The questions below, which I received from a liberal curious about left-libertarianism, are fairly typical. The common thread running through the left-libertarian response is that most of the evils currently remedied by the state result from state intervention in the first place.
“1. If government provided no safety net for the poor, what would happen to the 100+ million Americans with an IQ under 90, to the millions of Americans who can’t work because of cancer, heart disease, etc., to even the millions with graduate degrees who can’t find a job, and to America as a country?”
Government policies increase the basic threshold of subsistence for the worst off enormously, making comfortable poverty impossible (see, for example, Charles Johnson, “Scratching By,” The Freeman, December 2007). If government didn’t enforce absentee title to vacant and unimproved land against “squatters,” building codes whose main economic effect is to criminalize cheap vernacular building technologies or new low-cost/high-efficiency techniques the incumbent contractors don’t want to compete with, licensing regimes that impede independent production by unlicensed cabs, home daycare and the like, there would be a huge reduction in the marginal cost of both survival and comfortable subsistence. As I mention below, these same forms of exploitation drastically reduce the material resources and leisure available to working people for developing their own self-organized solidaristic safety net.
“2. If this room were filled with chronically unemployed people: people with IQs under 90, who are old and/or with severe heart disease or cancer, how would you explain to them that you oppose a government safety net: No unemployment, subsidized housing, health care, or public transportation?”
Government policies (like those mentioned above) promote inflation of land values, and make housing more expensive by restrictions on building techniques. Subsidized housing is a way of ameliorating the most destabilizing effects of this for the worst off, without killing the golden goose for the politically connected real estate industry. Since the subsidies go directly to the real estate folks, they’re making money at both ends.
Healthcare costs are jacked up by all sorts of artificial scarcity rents and privileges.
Subsidized public transportation would be far less necessary if subsidized monoculture and sprawl didn’t first make cars a necessity and make feet and bikes useless.
“3. In the pre-industrial age, it was possible for most willing workers to find sustainable employment. But in the information age, being willing isn’t enough. In the modern era, can you point to one of the world’s 200 nations that have no government-mandated safety net and yet doesn’t have huge numbers of people living painfully destitute lives while others live in grandeur?”
The very concept of “sustainable employment” reflects an economic model created by the state in the first place. Much of the current dichotomy between grandeur and destitution reflects scarcity rents on forms of artificial property enforced by the state. The mass-production industrial model, where product-specific capital assets are extremely expensive so that only the rich can afford to buy them and then hire people for wages, is something the state had a huge role in creating. As we see a technological shift toward lower-cost, general-purpose capital assets (essentially a reversal of the shift from affordable craftsmen’s tools to expensive machinery that resulted in the wage/factory system in the first place), much of the rationale behind dependence on wage labor will disappear. The lower the cost of subsistence, and the lower the capital outlay for becoming a producer, the more blurry the boundary between being employed/in business and unemployed/out of business will become. And the lower the costs of subsistence and the lower the costs of capital equipment for self-provisioning in the informal sector, the more the share of total provisioning that will shift from wage labor to the informal sector.
“4. Eliminating a safety net for the poor is an experiment unproven in modern society. The government-mandated safety net is certainly not a model of cost-efficiency but are you willing to take the risk that if we eliminate it, we won’t end up with a society in which our children will see people on the streets dying of starvation or with cancer writhing in agony?”
Writers like Kropotkin and E.P. Thompson describe elaborate self-organized safety nets — cooperatives, mutuals, friendly societies, etc. — created by workers for themselves. These met a huge volume of needs. But their effectiveness was limited by the fact that they existed in a society — like ours — of privilege and artificial property rights. The effectiveness of the self-organized welfare state was limited by the resources of an exploited class. In a freed market, where labor is not burdened by such parasitic rent extraction by the privileged, the working class would have a lot more resources to devote to a mutual/cooperative welfare state.
In general, artificial scarcities and artificial property rights are the main source of the overclass’s ill-gotten wealth, and the main reason for the underclass’s poverty. Government systematically redistributes income upward to the classes that control it. The welfare state is a way of giving just enough of it back to the hardest-hit to prevent destabilizing levels of homelessness and starvation from imperiling the system.
In the case of health care, access to medical drugs, the government has given doctors monopoly control over access to medical drugs. For example, my costs for blood pressure and cholesterol drugs works out to $112 a year. But because of prescription laws giving doctor control over access to these drugs, I am forced to pay another $400 a year in the form of office visits and lab tests. (yes, I have insurance, but this is just a money transfer scheme where others earn a living running the "insurance" system). Assuming that half of all visits to a primary care physician are of this nature, without prescription laws my doctor would be seeing half the number of patients he sees. Which would give him an "incentive" to provide better service, be in less of a hurry to shuffle people in and out of his office. Obviously without prescription laws there would be no "shortage of primary care physicians" as we read about in the media. This is just one example of how "government" adds to our living costs. How government makes everything cost more than it needs to cost. Without zoning and building codes, there would be no problem in creating sufficient housing for everyone in more "efficient" forms than we have now. Again "government is the problem, not the solution". If I wanted to do it, I'm sure I could write a book on how government generally fouls things up.
I will add here that neither Democrats or Republicans believe in freedom. Both are supporters of "big government". Both parties are corrupt, selling themselves like prostitutes to the "highest bidder". Obama and Romney both favor "big government". The only difference between them is that they dispute what "big government" should be doing… Neither of our two major political parties believes in individual freedom. Both support spending a trillion dollars a year on the military (total cost when you add in defense contractors, the cost of disabled veterans, everything else). Folks, we don't have a trillion dollars to throw away! As a matter of fact, "Uncle Sam" is "broke". Bankrupt! The only source of money Uncle Sam gets comes from taxes. (along with what he "borrows" from mainland China) The USA spends about 1/2 of all money spent on "defense" the world over. Everywhere Uncle Sam goes he makes more enemies for us. Having American drones kill innocent people (collateral damage the military says) makes terrorists out of people who weren't our enemies before. We have military bases in 130 countries! Like the former British Empire, "The Sun Never Sets Upon The US Armed Forces"! Eleven years ago we felt the anger of radical Muslims when they crashed hijacked airliners into the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon, and had the people aboard Flight 93 not acted, most likely the Capitol or the White House would have been hit. Yes, we did manage to kill Osama bin Laden, but there are millions more who think like him. The War on Terrorism is a war we can never "win" no matter how hard we try. No matter how many American soldiers die fighting this "forever war"!
<div id="idc-comment-msg-div-439132531" class="idc-message"><a class="idc-close" title="Click to Close Message" href="javascript: IDC.ui.close_message(439132531)"><span>Close Message</span> Comment posted. <p class="idc-nomargin"><a class="idc-share-facebook" target="_new" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u =http://c4ss.org/content/12563#IDComment439132531&t=I just commented on On Breaking Your Legs and Giving You Crutches: Responses to a Liberal" style="text-decoration: none;"><span class="idc-share-inner"><span>Share on Facebook</span></span> or <a href="javascript: IDC.ui.close_message(439132531)">Close MessageWrites muskegonlibertarian: "Assuming that half of all visits to a primary care physician are of this nature, without prescription laws my doctor would be seeing half the number of patients he sees."
Part of the reason for making sure that a patient on maintenance medications – like those for your uncomplicated chronic essential hypertension – is the justified fear among us sawbones that we're gonna get hauled into court and asked questions under oath that start: "Doctor, were you aware that standard of care requires you to regularly screen your high blood pressure patients for [fill in the blank]?"
Have you got any way to know whether or not the drugs you're taking are still working satisfactorily? Your physiology habituates over time, and the doses you were prescribed a year or two ago may not be showing adequate efficacy right now. In addition, there are probable and improbable (but eminently possible) adverse effects that can be induced by even the oldest and most "plain vanilla" blood pressure meds.
If your doctor doesn't look, he's not gonna find, is he?
The "shortage of primary care physicians" at which you're scoffing – guys like me – is real, and it's due to the fact that most of the youngsters getting out of school can't afford to play Marcus Welby, M.D. The pay sucks.
This, by the way, is why your friendly medical Marxists want to have lots of us Marcus Welby, M.D., types. They can get away with paying us peanuts. The board-certified secondary- and tertiary-care specialists have different fee schedules with HCFA – er, MAMA – no, damnit; they're "CMS" now.
I was trained to practice medicine "on the cheap." My preceptors taught us to get the most bang for our patients' bucks because they'd come up in an era where health "insurance" – if you had it – covered only the costs associated with catastrophic illnesses, the ones that landed you in the hospital. Doctors had to keep their office visit fees down (and avoid prescribing the expensive "latest and greatest" drugs), doing as much as possible with as little monetary expenditure as possible, because the majority of our patients were paying out-of-pocket, and if you didn't show some respect for folks' pocketbooks, there were always guys down the street who did.
Competition is a good thing, remember?
And then the H.M.O.'s (and the other alphabet soup crap) came along in the '80s. The socialized medicine weasels in government just loved that. They sure used taxpayer dollars to subsidize the "health maintenance" boondoggle right from the beginning, didn't they?
You're online. Look up the economic concept called "the tragedy of the commons."
Go ahead and assume "that half of all visits to a primary care physician" for follow-up on chronic conditions like hypertension and hyperlipidemia and diabetes mellitus and suchlike are worthless.
Vigilance is always gonna be perceived as worthless, until the day you get proof – by it's presence or it's absence – that it wasn't.
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In a Libertarian society you are legally responsible for your own actions and can't sue for any adverse result caused by your own actions. In other words the doctor can advise, but it is legally up to the patient to make the decision whether or not to follow that advice. This far different from the "statist" legal system we have now. Under Libertarianism you have much more personal freedom than under the system we have now, but on the other hand unless you are legally declared "incompetent" to take care of yourself, you are 100% responsible for your own actions and any harm you bring to yourself. So the doctor is completely "off the hook" if the patient suffers adverse consequences because the patient did not follow the doctor's advice.
Writes muskegonlibertarian: "In a Libertarian society you are legally responsible for your own actions and can't sue for any adverse result caused by your own actions."
Yeah, I know. Caveat emptor if that's what the voluntary contract defining the doctor-patient relationship stipulates. I suspect I've been a libertarian (antedating that day in Dave Nolan's living room) a bit longer than you have.
We're not "in a Libertarian society" right now, however, but in a polity and under a civil government where tort law – liability law – has gone completely nuts. See if you can find a copy of Peter Huber's Liability: The Legal Revolution and Its Consequences (1988), which – though not current – offers the best summary of causation with which I'm familiar.
"Under Libertarianism," there wouldn't be any impairment of contract (as there is in U.S tort law at present), meaning that your relationship with your medico could and would be much more rigorously defined, with the expectation on both your part and his that your failure to comply with his recommendations really would take him "off the hook" for the adverse consequences of your own derelictions of duty.
Might be nice to practice medicine in an environment where "informed consent" actually means something, mightn't it?
And where – in the bargain – there's no government-imposed occupational licensing, no federal or state "controlled substances" laws (meaning no "War on [Some] Drugs"), no unspeakably costly FDA-induced delays on the marketing of new diagnostic and therapeutic modalities (Web search "Milton Friedman" and "beta-blockers" sometime), and none of the rest of that nanny-state stranglehold on your life.
I'd be goddam delighted to live and work "In a Libertarian society."
Can't say that for the apparatchiki of the AMA, of course, but who gives a flying puck for them?
muskegonlibertarian observes: "I will add here that neither Democrats or Republicans believe in freedom."
Oh, hell. Neither faction of the big, permanently incumbent, Kumbaya-bipartisan, "go along to get along" Boot On Your Neck Party believes in enforcing the U.S. Constitution (particular emphasis on the Bill of Rights).
As for their foreign military adventurism, wiki up "American Anti-Imperialist League," and while you're at it find Smedley Butler's War is a Racket (1935).
This "military bases in 130 countries" crap is nothing really new, except in scale, nor is the opposition – both principled and pecuniary – thereunto.
Regarding " the anger of radical Muslims when they crashed hijacked airliners into the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon, and [...] the people aboard Flight 93," that's been the Islamic world from the git-go. Malfeasant U.S. government foreign policy is merely a recent exacerbatory factor. Whether our weapons-carrying emissaries of democracy had been in their grill or not, the Sons of the Prophet would be down our unbeliever throats with razor blades to whatever extent their material resources gave them the means.
Our republic has been in an undeclared state of war with Islam since the earliest days. Dig into the history of the Barbary wars (1784-1816) and the Moro rebellion (1899-1913). It's from the latter we get the bloodthirsty ditty (still popular among professional American military men) which includes: "Underneath the starry flag/ Civilize 'em with a Krag!"
Until we're reduced to dhimmi status – or convert to the True Faith – we're always going to be at bayonet-point with Dar al-Islam. There are no "moderate" Muslims. A rabidly "radical" nature is literally written into their scripture. Please note that their name for the whole non-Islamic world is nothing less than Dar al-Harb.
Y'know what that means?
"The House of War."
Back when we were fighting Germany, Italy, and Japan in WW2, I'm sure we weren't issuing visas to nationals from these three countries to come visit the USA. But we are issuing visas today to Muslims. OK, most likely most of them aren't terrorists, but there is certainly enough of them that are. Airliners have been hijacked since the 1960's. We could have after the first hijacking (to Cuba I believe) created airliners with no access from the passenger compartment to the cockpit. This would require some redesign, but wouldn't be all that difficult. If you can't hijack the airliner, you can't seize control and crash it into a building! Yes, the terrorists could have created bombs of some sort that would bring down an airliner, but they did that before with a bomb. In any case, we should make as difficult as possible for them to come here. Yes, probably we can't get 100% security, but we can make it as difficult as possible. We could also put far more effort into creating cars that use much less fuel. My 1966 VW weighed about half of what a modern "compact" car does and even with the relatively primitive technology of the time got 33 mph on the highway. I expect using today's technology we could double that figure. Here locally too we have a city bus that uses compressed natural gas instead of diesel. We have a lot of natural gas here in the USA. According to what I've read, at least a 100 year supply of it. We could build thorium reactors for power. Better than the U235 plants that we have now. Solutions do exist. But we have to be willing to use them.
Tucci78, should I take it that you yourself have dug into the history of the Barbary Wars (1784-1816) and the Moro Rebellion (1899-1913)? Because if you have not, you are not arguing on a sound basis, and if you have, it is disingenuous of you to omit how the U.S.A. actually started each of those, the Barbary Wars by unilaterally terminating the freely undertaken subsidy by which the U.S.A. had purchased diplomatic recognition among other things – welching on a deal – and the Moro Rebellion by invading the country in question. So there is no track record at all of Muslims making unprovoked attacks on the U.S.A. (though they have done so against others).
The last question's response was the most articulate. I'd like to read more about mutual aid societies on this site.
I assume you've heard of SeaSol? The Seattle Solidarity Network? Neat little mutual aid society for people screwed over by employers or landlords.