This is an issue that goes to the core of people’s misunderstanding of what Libertarians declare and it actually represents more fake means enabling a very common tactic used by our opponents.
THE ARGUMENT
Most libertarians specialize or spend an enormous amount of time bitching against governments. Most of us do so because all the information that we have point in the same direction; this is, that governments are not only vastly inefficient but actually very very destructive. As such, it would be gross incompetence from our part not to let our fellow human beings know so. Unfortunately, this has a side effect. This effect is that we are painted in a picture or under a light that we didn't choose, by our enemies. They typically use the "straw man" methodology to attack our arguments by simply declaring that we always say that governments are always mistake, whether this is true or not (it isn't, if you are asking).
To make things even more complicated (or more interesting) there are some of us, a minor minority, who so declare. This could not be otherwise since libertarianism is as vast as the number of libertarians or perhaps even more. We consider this small minority a negligible minority. Nevertheless, they do exist which only fuels the flames of our opponents and provide credibility to their arguments.
THE REALITY
The reality however, is quite different. Most libertarians are actually rational people. Of course, they choose to apply the rationality that they prefer for their own reasons. This leads to a strange scenario where ideologies such as socialism are made to live side-by-side with libertarianism. This is obviously a gross contradiction in terms but nevertheless, there are libertarians out there who so attempt.
Now that we have finished with this disclaimer we can move on. What most libertarians say is quite simple; they say that for the most part governments are grossly inefficient, then that they are destructive to your financial and physical health and lastly, yes, once in a while they get it right.
We're not saying (at least the majority of us is not) that governments are always wrong. We fully recognize that in a scale of screwidness governments operate throughout its entire range. We fully acknowledge that some governments do much better jobs than others. But what we also acknowledge is that on average governments do a piss poor job!
It is for this reason, because of the average effect of all governments, that governments are dangerous and destructive. It's not that every single decision that they make is incorrect, erroneous, or downright ludicrous, but that the average of the decisions are incorrect, erroneous, and downright ludicrous.
Now that we have established why governments are bad news for you, allow us also to explain why this state of events has no cure. This is so for two reasons:
- The first reason is because there is no way to force governments to make good decisions. It's the old story or the old question asking "who watches the watchers". It is a question that has no solution within democracy, or for that matter in any other political system other than libertarianism. As such this type of government problems have no solution.
- The second reason is because even though some government decisions turn out to be good, the price we pay for those decisions is beyond anybody's wildest imagination. Consider this, some time ago we pointed out that the world has reached a crossover point between the world GDP and the formal government debt. Now go back in time just a few years and think of at least one or two good decisions that your government has taken and ask yourself, is the price of those sporadic good decisions worth the mountain of debt that governments are leaving behind? Are those few good decisions worth the destruction of our economies and our livelihoods? Of course not. In order to bring this problem down to a knowledgeable scale, just imagine what would happen if you would be forced to pay US$100 for one tomato. Or perhaps US$1000 for one rubber tire. Or maybe US$10,000 for a simple visit to your family doctor. How ludicrous does this sound? A lot right? Well, if we factor in all the debt that our governments have accumulated and all the financial destruction that they caused (and continue to cause), these would be the real numbers we would be looking at.
The problem is not that governments fail all the time, but that the few times where they get it right are so incredibly and ridiculously expensive as to make the whole proposition not viable.
THE MIRROR
In line with this thinking, most libertarians also freely declare that libertarianism is not The Solution. Most libertarians freely acknowledge that libertarianism is simply a step towards something better. As in libertarianism every person is responsible for their own decisions, it is extremely unlikely that those decisions will have a huge impact on everybody else. But, most of us never say that libertarianism is infallible. What we say, is that given the choice between the price for good decisions that we pay under a Democratic system and the same price that we pay under libertarianism, they are orders of magnitude different.
What we say is that libertarianism it's an imperfect system. We fully recognize that. Anybody that actually presents libertarianism as a religion that must be accepted at face value and must be believed to be infallible should get their heads examined. The difference is that on average libertarianism makes much much better decisions than democracy. Therefore, on average, libertarianism works much much better than democracies.
We must never forget that we cannot compare democracies against libertarianism directly. This is so because democracies are so-called representative systems while in libertarianism we represent ourselves. Those two systems are not comparable directly. However, we can compare the outcome of both systems. Furthermore, because there are many variations in this process, it is meaningless to compare daily outcomes. What is meaningful, is to compare averages. It is for this reason, that we, in this site, have the tendency to generalize. We may take a daily event as an example but we strive to demonstrate how this example is part of a much much bigger picture that actually represents the trend. It is this trend that is destructive, not an individual decision that an individual government may have individually taken at a specific point in time. It is the accumulation of those decisions, their biases, and the preferences, which accumulates over time and produce massive damage.
LETS BE CLEAR
One of the things on which we need to be clear, is on our tactics to fight governments. As we explained many times before, political systems are very vague and ill-defined. As such, they are not scientific systems and thus deductive reasoning cannot be applied. Therefore, we are forced to use inductive reasoning which leads us into the realm of philosophy. This is a problem because we would much rather be using hard-core deductive logic (as in mathematics) than inductive reasoning which is subject to interpretation and in many instances based on subjectivity.
Because we are forced to use inductive reasoning often times we will be seen taking stances which are very aggressive against governments. This aggressivity originates in the fact that inductive logic typically carries with it our subjectivity and biases. As such, our discontent and downright anger shows through. There's nothing we can do about this other than make our reasoning as deductive as possible and base it on as many sound numbers and statistics we can get our hands on.
However, this does not mean that we believe that under no circumstance governments are capable of making good decisions. This is not true. The problem is that due to all those issues that we described above, our opponents keep painting us under a different light. And in this area this is very easy to do because it is patently and obviously clear that sometimes governments do get it right. If we are presented as saying the absolute opposite we look like lunatics. This is of course a very common tactic and must be dealt by presenting our points of view more clearly and more thoroughly than the opposition.
This is something that is not easy to do because believe it or not, it requires a scientific mind which has been trained to think in a scientific manner. This is true because if science teaches us anything is that we are always wrong. This is so because every single model that we have of reality it's simply a model. It does not actually represent reality. And we know that as time goes forward, new models, better models, will become apparent. Is this humility that enables us to recognize that there are no absolutes. As such, we cannot under any circumstance declare that all governments are absolutely wrong all the time. This would go against reality.
Unfortunately, many libertarians do not have scientific training. They have not been humbled by reality. As such, they still believe in absolutes and at such they believe in libertarianism as a religion. This is of course a big mistake. Nevertheless, they do exist and they are out there.
CONCLUSION
if there is any conclusion that we ask you to take with you now that you have reached the end of the article, is a simple one. This conclusion is that there are no perfect systems but there are better systems. This conclusion can also be expressed by saying that you should be guided by reality not by other people's interpretation of reality. In science, we call this a prevalence evidence. What this means is simply that when we have an overwhelming amount of data supporting our model chances are our model is going to work just fine for the work that we need to do with it. In this sense libertarianism is our best current model. It works well enough that we can recommend it as a future direction. However, we cannot say and we will never say that it is the ultimate end to all our political problems.
Note: please see the Glossary if you are unfamiliar with certain words.