This is the first in a 3-part series explaining why your political views suck. I plan to tackle the Republican and Democratic parties in parts 2 and 3, but feel free to nod along if this article if I happened to miss your party on the dart board this week.
Ah, the Libertarian party--just like cold fusion--efficient but lacking the technology to work right, and always 10 years from being viable. Libertarian views can usually be sold to members of the 2 main political parties in the US without much difficulty. In a simplistic sense they split the difference between liberal and conservative mindsets. The reality is that the libertarian worldview, for all of its efficiency and sense, has some pretty severe failings in its pure form. Lets take a look, shall we?
The libertarian wants the police, courts, and maybe fire as the only real government agencies. They believe that any kind of taxation by the government for services and programs beyond this limited purview amounts to theft. The libertarian mindset believes that every other issue can be handled by the free market system. If you take the concept generally, this would absolutely work--any economics class should highlight how an economy will develop around the goods and services needed for survival. If you believe that humanity is predisposed towards "good" then this system is pretty good despite breaking down in a lot of places. Here is a "feature" of a pure free market government:
-Privatization of every government entity (post office, highway/roads, social security, etc.)
Large government programs aren't nearly as efficient as those handled by private organizations in almost every case. For example, the US Postal Service is running a large deficit whereas comparable private entities like UPS or FedEx turn a tidy profit doing much the same thing. When an entity must make a profit to survive and to satisfy the interests of its owners (stockholders in the case of a publicly traded company) that entity can't afford to allow the inefficiencies that cause the US Postal Service to lose money. Sounds pretty good, right? It's not quite so rosy when you take in the whole picture.
The US Postal Service is in a rough spot, they are losing money and aren't allowed to make the cuts needed to shore up their budget. What sort of cuts do they want/need to make to get back to even? Cutting delivery days, closing many local offices, and raising the price of stamps. It might not sound so bad except that the vast majority of the American public doesn't want to deal with any of that. If it were a private entity the public wouldn't have any say in the matter short of using a different provider, but that brings other headaches. Right now you can send a letter to anywhere in the US for the cost of a stamp because the government opened post offices even in very remote locations. As a private business they could have decided (just for the sake of argument) that it wasn't profitable to open a post office in Alaska or Hawaii. This idea has really lost a lot of its sting since the advent and proliferation of email, but I hope you take my meaning.
In the case of the postal system you just might not have a local office within 100 miles or be able to send mail to some places. If you take another government agency like the FDA or USDA then the consequences are a bit different. The free market will certainly punish a company that develops a drug that accidentally kills people or that distributes food that makes people sick--you wouldn't buy from a company that might kill you, right? The problem here is that someone had to die or get sick before the free market could begin to adjust itself. Morality doesn't really fit onto a balance sheet, however, and companies already push goods that could harm or kill you if they don't feel that the backlash would outstrip the potential profits. In a completely open free market, you might just be an acceptable loss for a company pushing an experimental weight-loss drug without any government oversight to verify safety or efficacy.
If you believe that people (and by extension corporations) are inherently good, then maybe you could stomach the complete free market system. You'll also have to banish the notion of simple human greed completely from your mind because if greed exists then the system falls apart.
While the libertarian mindset may not work as the entire system, it does have some good ideas. If we need to draw the line at where the government should interfere or regulate then we can look to the 2 major US political parties to see where they draw the line. But both of those parties suck as well which I'll tackle in my next 2 installments. In case you're wondering, I'm going to save the Democratic party for last since it doesn't get the reasonable scrutiny that it should from reasonable people. Until next time...
