Puerile No-Government Fantasies

Here's the main problem with people who believe in allowing markets to run everything and limited government: they're just in it for themselves, and they already have a head start.

Their argument almost without exception boils down to a resentment of paying taxes so your kid can go to school.

The underlying idea is that the whole social contract thing is a crock; that government and its myriad rules and agencies have been foisted upon us unwittingly; that laws have created market dislocations that benefit the powerful industrial cabals that created government to begin with; and that if left to their own devices, people would take care of themselves quite nicely without it, thank you very much.

What separates Libertarians from Anarchists is that the former would keep a police force to enforce the peace and an army to protect the borders. Everything else would be strictly based on choice and the private sector.

Roads? Not a problem, private companies would compete for your dollars. Schools? All manner and price would emerge to serve various constituencies. Health care? Ditto. In other words, there isn't anything government does that private businesses couldn't and wouldn't do more cheaply and more effectively.

Best of all -- and this is where you see the childishness of the philosophy -- you don't have to pay for anyone else. Pay as you go, pay as you need. Save for future needs and if you don't, maybe a private charity will exist to help you out.

Or not. In which case, tough noogies.

Put aside the inanity of the argument -- the idea that we'd be better off this way, or that private companies are actually more efficient than government in every case. The real question is, how far do you roll this back? Do you actually rescind all laws? Delegitimize all levels of government, from federal statutes all the way to town ordinances? Do you sell off all government assets and redistribute the loot to the people? Do you pay off government debt first, or do you claim that those obligations were made without the consent of the people?

Or let me put it another way. Imagine we've achieved this Libertarian paradise where no laws obtain, other than the laws of the market.

Information flows easily, allowing individuals to choose goods and services in an informed manner. Consumers can take their business away from companies that pollute the rivers, maltreat animals, sell contraceptives -- you get the idea. Instead of laws regulating behavior, everyone does what they want (other than commit acts of violence) and the market punishes and rewards.

Now what happens if there's a place that needs, I don't know, a hospital, and the people in that place get together and decide to raise money to build one together and hire some people to run it for them? Would that be legal? Because that would be the beginnings of -- wait for it -- government.

So the question no Libertarian can answer is this one: if a government emerged from a Libertarian state, would it be illegal? If people of their own free will created government, would they be considered traitors? Would their community be ostracized?

Because you know that this is exactly what would happen, and it would be more successful than the puerile alternative offered by the likes of Ron Paul and his acolytes. Government wasn't actually foisted on us -- we organized it. It didn't come easily; Chicago had to burn to the ground before we realized that private sector fire departments were a really bad idea.

Yeah, government is really big and messy and complicated -- which is as it should be, since our country is really big and messy and complicated. Libertarian philosophy is at best nothing more than an infantile yearning for a simpler, more bucolic, prelapserian epoch, a wish to evade the complexity and trade-offs that grown-ups have to make every day. (At worst, it's a craven attempt to avoid paying taxes.)

I "wish" I didn't have to pay taxes too, but I also "wish" I could live forever. You don't have to share the vision of the author Claude Meunier, who once told me, "I enjoy paying taxes because it reminds me that I live in a civilized country," to understand that we really are inseparable and united by common needs.

Separateness is a fantasy in which we indulge ourselves. But just as we can't quarantine ourselves against diseases that are a plane ride away, we can't segregate our needs from those of our compatriots and refuse the very notion of a common weal.