A while back, Jon Stewart proposed 19 questions for libertarians. This is pretty old news, but I've decided to take a shot at answering them.
1. Is government the antithesis of liberty?
No, the aggressive use of force is the antithesis of liberty. A government is simply an organization that tries to maintain a monopoly on the use of force. Common criminals can just as easily be the antithesis of liberty as well though.
2. One of the things that enhances freedoms are roads. Infrastructure enhances freedom. A social safety net enhances freedom.
First off, that's not a question. Secondly, liberty isn't something that can be "enhanced". It is simply the lack of coercion. And finally, libertarians do not call for roads to stop existing but for them to be created voluntarily.
3. What should we do with the losers that are picked by the free market?
Who the hell is "we"? If you mean people in general, people can do whatever they want with the losers as long as its voluntary.
4. Do we live in a society or don't we? Are we a collective? Everybody's success is predicated on the hard work of all of us; nobody gets there on their own. Why should it be that the people who lose are hung out to dry? For a group that doesn't believe in evolution, it's awfully Darwinian.
I think the fact that you use the word "we" already shows that we live in a society. Society a word for the mass of all interaction between individuals. But as for leaving people "out to dry", libertarianism does not say what you have to do with these people. If you want to give to charity and help them out, more power to you. But that's your choice as an individual, something only you can decide to do. Markets, however, need to run in a way so that businesses using scarce resources inefficiently (that is, a business running at a loss) be phased out so that those resources may be reallocated to where they need to be. For succeding businesses to thrive, failing businesses need to die, and keeping failing businesses alive by government intervention only does so at the expense of successful businesses and acts as a net drag on the economy. We can't have privatized gains and socialized losses.
Also, who said libertarians don't believe in evolution? I have absolutely NO idea where you're getting this.
5. In a representative democracy, we are the government. We have work to do, and we have a business to run, and we have children to raise.. We elect you as our representatives to look after our interests within a democratic system.
Bullshit, we are not the government. I'll defer to Rothbard on this one.
The useful collective term "we" has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If "we are the government," then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also "voluntary" on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that "we owe it to ourselves"; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is "doing it to himself" and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have "committed suicide," since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.
We must, therefore, emphasize that "we" are not the government; the government is not "us." The government does not in any accurate sense "represent" the majority of the people. But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority.
- Murray Rothbard, Anatomy of the State
Also, again, not a question.
6. Is government inherently evil?
Aggressive coercion is inherently evil, and the defining features of government is aggressive coercion, so I'll go with yes.
7. Sometimes to protect the greater liberty you have to do things like form an army, or gather a group together to build a wall or levy.
Yes. Yes you do. And?
8. As soon as you've built an army, you've now said government isn't always inherently evil because we need it to help us sometimes, so now.. it's that old joke: Would you sleep with me for a million dollars? How about a dollar? -Who do you think I am?- We already decided who you are, now we're just negotiating.
You confuse government with security. Building an army isn't the same as building a government. A government is a territorial coercive monopoly on security that receives its income by "the political means" (i.e. theft).
9. You say: government which governs least governments best. But that were the Articles of Confederation. We tried that for 8 years, it didn't work, and went to the Constitution.
The Articles of Confederation actually did work exactly as they were meant to. Politicians simply wanted more power and overthrew it. Perhaps you're merely repeating what you were taught in state schools. Remember, history is written by the victor.
10. You give money to the IRS because you think they're gonna hire a bunch of people, that if your house catches on fire, will come there with water.
No, I give money to the IRS because I think they're gonna hire a bunch of goons to lock me in a cage if I don't. What you are saying implies that I give money to them voluntarily. What if I believe a different group can hire a bunch of people to stop fires in my house better than the IRS can? Am I allowed to stop paying them? No, I'm not. Taxes are theft, operating in the same way as a protection racket.
11. Why is it that libertarians trust a corporation, in certain matters, more than they trust representatives that are accountable to voters? The idea that I would give up my liberty to an insurance company, as opposed to my representative, seems insane.
Businesses are more accountable to consumers than politicians are to voters. If I don't like the way a business does things, I can drop my relations with them entirely. I can't do the same for politicians. Furthermore, democratic elections are subject to rational ignorance. When I spend my own money on a business, I have a good incentive to try and find the best product I can. But with voting, with a little mental arithematic I can pretty quickly figure out that the odds of my vote making a difference in an election are very small, and might try and vote for what I consider a "lesser evil" to keep a greater evil out of office. And there is also a very strong argument that politicians do not decide upon their actions based on what the people think, but by what special interest groups lobby them to pass things.
There is also a sharp distinction between "state power" and "social power". Businesses gain power by offering me products. Governments gain power by the barrel of a gun.
Now I recognize that there are many, many faults with corporations today, but most of that is due to the unholy matrimony between business and state. I would not expect corporate bailouts or limited liability groups in a free market.
12. Why is it that with competition, we have such difficulty with our health care system? ..and there are choices within the educational system.
We don't really have free market competition in health care. Government licensing and patents are just the tip of the iceberg with the massive regulations in the health care system. With the American Medical Association, we're essentially running as a medieval guild.
13. Would you go back to 1890?
No, that might mess up the time stream and prevent my own birth. If I had a time machine, I'd go to the future.
14. If we didn't have government, we'd all be in hovercrafts, and nobody would have cancer, and broccoli would be ice-cream?
That's just a sentence you put a question mark at the end of. The utopian socialst Charles Fourier, however, did promise that under socialism the seas would turn into lemonade. I'm not exaggerating here, he really promised that.
15. Unregulated markets have been tried. The 80’s and the 90’s were the robber baron age. These regulations didn't come out of an interest in restricting liberty. What they did is came out of an interest in helping those that had been victimized by a system that they couldn't fight back against.
The intentions you make your system on doesn't change what the system does. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Besides, the late 1800's showed the greatest economic boom in human history.
16. Why do you think workers that worked in the mines unionized?
I don't know, and I really don't care. If people want to unionize, that's fine, as long as its voluntary.
17. Without the government there are no labor unions, because they would be smashed by Pinkerton agencies or people hired, or even sometimes the government.
So you're essentially admitting that the organization that you claim is essential for the existence of this group has acted in a way detrimental to the existence of the group. Right.
Anyways, what you really need is security, not government.
18. Would the free market have desegregated restaurants in the South, or would the free market have done away with miscegenation, if it had been allowed to? Would Marten Luther King have been less effective than the free market? Those laws sprung up out of a majority sense of, in that time, that blacks should not.. The free market there would not have supported integrated lunch counters.
I firmly believe that markets do away with discrimination better than any other way. Money is the best diplomat in human history. Trade between nations has prevented wars. Businesses that choose to discriminate are choosing to economically isolate themselves.
You seem to forget that Jim Crow laws were laws created by the government.
19.Government is necessary but must be held accountable for its decisions.
Jeez, at least the other non-questions had some implied criticism of capitalism. This is nothing but mere assertion. I'll respond in assertion then.
Government is not necessary at all and the very fact that it has a monopoly on law makes in unaccountable.
