Isn’t it important that Libertarians volunteer their resources and their time to the poor and needy? Perhaps it is important enough to emphasize a movement around. Positive liberty without coercion. By default, my observations indicate that many Libertarians view anyone other than a Libertarian or anything other than Libertarian-esque conceptual arguments as anti-liberty, and therefore the Enemy. I no doubt believe many of the Libertarian community are ex-socialists, searching for some moral high-road on the path to “evenly distributing” freedom; interpret that as you may. So perhaps this dualistic outlook, generated by all sorts of different moral and technical inductive reasoning, i.e. a priori, NAP, et al lead the common, or even well-read Libertarian, to lose sight of the immediate “positive” material component to negative liberty when we’re looking at long-term economic health, be you a Hayekian observer or some other flavor. On a distribution we’ll prove that laissez-faire governance, and/or non-interventionism, leads to the greatest freedom overall. But in that same instant, progressives will correctly point out that the real-world application of Austro-Rothbardian/Hayekian/Misesian, et al on our dependent lower-classes mets out not only opportunity, but a real loss in the standard of living. Since minimum wage is a market intervention, and creates artificial scarcity in an otherwise “natural” wage market, we can only deduce that in times of Recession that in order for companies to begin hiring, i.e. making investments on human resources, real wages seem to have no where to go but down. Labor is abundant, capital flow is stagnant. It seems to me, that there has to be a curve somewhere in between “x” amount of laborers who demand “a” an hour and “y” amount of employers that demand “b” an hour. Or in a Hayekian sense the time and cost of production versus the wage essential to greater than or equal to subsistance living in a particular economy. In either case I think it is important to emphasize that Libertarians, or really anyone, voluntarily mobilize their wealth to make up the difference between the price-demands of subsistance living and the reality of prices and real wages in the market. An ideal scenario, at least to me, as I speak with socialist roots in my upbringing, would be for-profit corporations volunteering “x” amount ot charities, not by decree from an outside force (i.e. the Welfare State) but a unanimous agreement or contract. Further discussion is obviously needed. I just felt the need to unload my normal-convoluted, and surprisingly human self on the Mises community.
We are already thinking about this.
Participating in volunteer work just proves that there’s more that can be done. We’ll never be able to get 5% of GDP voluntarily channeled to replace social security.
Well, it would be nice. I think people are good at making excuses to be uncharitable. This is where the free state projects are superior. Invisible hand helps more people than charity.