I despise taxation and bureaucratic waste as much as the next guy, and I don’t like people getting a free ride off of welfare when they can clearly work. That being said, I also know many families who do work hard but for one reason or another are stuck in low-paying jobs and would be dead without some sort of safety net supporting them, whether it be free socialized healthcare or free education.
So my question is this… given that if we privatize everything, and given that there will be people unable to afford medical care, or unable to afford access to the now private roads, or unable to afford tuition, or insurance, or private protection… what happens to those people. This could be a catch 22 since if you can’t afford access to the roads, you can’t get employment, or maybe without an insurance policy, nobody will want to hire you anyways. People that could find themselves in this situation include orphans, families who lose their main breadwinner, victims of child abuse…These people will exist and you can’t just get rid of them, so, what is the anarcho-capitalist way of dealing with this?
In before someone makes a snide remark and turns you off on anarcho-capitalism… [:)]
It’s not free. It’s stolen from someone else.
Charity. Or they work more. Or they accept a lower level of service. But they have no right to use government to acquire more for themselves at the cost of someone else.
Maybe your employer owns the road. Maybe he provides toll payments for the whole workforce. Maybe you car pool with another employee, subsidizing his gas and tolls, with your less than full fuel and toll monies.
No. In a free market, there is zero unemployment for people who want to work.
Sure. Life is tragic. Right now, the government takes victims of child abuse into it’s bureaucratic bosom, and then rapes them in state institutions. Right now, people lose their bread winner, and the other family member can’t work because the labour market is distorted.
For sure, no one is proposing getting rid of them. Everything the state provides, can be provided privately. More efficiently, through competition, with different levels of service, catering to different amounts people can afford to pay. The market seeks to satisfy demand, as cheaply as possible when competition flourishes.
For the sake of correctness, not necessarily. Use a machine analogy: if that was true, companies would still use all available obsolete machines. Getting back to people, there’s a minimum “power consumption” to satisfy their very basic needs. Of course, people may temporarily settle for less, but they can’t do it in the long run. So the general idea is free markets have minimum unemployment.
However, one shouldn’t struggle for egalitarian ideals. Let’s have an example. What if I’m only good at making shoes for three-toed people? If the number of these people falls, the demand falls. Of course, somebody wants more of a given thing than less, so if prices drop, each one will probably buy more. However, I can’t force others to buy my shoes at what I consider a “fair” price, even if I starve. Actually, I’ll need to find something else to produce, something that society really needs. To do otherwise would constitute aggression.
LS’s response is good. Also, all forms of voluntary association currently suppressed by the state, included mutual aid societies and similar organizations, would flourish in the absence of the state.
This may well depend on that “want to work”. Strictly, LS is right, if you wish to work no matter the wage, you’ll find work. So please take my previous reply as a clarifying statement, not as a contradiction.
Without the welfare state, individuals may very well have to actually improve their social relationships with friends and family to ensure, if they ever fall into hard times, that they can turn to someone for aid. Its quite the shame how people are quick to forget that such social relationships have a purpose outside of leisure and recreation.