Making Money on Line

I believe as a whole, Americans are a very compassionate and caring group of people. Along with that, I believe that most Americans would not willingly or knowingly allow someone to go hungry or uncared for. The amount of charitable contributions we make each year to organizations whose mission it is to help those in a time of need demonstrates the compassion of Americans.

There is however, a stark difference in freely giving to charity and being forced to serve another. When the government provides a service, no matter what that service is, where does the money come from to fund it?

Taxation.

The only way for government to give one American anything is to first, through the tax code, take money from another American. It must forcibly use one American to serve another American. In most literal terms, forcibly using one person to serve another is the definition of slavery.

So why do we continue to allow our government to enslave us?

Some would argue that our government should be there to provide a safety net, but how big does that net really need to be? Studies have shown that people change their behavior when the government provides welfare. With the “Great Society” programs of the 1960’s, came an increase in the number of unwed mothers and conversely when welfare programs were reformed in the mid 1990’s, the number dropped.

Big cities like San Francisco and New York have some of the most generous homeless programs in the country — they also have some of the largest homeless populations as well.

In Europe, where unemployment compensation benefits are very generous, people spend less time looking for jobs and in some countries, the dole is actually a career opportunity. Up until recently, unemployment benefits in the U.S. were modest and as a result, people took jobs that were available. Now, it seems to most that unemployment benefits will be extended indefinitely — giving little incentive to take a job that’s less than perfect.

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Ross Douthat is right to say that worrying about what would happen if Ron Paul seized ultimate power and decreed America a minarchy probably isn't a good use of anyone's time. But where Douthat thinks that minarchy is used as a way to dismiss libertarians, in practice, I've tended to find it their first line of defense -- the right's version of "well, Marxism has never really been tried."

To some degree, you see it in Douthat's post, when he quotes Conor Friedersdorf lamenting "that libertarians hold very little power in this country." The reality is that the sort of incremental libertarianism that aligns with the interests of rich individuals and corporations has quite a lot of sway in Washington, but it routinely manages to escape the consequences of its ideas because, libertarians argue, the world we live in isn't the world they would've built, and so how can they be asked to answer for it? It's the "don't blame me. I voted for minarchy" defense.

But if the argument is that incremental libertarianism deserves more respect, then it also deserves more accountability. Desperate storytelling about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aside, the financial crisis was, in large part, the product of the idea that massive financial markets that we didn't understand would effectively regulate themselves. Alan Greenspan, perhaps the only man in America with the unilateral power to have prevented the blowup, has been quite clear on the flaw in his thinking: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity — myself especially — are in a state of shocked disbelief."

To a first approximation, that was a failure of not just a crucial pillar of libertarian economic thought, but of libertarian practice: We spent the '90s not just deregulating, but much more dangerously, refusing to enact new regulations even as the financial system changed dramatically. One of the key players there was Sen. Phil Gramm, who certainly has his fans at the Cato Institute. His was the sort of libertarianism that is politically potent because it is backed by lots of money and lots of elites who combine to push it into the public discourse.

Taxes are another example. Plenty of libertarians have lined up for repeated tax cuts under the theory that they would stoke enough growth, and force enough compensatory budget cutting, to put the country on a more sustainable fiscal path. Plenty of wealthy individuals and firms have pumped a lot of money into propagating that theory and rewarding politicians who vote they way it asks them to. That theory, however, has been a disaster as a policy matter, even as the individuals and firms have made a lot of money.

And there's a lot of power, of course, lined up against anything that gets us close to single-payer health care. Most of the arguments made in that debate are fundamentally libertarian ones: that it will reduce freedom, or that government programs are inevitably bloated and wasteful ("Like going to the DMV? You'll love government health care!"). Cato's policy wonks spent much of 2009 on television arguing against reforms that would mean more government intrusion into the marketplace. Politicians and political organizations, meanwhile, received a lot of money and support in exchange for making those arguments. But it's of course true that America, being the developed country with the least nationalized health-care system, also spends the most and has the highest rate of uninsurance.

So when Douthat says that "a more-empowered libertarianism could have a salutary impact on debates over, say, the future of the entitlement system," it's worth asking what impact semi-empowered libertarianism has already had on debates over the entitlement system. That libertarian dreams of a privatized (or completely dismantled) Medicare system haven't come to pass is no more relevant than dreams of minarchy. What has come to pass is an aggressive and successful effort to stop America from following other countries' paths to national health-care systems. And the result can be seen here: If our costs had followed their costs, we'd have no budget deficit to speak of. Libertarians shouldn't have to answer for minarchy. But they do have to answer for that.

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