Don't you know what libertarianism
is, NJ?
From Wiki:
quote:
The first known use in a political sense of the term translated into English as libertarian was by the French anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque[6] who in 1857 employed the coinage libertaire in a letter to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.[7] The English term is thus derived from a word which in French is synonymous with anarchist.[8]
Proudhon himself outlined a libertarian social philosophy consisting of "an analysis of the power relations underlying existing forms of political authority" and, further, "a vision of an alternative libertarian society based on cooperation as opposed to competition and coercion, and functioning without the need for government authority."
Less (or no) taxes, minimal (or none!) government or public oversight, private services instead of public?
Extreme libertarians are
anarchists. "Moderate" libertarians simply ignore the fact that, from the moment you're delivered in a hospital, you are being lifted up by the rest of society and owe society an unpayable debt. They want lower taxes and believe social services like welfare are unfairly taking their "hard-earned money," ignoring the fact that taking away these programs would condemn many people to homelessness and death. They think that private services like the private healthcare industry are "better" than government-run social services due to competition and that this is self-evident, yet ignore the example of history, where private fire departments would
set fires to make profits, and the modern example of the healthcare industry where millions of Americans cannot even afford to visit the doctor, sometimes even when they
have coverage.
All of us owe the rest of society a debt that can't be paid, becasue we're all constantly dinking at the public trough. Water, food, medicine, housing, electricity, police, fire,
all are provided by society as a whole, and we all have the responsibility to contribute back to society in the form of taxes at the very least. I don't have a problem at all with higher taxes for additional welfare and unemployment funding, public healthcare, or other social services, becasue I
owe society for the standard of living I have, and I don't believe people
deserve to be homeless when some tax dollars from all of us can afford to give them housing and food.
I don't have a problem with
social libertarianism - by all means, people should be allowed as much freedom to exercise their beliefs and lifestyles without government interference as possible. Religion, sexual orientation, art, and other things should all be far outside the purview of governemnt. I strongly agree with this side of libertarianism.
But
economic libertarianism begins with the idea that you, and only you, have earned every penny that you are paid, ignoring all of the support from society that allows you to do so. If you're poor, well, we shouldn't be forced to help you raise your standard of living and become a productive menmber of society -
those people don't deserve to receive any of your hard-earned cash, right? Obviously private charities can do the same job, can't they? Because everyone would obviously give to charities if given the choice so that we'd have enough to support the needy. (I find this particularly ridiculous - libertarians claim that we shouldn't be forced to support the poor with public funds, yet insist private charity can do the same job? The only motivation is that making public welfare no longer
mandatory through taxes but instead optional through charity means that the libertarian can choose
not to help support the needy - ie, fuck you, I've got mine!)
Libertarians worship the free market as if free market systems actually work when not constrained by the governemnt, or are even appropriate for all solutions. Fee market solutions are not working, for example, in the current American healthcare system, where healthcare costs are
rising at an astronomical rate each year instead of lowering from "competition," and the incentives are currently organised so that care is determined not by the patient's best interest but by how much the provider will need to pay. In America, if you develop a serious illness that costs more than your coverage affords, you can be faced with the choice of death or being in debt for the rest of your life. Countries that already utilize
public medicine, something libertarians scream and cry at, do not have such problems. Remember Enron? Deregulation worked wonders there, didn't it. Deregulation and cutting of government subsidies for infrastructure (supported of course by libertarians, since private industry and the free market should work to ensure everyone has power and the infrastructure is kept updated without "government interference" or taxpayer dollars) have ensured that our nation's infrastructure has fallen behind and often fallen into disrepair. And who cares about stringing power lines to people in rural areas where there's no profit potential for the power company? The free market system says we shouldn't do that; only government subsidies encourage such ventures.
Free market systems can and do work, but not the libertarian way where "oversight" is a bad word and the market is somehow a magically self-correcting entity that always works in everyone's best interest. Face it - the libertarian world increases the social ills of America rather than solving even a single one, all for the sake of "lower taxes."
Perhaps you don't ascribe to those parts of libertarianism, NJ, but the basic philosophy of "I shouldn't have to pay taxes that are then given to people who didn't earn the money themselves" irks me. Government oversight, where the incentive is to get elected and so to actually improve the standard of living for the
citizenry rather than the profits of private corporations, is necessary to keep the good aspects of a free market system without letting the bad parts run out of control. It means that while I'll support the social implications of libertarianism, their economic policies tend to be even
worse than the Neo-Cons. I want to move
toward single-payer, universal healthcare, public assistance for housing and transportation, more public funding for education and infrastructure, and services for the disabled, not
away from them.
Libertarians are dreaming of a free-market utopia of voluntary human cooperation that is every much the pipe dream communism is. The moment you add actual human beings to the equasion, libertarianism fails for ironically enough the exact same reasons its mirror opposite communism has failed: human greed.
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