Why are there certain tasks that only the state can carry out efficiently? If competition is good in any other field, I fail to see why society wouldn’t benefit from police, army and court competition as well.
A classic : The Production of Security
But government doesn’t provide us with security. Rather it’s a threat to our freedom.
I guess the point is that we will always have warlords, so what’s the point of throwing one out to get a new one in?
But which is the State’s essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.
Maybe, without government loans, young people wouldn’t afford studying because private banks wouldn’t run the risks.
Then secondary education had better cover a helluvalot more.
Is the health care system in the US by now a free market? Why / why not?
Or maybe, we would see more creative solutions.
For example:
An aspiring medical student goes to a bank, and after thoroughly checking out the young man, the bank decides to give him all the money to put him through med school…in exchange, the student must give a percentage of all his future income to the bank, say 10-15%. Or maybe he will have to give 50% his first 5 years, then 40%, then 30%, etc…or maybe something else entirely.
The bank will more than make back the loan, and the student will, provided he studies and works hard, never have to worry about money to a great degree.
The incentive for the bank is to only give loans to those who they think will work hard, complete university, and have a good career; the same applies to the student, he would rather see 15% of $500 000/year disappear, instead of 15% of $20 000/year. Or perhaps the bank will only provide money, as long as the student maintains a certain grade. I don’t know. The point is, we would see many more creative, market based solutions appear, that we hadn’t even thought of previously.
Socialists are uncreative, narrow-minded and stubborn.
Fixed that for ya. Generalizations can go all kinds of ways.
Both. Aggression against the many, defense of itself.
Some people say that in a free market, big companies will buy up more and more of the small companies, and eventually control the whole market. When they’re in control, they can pay their employees as little as they want. Why is this wrong?
Also, some people say that an anarchy never will last long. Soon people will gain power, and dystopia will replace utopia.
alimentarious, these are decent questions, but don’t you ever get the feeling that “some people”, as you refer to them, seem to have a crystal ball when they say these things?
Yes, but they say the same thing about me. “Libertarianism is a beautiful theorry, but how can you know that a libertarian society will work in practice unless you have a crystal ball?”
Your rejection of the “crystal ball” (most likely a metaphor for some amount of “central planning”, at least in my experience with these sort of arguments), is partially what makes your libertarianism possible.
The coercion involved in central planning is rejected when you refuse to give grand delusions of grandeur about what a society “should” look like if it were libertarian.
Ask them why doesn’t their crystal ball seem to ever work, despite election after election, old officials tossed out for new ones which eventually become as corrupt or lameduck as the older ones they replaced, etc.
Ask them does their inability to predict the future of society vis-a-vis the State invalidate their doctrine? They will probably grumble & go “no”.
You might not win with that, but you won’t be marginalized out of their simplistic arguments that merely appeal to The Crowd in an effort to prevent new ideas from becoming memetic.
The problem is, their crystal ball works better in Norway than in the USA. People here believe that it is the social democratic system that makes Norway one of the best countries to live in. The mentality is: “Why change a winning team when we don’t know the effects?”
Some people claim that competition within physical power means violence, and that we therefore need the state. They say I should read Robert Nozick’s book “Anarchy, State and Utopia”. Has anyone here read it?
Has anyone here reead Robert Nozick’s book “Anarchy, State and Utopia”? It’'s supposed to debunk anarcho-capitalism. It says that competition within physical power, means violence. Therefore we need the state.