majority of people would rather have the freedom of regulation than the freedom of anarchy (and no, don’t point out that libertarianism isn’t anarchy, I know that. In this context, anarchy is a substitute for the chaos of deregulation). I feel more free when I know the food I eat, the products I buy, and the roads I travel on won’t kill me because some rich guy’s trying to save a few bucks. Regulation frees me from having to worry about that because I, like 99% of people, do not have the resources of the government to ensure that everything I consume is safe and tested
Regarding “freedoms,” see post #129. The money pays for defense, policing, public schools, Medicare, Social Security, AFDC, OSHA, the FDA, and a whole lot of other things no sensible person would want to give up.
Require an ultrasound where the woman has to look at the images as precondition for abortion, that’s just one.
Simply because point 2 is in no sense a good idea. Leaving aside for the moment the question of reproductive choice as a constitutional right, the difference otherwise is not the propriety of regulation but its content.
And – once again – look around the world, at all the countries where things in general go as well as or better than they go in the U.S. One thing you won’t find in any of them is minimal government.
Pretty much what the hardcore zero-government faction actually holds.
Well, you can look at it another way - if you look at the top countries, how many of them are heavy on the social democracy as opposed to those that embrace a more limited form of government?
Canada used to under-perform the U.S. substantially. Then we reduced the size of our government by 20% while you increased the size of yours, and now we’re doing better than you are.
There is plenty of evidence that larger government correlates to slower GDP growth. Romer and Romer found that when you separate out endogenous effects, 1% increase in taxation lowers GDP growth by 3%. This paper shows a negative correlation between size of government and GDP growth.
According to the Heritage Foundation and the Fraser Institute in Canada, the top 10 countries with the most economic freedom are:
- Hong Kong.
- Singapore
- Australia
- New Zealand
- Switzerland
- Canada
- Chile
- Mauritus
- Denmark
10 United States
Of those 9 countries that allow more economic freedom than the U.S., do you see any that are doing worse economically or socially? Of those, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Switzerland now have higher per-capita GDP’s than does the U.S., despite the U.S. having a pretty good lead over all of them 20-30 years ago or so. Chile has been the bright spot in South America, while the governments beloved by the left such as Venezuela have become economic basket cases.
Canada used to have a substantially smaller per-capita GDP than the U.S., back when we had a large government and nationalized industries. Now our dollar is at par and our per-capita GDP is almost caught up with yours.
In Europe, the big social democracies are floundering. France is in terrible trouble, and flirting with recession while the debt is skyrocketing and taxes are being increased. The UK is not doing much better. On the other hand, Australia and New Zealand are near the top of the OECD rankings for economic growth, and they are at the top if you exclude the smaller, poorer countries that can be expected to grow fast.
Yeah, a bunch of dystopian hellholes, those freer countries.
As a Canadian, I have first-hand experience with both models. From the 1970’s until the start of the 1990’s, our country was run along a more statist, social democratic model. We had large state industries, high taxation, plenty of government ‘investments’ in the economy, grand industrial plans, expansive welfare programs, etc. The result was structural unemployment near 8%, a mounting debt, a government that was consuming more than half our our GDP, and a standard of living that trailed the U.S. by about 30%. Our dollar was worth 65 cents at one point, and was chronically at least 20% below the U.S. dollar in value.
Starting in the 1990’s we elected a series of governments that focused on reducing welfare, shrinking the size of government, and paying down our debt. we went from a debt to GDP ratio of over 70% down to about 30%, and from 10% of GDP annual deficits to surpluses or small deficits. The government’s share of the economy declined from 53% to 35% - the largest decline in the modern world, I believe.
What was the result? Our dollar is at par, our standard of living has risen to U.S. levels, our debt load is maintainable, our pensions fully funded. Before these pro-market reforms, our unemployment rate had spiked as high as 14%, and was at 12% before we started major economic reforms, at which point it began to decline down to below 6%. Today, our unemployment is 7.1% - better than the U.S., while we used to chronically lag 2% behind. And we’re creating jobs like crazy - in May we created 95,000 jobs, which is astounding considering that those are the kinds of numbers the U.S. is seeing with a 10X larger population base and starting from a higher unemployment rate in the first place. Given the difference in populations, the U.S. would have needed to create one million jobs in May to match Canada’s gains.
By the way, most of our job gains were full-time, private sector jobs. Not jobs created by government ‘stimulus’ or job ‘gains’ created by converting one full-time position into two part-time positions, as the U.S. data is showing. Also, a lot of these jobs went to young people, whereas the U.S. is having a hard time employing its youth.
So getting back to the notion that we should be studying libertarianism vs progressivism as directions to take the economy from where it is today, just what do you think the evidence shows? If the U.S. wants lower unemployment and better standards of living, would it be better to make the government bigger, raise taxes, and introduce more regulations, or would it be better to shrink the size of government and implement reforms that give individuals more economic freedom? We don’t have to discuss Communism vs Libertopia here - let’s just talk about the correct direction the country should be moving in.
Those nations have two things in common, a productive capitalist economy, and a class of people who manage to live off the prosperity created under such a system by taking advantage of the monopoly of force. A libertarian nation would merely have the first thing.
Yes, but they’re called “capitalists,” not “politicians” or “civil servants.”
There will be no capitalists in a libertarian nation?! That must be some new formulation of the ideology.
Can I play?
Forcing you into a job frees you from having to look for one.
Taking all your income and giving you a standard ration frees you from having to compete against everyone else.
Taking away all your choices frees you from the consequences of making bad ones.
Putting you in jail means freedom from having to worry about where you’re going to sleep and whether you can make your rent payment.
I get it. Freedom is slavery. War is peace.
A) you’re making the assumption that government regulation is absolute protection from food poisoning. So I’m guessing that if I google ‘food poisoning’ I won’t be able to find a single case since the start of government regulation of the food industry, right?
B) you’re also assuming that there are no other mechanisms to keep tainted food out of the marketplace. Here’s the scoop: Food poisoning was more common in the 19th and early 20th century, but it wasn’t because of lack of regulation - it was because of lack of refrigeration.
C) There are plenty of markets that are almost wholly unregulated, and yet maintain very high levels of quality and safety. I mentioned this before, but for historical reasons SCUBA diving equipment is almost completely unregulated. That includes the whole chain of supply from the gear down to the boat tours. And yet, SCUBA has an incredibly high safety record despite being a fundamentally dangerous activity with critical gear needs. How is this possible?
So, the people of the Soviet Union were perfectly happy to trade off their freedom for the safety and quality of government-supplied goods?
Would you consider the current consumer marketplace in the U.S. to be ‘chaos’? Most of it is unregulated, you know. Is the computer industry in ‘chaos’? There is almost no government regulation of safety or efficacy in that space. Just how difficult is it for you to navigate all that chaos and find a decent computer or phone? Hell, there aren’t even minimum education requirements or professional licensing standards for computer programmers, and large chunks of your life are being controlled or aided by software. Doesn’t that bother you? Do you think we’d have a better computer industry today and better software if programmers were forced to go through the kinds of certification and licensure we require of hairdressers, let alone lawyers and doctors?
If you want to see the market in all its chaotic action, look no further than the internet. I’m not talking about the backbone - that’s just the roadwork. I’m talking about complex structure of economic activity, which has emerged almost completely without any government guidance or regulation whatsoever. And you can see some of the negative results of that - spam E-mail, viruses, porn, sites of questionable accuracy, scams. Sure, that all exists. But look what else exists: Amazon, and Netflix, and Paypal, and eBay, and a million sites allowing people to find information or buy products in their small niches. Independent artists are thriving on the internet. This board and others like it have created entire new models of social interaction.
How can such a thing exist without a central planner? How is it that with a modicum of care I can safely use my credit card online? How do all these web sites talk to each other without government standards? How did all this happen so fast?
The answer is that innovation in the digital space has been unencumbered by regulators and inspectors. In the brick and mortar world it can take months in some places just to get a business license or get an approval to put up a sign. Infrastructure can be tied up in environmental regulations and approvals for years. Business ideas are left untried because people don’t have the time, money, or wherewithal to deal with the myriad regulations and requirements required to get started.
But on the web, I can have a good idea in the morning, set up a web site in the afternoon, and be in business. I don’t have to worry whether I’m meeting diversity requirements, or whether my faucets are an inch too high for the Americans with Disabilities Act. I don’t have to file reams of paperwork with governments starting from the city, the state, and the feds. I don’t have to wait until a government inspector goes through my code and declares it ‘safe’ for the internet. What do you think would happen to innovation on the internet if we had to jump through the same kinds of hoops that Brick and Mortar companies face?
In an economy unencumbered by heavy regulation, change can happen more quickly. Ideas can be tried and succeed or fail. We can iterate faster. Yes, there are some downsides. If you get to a certain low level, maybe the downsides even outweigh the benefits. But we’re nowhere near that point now.
According to this study there is a direct (not necessarily causal) correlation between the size-of-government and the people’s happiness.
You need to flesh out your class theory a bit. Yes (crony) capitalists live off the productivity of legitimate capitalists in the capitalist system. They use the “civil servants” and “politicians” to accomplish this. In libertarian class theory the exploiting class includes crony capitalists, politicians, and to a lesser extent the beneficiaries of government welfare programs. The exploited include capitalists who don’t benefit from state intervention and the working class.
No, there will be capitalists. Crony capitalists would exist to a smaller extent under a libertarian state and would be nonexistent in an anarchist society.
You do realise that any serious attempt to make the US more like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, and even Switzerland in major policy areas, like health, would involve serious interventions opposed by libertarian first-principles?
You can but you won’t be good at it. 
There is absolutely no reason to believe that one is more free if they are constantly subjected to the whims of corporations that can kill them if it harms their bottom line. All of the things I listed are rational things that people should be free from having to worry about. Silly examples like being a homeless bum with no responsibilities are laughable distractions to the issue at hand. One is more free when regulations exist, and I’m glad most people want it that way too. Your ideal of a libertarian utopia doesn’t exist in the real world. It hardly exists in fantasy worlds either. And the rest of your post takes hyperbole to such new uncharted levels that I’d need a map to figure out where you’re coming from. :rolleyes: