The New Road

Libertarianism

Libertarianism gets a lot of play nowadays. Primarily because conservatives like Ann Coulter now like to say they are Libertarians because conservatism has failed so badly. Libertarianism is an interesting idea; completely free markets, zero government, very few laws, no taxes. Basically the conservative cool kids, who don't do the Christian dogma thing, are Libertarians.

You would think on the face of it that I would love Libertarianism; zero taxes and you can smoke all the pot you want legally. But honestly, I find Libertarians arguments naive and simplistic. All the Libertarian arguments are suited to highly intelligent, skilled, successful individuals. It's not suited to a whole society, which contains people who may not have faired so well through no fault of their own.

Take people who are mentally retarded as an example. I've never heard a Libertarian present a reasonable idea for how a Libertarian state deals with members who are mentally retarded and unable to work.

The Libertarian ideal is that you work and make a livelihood for yourself. If you can work then you should find a charity that will support you. If you cannot work and cannot find a charity that will support you, then you die. There is no social safety net, at all. The one argument I have heard from Libertarians on the case of mental illness is that it doesn't exist and therefor it cannot be used as an excuse not to work. Thus a mentally retarded person is capable of work, but would simply not choose to and thus should die (except in case where they find a charity to support them.)

Not mentally retarded? Ok. Well, let's say you run your own business, but since it's a completely free market you are bankrupted and left in tremendous debt. Since there is no bankruptcy law in a Libertarian state, you need to find a charity, or die.

How about in cases of a disaster in your community, like one of the fires in southern California. In a Libertarian state, since there is no commons and no actual government there would be no firemen. Somebody might choose to create a fireman business and in that case they would come up to your street and have a little bidding war as to whose house they would protect. Heaven help you if you bid low because, bye bye house.

Imagine if you will Libertarian Louisiana. The chopper flies over your house, they pick you up off the rooftop. They winch you up into the chopper and present you with a credit card swiper. Either you pay the $10K for the service, or they throw you back into the drink.

Think of everything you take for granted on a daily basis; roads, streetlights, power, firemen, police, air traffic control, coast guard. All of this would be privatized and turned for a profit. So everything you didn't pay in taxes would be paid for at flexible market rates. Today you could happily pay $0.0001 per kilowatt hour, tomorrow you may have to pay $100 if the power company becomes a monopoly. Today you could pay only $0.10 a mile to drive to work on the private road, tomorrow you might have to pay $10 per mile as one company bought another and destroyed the other road to reduce competition.

There is such a thing as the commons, and the common good. Libertarians go too far. Viewing police and fire as privatized functions is nuts. And don't get me started on how they choose to handle the weakest amongst us. Libertarian ideals are dog eat dog taken to the extreme. It's not building a civil society, it's destroying what took us two thousand years to even try to approach.

Actually, saying it's "dog eat dog" is an insult to dogs. Dogs treat each other far better than a Libertarian society would have us treating each other.

Update: There is a strong Libertarian bent in the neo-con group that's running the White House. You hear it in the rhetoric; "Government so small you can drown it in a bathtub", "No taxes", "Government isn't the answer, it's the problem." The initial Katrina response was Libertarianism in action; it's not the federal government's problem, in fact it's no government's problem, those who could get out got out, those who didn't died. Problem solved. It's culling the herd, separating the weak from the strong.

Thankfully, this insanity is morally abhorrent to every decent sane human. You can't let someone die because they don't have a car, or because they don't have enough money to pay the heating bill. Libertarianism sounds great when everything is going well but it shows it's devoid of any moral center in times of adversity. The times when we need each other most and rely on our strength as a community to uplift us all.