political question of the day
Are all libertarians jerks? Or just esr (and most of the other ones I've talked with)? Or am I possibly overreacting?
The short version is here, the slightly shortened but still rather long version of the prologue/context is here, and the full dialogue is here if you're really desperately trying to unload some spare time ( Read more... )
The short version is here, the slightly shortened but still rather long version of the prologue/context is here, and the full dialogue is here if you're really desperately trying to unload some spare time ( Read more... )
My quick answer to that, is that the marketplace is made up of people. The quality of the solutions that people come up with is dependent upon the people living in that particular community. If the smartest and kindest people are allowed to have the freedom to do the most good, without governmental red tape getting in the way, then everybody benefits from it. I suspect that most of the people who would abuse the freedom in a libertarian society are already breaking governmental law - so that the main difference is that good people would be able to do more good. Also, there isn't just "one" libertarian/anarchist solution to solving a community's needs. Technically, even a hippie commune could function in a libertarian society as long as there's a consensus in the commune.
The problem with emergency personnel being funded this way, however, has recently been quite graphically pointed out by the fire service which let a family's house burn down because they hadn't paid the $75 fee.
The family was willing to pay whatever it cost to have the firefighters save their house. The government-run fire service (yes, it was opt-in, but it was still wasn't private) didn't want to barter. Even the mayor supported the decision to let the house burn down. There's a MSNBC article about it here if you don't believe me.
On feudalism: aren't mortgages and wage-slavery driven by free market forces? Isn't government regulation pretty much the main thing preventing them from being far worse?
Depends who you ask, though I'm pretty sure that mortgage interest rates are dependent on what the Federal Reserve does. Personally, my economic theory background is pretty weak (I only took one Microeconomics course in college), so any answer I give you would just be parroting what I've heard, without fully understanding the theory behind it.
As far as "wage slavery" goes... if a company has $X amount of money to spend, they can either hire fewer workers and pay them more, or higher more workers and pay them less. When there's a minimum wage, companies are forced into the former option - and thus fewer people have jobs, though the people that do have jobs make more than they would otherwise. Also, with respect to child labor laws, and children in other countries working for pennies on the dollar... I've heard a story where people protested and successfully shut down a such a factory... sounds good to our ears, except that the children had lost their jobs that they were quite willing to be paid pennies for, because that's how they were able to help feed their family.
Apologies for the late reply... between cooking, cleaning, running errands, and chasing after an increasingly-mobile baby, I'm finding that I don't often have time and patience to write a considered reply - each of the topics you mention generally need several pages to treat the topic thoroughly, but I'm at least attempting to distill the main arguments into a paragraph each. Really, though, I'd encourage you to go to LewRockwell.com and search for the answers to your questions - Mary Ruwart is a good one for the "helping those who need it" questions, and I've also found Walter Block to be pretty open to questions, though his answers are often controversial.
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