Surely all government are not bad. Take for instance libaries; there are federal libaries all across the nation, these libaries provide some people for a job. Also the libaries alow many people in that area to do research and learn a far amont of information they may not be able with out it. Or is it that a private libary would be more efficient? If it is the latter then we really can not get mad at the libary of today, just need to transition to make more private, better libaries.
sounds like you already know the answer. I’m willing to bet there already are private libraries in existence right now.
Why do we keep getting nearly repeat threads?
For our purposes there are two types of government services: Services which would be provided in a free market and those which would not. No libertarian (to my knowledge) states that none of the current government services would be provided by entities on a free market. With this said there is undoubtedly misallocation in some way in any service provided by the government. With this said there’s some degree of value gained in any government program, sometimes it might even make up for what is directly lost. It is always important to remember, however, that what is gained and lost cannot be precisely measured
With all of this being said there’s a difference between accepting that something is gained by certain government services and that these services shouldn’t be fought because of the way in which they are provided. A library is provided by force, you will be sent to jail if you don’t want to fund it, and that is certainly something to be “angry” about.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to help the elderly live a decent life in their old age. There’s a problem with using force against others to do this.
Government ends do not have to be “bad”. The means to those ends are bad. If you finance your project by stealing and threats of violence it’s bad, even if your project would otherwise be a good thing.
Libraries are a strange example if only because its no longer necessary to go a building filled with books in order to do research. Its not necessarily a libertarian position to think of libraries as a somewhat wasteful use of government funds. Also, as far as I’m aware in the U.S., libraries are not federally operated, they are usually run on the local level and rely on a significant amount of voluntary contributions.
Intellectual property laws probably go a long way in helping to keep libraries around.
Great point.