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June 14th, 2013 
Peter Nolan Last week,
Michael
Lind posed what he thought was a devastating question for
libertarians: if your system is so good, why aren’t there
any libertarian countries?
This was
more a funny question than a difficult one, since while Lind really
seems to have thought he’d gotten us good, the question
is one libertarians themselves address constantly. By rephrasing
his question, I
teased out the answer:
(1) “If
your approach is so great, why doesn’t local law enforcement
want to give up the money, supplies, and authority that come
from the drug war?”(2) “If
your approach is so great, why don’t big financial firms prefer
to stand or fall on their merits, and prefer bailouts instead?”(3) “If
your approach is so great, why do people prefer to earn a living
by means of special privilege instead of by honest production?”(4) “If
your approach is so great, why does the military-industrial
complex prefer its revolving-door arrangement and its present
strategy of fleecing the taxpayers via its dual strategy of
front-loading
and political engineering?”(5) “If
your approach is so great, why do businessmen often prefer subsidies
and special privileges?”(6) “If
your approach is so great, why do some people prefer to achieve
their ends through war instead?”(7) “If
your approach is so great, why does the political class prefer
to live off the labor of others, and exercise vast power over
everyone else?”(8) “Special
interests win special benefits for themselves because those
benefits are concentrated and significant. The costs, dispersed
among the general public, are so insignificant to any particular
person, that the general public has no vested interest in organizing
against it. An extra 25 cents per gallon of orange juice is
hardly worth devoting one’s life to opposing, but an extra $100
million per year in profits for the companies involved sure
is worth the time to lobby for.“If your
approach is so great, why does this happen?”(9) “If
your approach is so great, why don’t people want to try it out,
after having been propagandized
against it nonstop for 17 years?” (K-12, then four years
of college.)
Now we have
E.J.
Dionne, who’s come along to remind everyone why we need
our overlords. He thinks Lind’s question is a super one,
too. I will have plenty to say if I confine myself to this one
Dionne paragraph:
We had
something close to a small-government libertarian utopia in
the late 19th century, and we decided it didn’t work.
We realized that many would never be able to save enough for
retirement and, later, that most of them would be unable to
afford health insurance in old age. Smaller government meant
that too many people were poor and that monopolies were formed
too easily. And when the Depression engulfed us, government
was helpless, largely handcuffed by this antigovernment ideology
until Franklin Roosevelt came along.
Every aspect
of this statement is false.
In the nineteenth
century there was no such thing as “retirement,” so
no one would have said, “Under this system, people won’t
be able to save enough for retirement!” Only continued capital
accumulation, which occurs when businesses may reinvest their
profits in the purchase of capital goods without being expropriated
by government, made it possible for the economy to become physically
productive enough for something like “retirement”
even to become conceivable. Even when Social Security was established,
the retirement age was higher than the average life expectancy,
meaning most people would be dead before they could get any of
their money back.
As for health
insurance in old age, this too is belied by the facts. “Most
of the government’s medical payments on behalf of the poor
compensated doctors and hospitals for services once rendered free
of charge or at reduced prices,” writes historian Allen
Matusow. “Medicare-Medicaid, then, primarily transferred
income from middle-class taxpayers to middle-class health-care
professionals.”
And what
made health care so costly in the first place? Not the “free
market,” which Dionne himself would admit hasn’t been
anywhere near health care in anyone’s lifetime. Vijay Boyapati
provides a
big chunk of the answer.
Dionne then
says, “Smaller government meant too many people were poor.”
This is flat-out idiocy. The greatest gains against poverty in
the United States occurred when government was least involved.
In 1900, the poverty rate by today’s standards was 95 percent.
By the time the federal government got involved in poverty relief
in a non-trivial way, in the late 1960s, that figure had already
plummeted to between 12 and 14 percent, where it has remained
to this day. There’s a good discussion of all this in
Back
on the Road to Serfdom, a collection of essays I edited
for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
Since government
got involved, the poverty rate has stagnated. Trillions of dollars
have been spent, yet the figures won’t budge.
So the truth
is exactly the opposite of what Dionne claims. Government
has done a rotten job of alleviating poverty. The
natural operation of the market is what has come as close
as any institution can to conquering it.
Source Article from http://lewrockwell.com/woods/woods238.html
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