# What do Libertarians think should happen when disasters strike? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 12, 2012, 5:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-libertarians-think-should-happen-when-disasters-strike/640758 "2012-11-12T05:22:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Hershele\_Ostropoler](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e47c2d/32.png) [@Hershele\_Ostropoler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hershele_Ostropoler)\ **Post date:** [November 14, 2012, 6:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-libertarians-think-should-happen-when-disasters-strike/640758/121 "2012-11-14T06:45:30Z")
> [@John\_Stamos\_Left\_Ear](#): > > So when you donate blood you get to say who gets it? When you donate food you get to say who eats it? When you donate money, you get to know who it is directly helping? Seems to me there are degrees of how much control you have no matter who is getting the money or donations. So it would appear. You are a customer of the charity, and if you don’t like what they’re doing with the money, you can give thm a very real incentive to change it. I don’t regard this as a point in favor of private charity. ---
**Author:** ![rogerbox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/76d3ee/32.png) [@rogerbox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rogerbox)\ **Post date:** [November 14, 2012, 7:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-libertarians-think-should-happen-when-disasters-strike/640758/122 "2012-11-14T07:11:35Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > But one of the unspoken assumptions in this thread seems to be that if government doesn’t organize relief, no one else will. That’s YOUR assumption, I highly doubt ANYONE on this thread thinks that NO volunteers will help with disasters, that is your ridiculous strawman (which you are too afraid to even make by the pre-emptive “unspoken” copout). We are saying not ENOUGH aid will come, not quick enough, and more people will DIE if there is no government aid. And that’s self evident. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [November 14, 2012, 9:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-libertarians-think-should-happen-when-disasters-strike/640758/123 "2012-11-14T09:04:38Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > First of all, very few libertarians are opposed to building codes - especially in areas where damage to one building can affect another. > > Second, the San Fransisco earthquake was a hundred years ago. Do you know what else was worse 100 years ago? EVERYTHING. And that’s not because of a lack of large government, it’s because people were ooorer. These types of arguments from the past are very annoying to libertarians. Whenever a discussion of libertarianism comes up, someone is sure to make this argument: “Dickensian London sucked. There was smaller government then. Therefore, smaller government makes things suck.” I’m sure you can see the myriad logical flaws in that kind of argumentation. Even when it comes to regulation, the amount of regulation we can tolerate today is largely a function of our wealth. Regulation costs money, and if you’re poor enough, you just can’t afford it. The reason for building codes is that the free market can not be trusted to build safe buildings. Same for EPA, OSHA, and the SEC. If you admit this, then it is just a matter of how much regulation we need, which is certainly not a settled thing. We’ll get to San Francisco later, but suffice to say that the Federal government, in the form of the army, saved the day with resources that California could not provide. As for London, the point is that when government is not there the private sector does not step up - and cannot step up. There were charities back then, of course, but they couldn’t feed all the poor. When has the private sector been able to deal with this? There are still the poor, but at least there aren’t the starving in liberal democracies. As for regulation, I’d say that in many if not most cases it is economically a net positive. A bit more regulation 6 years ago ((kind of like you had in Canada) could have save hundreds of billions of dollars of lost wealth. Yeah, the banks profits would have gone down. Tsk, tsk. It is not a matter of affording them, it is a matter of counting all the externalities and rejecting the arguments of the companies that do lose by no longer being able to throw costs off on the general public. > [@](#): > > The government can recommend until it’s blue in the face, but people respond to real incentives, not to pleas and suggestions from authorities. This is one of the first rules of economics. You can ask people to save more, or to eat less red meat, or to stay in school longer. But they won’t until there is a real incentive for them to do so. And so long as government promises to protect them from bad things, they will cease to protect themselves. When I mentioned government, it was just to note that the government was not against the self-reliance you like (and I like) and in fact supports it. No government person checks my garage for water or even my gas valve for the turnoff wrench I’ve chained to it. What real incentives to the rural folks have that are greater than mine? > [@](#): > > Yeah? And how do you feel about standing in gas lines because the government imposes price controls and prevents the market from efficiently allocating resources? I wonder how the people in Katrina felt when their government told them all to head to the sports stadium, then ignored them once they were congregated there? > > No discussion of libertarian answers can be complete unless we also look at the failure of government, and the misguided policies that make it harder to recover from disasters. The primary one is the absolute refusal by government officials to allow prices to seek their own level. One of the primary market mechanisms for disaster management is the price system. It ensures that supplies are available to people with the highest need, that additional supplies are rushed into an area that needs them, etc. Governemnts almost _always_ short-circuit this with ‘anti-gouging’ laws that are destructive and counter-productive. I lived in Louisiana and I am not going to claim that all government, especially Louisiana government, is efficient. Your statement is just as silly as someone claiming that Enron shows we should move to socialism. Bush FEMA was inefficient also, but we solved that by kicking the Republicans out. You realize that gas lines, odd-even rules, or letting prices get set by gougers are all forms of rationing. Your system does not allocate to the people with the highest need, but to the people with the most money. It may be shocking, but they are not synonymous. > [@](#): > > After Katrina, there was a huge spike in demand for things like generators and water pumps. The market responded to this by driving up the price of these goods, and that in turn caused people in nearby unaffected areas to buy those goods and transport them into the area - until the government stopped them because it wasn’t ‘fair’. Anti-gouging laws are the best example of how governments can make a problem worse through ‘feel good’ legislation and the ignorance of elected officials. Did they stop them coming in, or just coming in at too high a price? BTW, during WW II was OPA and ration cards immoral? Should we have just let the market set the price, so the rich could get all they wanted of everything and everyone else get little? > [@](#): > > I just gave an example: Wal-Mart. And if anti-gouging laws were struck down, many businesses would stock more goods needed in disasters, because they could be sold for higher prices if disaster struck. So you’d have more supplies in the area in the first place. I believe that before Sandy a lot of hardware stores in the North stocked up on tons of supplies needed rapidly - without gouging. Stocking within a potential disaster zone might not be a good idea. Preparing just outside is better - and it can be done without gouging. > [@](#): > > I think you under-estimate just how much charity businesses engage in. They do it for many reasons: to improve their brand, to improve the morale of their work force (everyone wants to work for a company that is seen as being a good corporate citizen), to protect their own assets and markets, etc. My company is constantly pushing us to engage in more charity. It has matching programs for employee contributions. It gives us several days off per year to volunteer for charitable work like Habitat for Humanity. It is even involved in disaster relief efforts. I think not. I’ve spent my time pressed into United Way service. Some companies are better than others. My last one was pretty good - for this one I used up the skimpy matching funds they provide for the year in two checks. But businesses owe it to their stockholders to do as much charity as makes sense, and no more. Private people like Gates are not under any such restriction. But none of it is enough to cover the need, alas it never has been. And it may or may not be allocated to where the real need is, which goes to sexy stuff like floods. > [@](#): > > And it’s not hard to imagine at all that a community might band together and set up volunteer emergency services and all the rest. For larger communities and regions, municipal and state governments can set up disaster relief efforts. Libertarians are much less opposed to government at the local and state level, because people ultimately have the option of changing locations if they don’t like local government. > > What a surprise - the U.S. government has low taxes, and the U.S. people are [among the most charitable in the world](http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/sep/08/charitable-giving-country#_). So yes, I AM claiming that public charity displaces private charity, and that higher taxes result in lower amounts of private charity. As Colbert said, hard to do when your region is under water. The San Francisco (and California) governments both did good jobs - but they didn’t have the tents or the resources. Ditto governments for Sandy, especially now that governments are strapped and don’t have reserves for this kind of thing. Since we are talking taxes, the only column that counts on your cite is the first with percentage of people giving. There the US doesn’t do so well. And helping a stranger? That is a weird metric. I’ve tried to find data on charitable giving over time, but I’ve only found some references saying that growth now is slow, nothing like the high tax '90s. However I think this is a measure of the economy, not the tax rate. > [@](#): > > I already mentioned this - Dickensian London sucked because it was POOR. Can you point to another major city in the same era that had better standards of living because of stronger government? Because comparing the living standards of hundreds of years ago to modern living standards makes for a lousy comparison. People are naturally poor. Not having strong governments didn’t make them richer, did they? I’d say that forbidding child labor, limiting hours, and the minimum wage all improved living standards - maybe not for the tycoons, but for most. Our living standards have improved as government has grown. > [@](#): > > And I might remind YOU that this is a load of nonsense. The only thing developed inside of government were the basic protocols, of which there were plenty of competitors. And there was a LOT of resistance within the government and academia (mostly by liberals) to keep the internet from going commercial. A lot of people back then felt that ‘crass commercialization’ of the internet would destroy it. At the time it was commercialized, _no one_ knew what it would become. I obviously mean government funding, not that direct government employees did much. I first used the ARPANet in 1974 or so. Some of my software went to BBN to be used on the Lockheed SUE which was used as an early IMP. And I was a heavy user before there were PCs. I heard plenty of people complaining about commercialization - with no domain addressing there is no spam. But I’d hardly call it a lot of resistance, and if there was any within government it escaped my notice. Academia sure. > [@](#): > > The structure of the modern internet has been driven almost entirely by market forces. It is the most unregulated market in the world, by far. Anyone is free to set up a web site or offer services online. Taxes are low or nonexistent. There are no public employee unions of programmers controlling access to the infrastructure. No internet planning boards determining what the ‘correct’ content should be. No zoning laws preventing web sites from looking or behaving how their owners choose. No government inspectors of code quality, no enforcement of the ADA or Davis-Bacon act requirements that only union programmers be used for web sites that serve government. > > The internet is a nearly-perfect example of ‘libertopia’ - a creation of spontaneous order driven by market demands rather than by central planners. And yet, it handles its own disaster preparations, it has standards that are enforced by the market, and it has created trillions of dollars in wealth. It also has some problems like spam and viruses, but even there market forces are working to control it. It is a great model in that government got it started and then private enterprise took it over. Just like space should go. Guess what - I’m not a socialist, just someone who sees the utility of both forces. > [@](#): > > By the way, Squarespace was based in New York, and they never suffered any downtime. Do you know why? Because they had TWO backup generators. One in the basement, and one on the roof. The basement one flooded, so the Squarespace owners enlisted help from volunteers and employees and set up a ‘conga line’ to move gasoline to the rooftop generator to keep the data center running. And now, after the experience of losing one of their generators, they are setting up a redundant server farm in a different geographic location to isolate them from any local disaster. They are doing this to win market share, not because the government told them to. They are only now setting up redundant servers? Plenty of companies offer fail over services, and have for ages. If they just figured out this is a good idea now, they are way behind the curve. > [@](#): > > Are you kidding? You already mentioned CompuServe, which _already_ had a packet-switched network up and running nationally. BBS’s were evolving rapidly into a constellation of networked hubs. There were MANY competing network topologies and technologies, any one of which could have emerged as the standard for the internet. The government simply got there first because it was the largest. Had the government never had a thing to do with anything digital, we’d still have an internet today, and it would look much the same as it does now. The names of the protocols would be different, and they might have functioned slighly differently, but the basic needs for such a protocol were obvious. No, the government got there first because it was first. They were developing it long before there was any consumer interest, even from the first primitive PCs. Would any of the private solutions scale? Not clear. Maybe Microsoft, after it achieved monopoly power, could have enforced a standard. Unclear. The fact remains that government, which can do nothing right, did it right. And long before a commercial need. > [@](#): > > Hell, there were even alternatives to HTML at the time. I was writing full graphic online pages in a language called “RIP-Script”, which was just as rich as HTML at the time, or even more so. My own company had a google-like text search product I wrote that we were selling to companies like Microsoft, which had set up huge BBS systems to provide tech support. PLATO and the Tutor language had hyper-linking in 1974 - I used it. html is not all that different from runoff in the larger sense. > [@](#): > > Despite what I just said about the internet, I don’t really disagree with this. As far as government interventions go, spending money on infrastructure and basic research is the least objectionable. The biggest argument against it is that ‘infant industries’ are hard to tell from ‘commercially viable’ industries, causing government to overstay its welcome. So for example I can admit that NASA helped bootstrap the space program, while also recognizing that today it’s totally incapable of competing for LEO launch and heavy lift with the private market, yet the government is still planning to build new LEO rockets and heavy launch systems to displace the private market that has already proven its capability to deliver those services better and far less expensively. I was a reviewer for the NSF small business program, which I think is a total waste of government money. Congress, under pressure from business I suppose, uses it to give money to small businesses and not those pointy headed academics. If the plans were good, they could get VC funding. That is one government program I’d cut in a second. So we pretty much agree. In space it is time for business to take over getting to orbit - maybe the moon. > [@](#): > > No, you made an assertion, and backed it up with personal anecdote. Actual disaster planners say that’s not true, and that the average city is only a day or two away from major food and water shortages because people DON’T save. Just how much extra food do you think the apartment dwellers in Manhattan have on hand? Probably enough for a snowstorm. This has never happened to NY before, so you’d hardly expect them to plan for it. The reason we do it in California, not just me, is that we can expect an earthquake some time. > [@](#): > > It’s not a big stretch to assume that, absent government earthquake codes, private insurance companies would set up the equivalent of Underwriter’s laboratories to demand and inspect for compliance with their own building guidelines for earthquake resistance. There was insurance in 1906. As I mentioned, no one really sells earthquake insurance. They did have fire insurance - and the insurance companies said - your home was knocked down by the quake and was worthless when it burned. Too bad. > [@](#): > > It’s you who keeps bringing up the 19th century examples. My examples would be more along the lines of the internet, Hong Kong, and Singapore. We have a friend from Hong Kong who was damn glad to get out and go to NY. I’m not sure she’d agree about its splendor. But her parents weren’t rich. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-do-libertarians-think-should-happen-when-disasters-strike/640758.md?page=6)