Looks like it’s past time for “Libertarian Issue of the week #3” thread. My bad. I promise I’ll get it going over the weekend, and it’ll be either “Welfare” or “The Courts”.
Let’s debate California fiscal policies versus, oh I don’t know, how about Kansas?Since the libertarians are all so certain taxes are the cause of the financial difficulties.
Several people have already given the bottom-line answer (libertarians would want the government to focus on a limited range of functions, including courts for dispute resolution and redress of rights violations, thus freeing up more money for that by cutting or eliminating other areas of spending).
I’ll just correct one misconception that might be created by ITR champion’s digression into a rant about public employee compensation – a libertarian government would cut this expenditure in the aggregate by having a lot fewer government employees, but not necessarily cut (and perhaps even increase) compensation for the jobs that would still be under the government’s aegis. The current government compensation scheme tends to underpay in fields requiring high-level skills (e.g. judges and other court officers compared to private-sector lawyers), thus, a libertarian system where free-market competition would become more intense would probably need to pay more per capita for the remaining government workforce.
Why don’t you spell out the issue instead of just posting a drive-by link? And a cite would be nice that libertarians think that “taxes are the cause of the financial difficulties”, whatever “the financial difficulties” are in the first place.
Isn’t that what post #3 is all about?
There is a difference between a specific example (as post #3 was) and saying it’s a general stance that all taxes are always at the root of every woe, which I believe is what John Mace was getting at.
Direct response to **ITR champion’s **claim that low tax states have more money available than California. Since Sam Brownback and the Kansas legislature slashed taxes, the economy in Kansas has tanked hard-core. Tax revenue is down 45% from a year ago.
Kansas cuts taxes on the rich, and its revenues fall through the floor. That’s Obama’s fault, according to the governor. Obama raised taxes on the rich (through income tax hikes and Obamacare-related tax hikes), but federal revenues are through the roof and the deficit is plummeting. Anybody seeing a disconnect here?
I interpreted “the financial difficulties” (emphasis mine) as referring directly to California and the claim against it.
So completely off-topic. Can you guys take it to another thread? Thanks.
To put it in some rather stark numbers, here is a PDF of the 2014 budget for the state of Georgia (which I picked because hey, that’s where I live).
If Georgia became a Libertopian state, it would probably cut the funding for Education (51.5%), Health Care (20.9%), Transportation (4.3%), General Government (3.9%), and Human Services (2.6%). Presumably after the first year without that, they would pay off the current debt, thus also eliminating the 6.4% going to Debt Service.
That leaves Criminal Justice (9.2%), Judicial Branch (0.9%), and Legislative Branch (0.4%), for a total of 10.5% of the previous budget. Again, presumably Criminal Justice spending will go way down as drug laws, prostitution laws, and a whole host of other laws are eliminated. Let’s say it gets cut in half (which I am given to understand is about how many of the crimes are drug-crimes, but I will be happy to see a cite that says otherwise, and in any case the other crimes eliminated will push it down further).
That means under a Libertopian system, we could cut taxes by 90%, and increase spending on the judical system by 400%, and still do better than break even.
Now, that’s not a state that I would want to live in (I like my roads and schools, thank you very much), but that’s how the courts would be funded in a libertarian system.
I expect something like that scene in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress where the disputants pay any random passerby a small sum to arbitrate.
Thanks for the numbers! I definitely see how eliminating all of those budget items would free up a lot of judicial dough.
The society in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has evolved the judicial system it has because of their unique constraints - they aren’t allowed a ‘government’. Lunar Authority is the ‘government’, but allows the people to run their own society so long as they don’t challenge the Lunar Authority and so long as they make their grain quotas. Also, the lunar population is relatively small and separated into geographically dispersed ‘warrens’. Their informal judicial system may be the right setup for them, but another libertarian society under different constraints will evolve different mechanisms.
The best thing about that book is the amount of effort Heinlein put in to analyzing how societies evolve, the value social constructs play as adaptive mechanisms, etc. The libertarian message is that society has needs such as the protection of the young, the elderly, the sick, etc. In a civil society, the people WILL organize together to fulfill these needs. When the state steps in and does it, it causes displacement of private organization that may be more efficient.
For example, consider line marriages in the book. A line marriage is a social adaptation to two problems: The lack of a social safety net, and the relative scarcity of women. A line marriage provides a way for people to look after each other - rather than parents kicking children out of the home, then in turn having no place to go when they are infirm and can’t work, the families stay together in one long line of ‘spouses’ across generations. This allows them to build wealth, provide for the retirement of senior members and the raising of the young and care for the sick.
Societies also organize through social cues. A big problem in a society that is overpopulated with young single males is that they tend to get into a lot of trouble. In Heinlein’s lunar society, being invited into a line marriage or a clan is a massive boost to your standard of living and prospects for the future, and the young males are therefore strongly incentivized to maintain their best behavior - especially towards women.
What people don’t get about what a libertarian society would look like is that they imagine it as today’s society, except without all the safety nets. But society is an adaptive system, and if government retreats, other institutions rise to take its place.
The political problem is that some people won’t like the results, and therefore will always seek to use political power to steer things in the direction they favor. Heinlein’s book actually ended on a sour note - after all the work and sacrifice of a revolution, it became “Meet the new boss - same as the old boss” as the new leaders immediately began building a new controlling bureaucracy.