| You can only be libertarian if a) you've never bothered to study history or b) it's a cover story for an ulterior motive. The US was mostly a libertarian's paradise from 1850-1950. It didn't work. Federal agencies and government regulations were created because the courts were unable to adequately respond to ongoing problems. The proximate cause of death for libertarianism was the sequence of massive bank panics and depressions leading up to the final "Great Depression" in 1929, but there were many causes across wide-ranging areas of society. To give just one example: The FDA was created (and later strengthened) in response to a long succession of disasters where well-established drug companies added known toxic (or lethal!) chemicals to their drugs, then placed them on the market without testing. Thousands of people were killed. No legal decision can bring back the dead. Most of these companies already had reputations to protect and judgements against them were expensive. Yet they continued to screw up royally. We've tried libertarianism. It simply doesn't work. It has never worked. It will never work. It is always less efficient to force millions of consumers to extensively research every aspect of the products they buy, then seek redress in the courts after suffering injury. It will always be a net win to set basic safety standards (for established product categories) and force manufacturers to follow the standards. If you're a rich oligarch who hates paying taxes then libertarianism is a convenient excuse to shrink government (regulations = expense) and/or foist as much of the tax burden onto others as possible. Libertarianism is also attractive to people who have grown up in a sheltered society and so see regulations and standards as unnecessary restraints. They don't have any basis for comparison. It's similar to anti-vaxxers: Vaccines were so successful that whole generations have grown up without watching their kids or friends die and be crippled by disease, so they don't value vaccines any more than they value oxygen in the air. For that matter it is the same as the current Boomer generation's FYGM attitude: growing up in a post-war boom when the effective wage was ~$18/hr and college cost 1/4 as much of course it was easy to work part time while getting your degree. And with a growing population and society of course there will be plenty of jobs waiting for you. Like oxygen in the air or water in the sea such conditions are completely beneath their notice and thus later generations "must" be lazy moochers and "of course" they should just "work hard like I did". Sometimes I think humans really are doomed. As a society every time we get a good thing going we completely forget the toil, blood, sweat, and tears required to get there. |
While I somewhat agree and don't consider myself a libertarian, I'm much more of Thomas Sowell supply-side economics fiscal conservative and social liberal, I believe this smug, self-righteous tone, littered with broad absolute dismissives, ("We've tried libertarianism. It simply doesn't work") through-out your post perfectly typifies the problem with US tribal politics, especially the left-leaning sort.
You could easily change the wording and throw in some similar greatly over-simplfied examples, and you could say "We tried socialism and it completely failed", as a dismissal for modern big-government liberalism. Which is ridiculous and unhelpful.
These endless trite left vs right debates on the internet always seem to pigeonhole unique and complex historical moments (with distinct geography, historial circumstance, economic situations, cultural differences, broad incentives, birth rates, technological differences, etc, etc) into some ideal fantasy governments that never really existed or even marginally fit into the molds of ideologies being questioned.
I mean... even scale is a huge difference maker. I believe smaller country's governments function far better (see: Canada, Scandinavia). As do "early-stage" countries in the growth stage after being up-ended. To apply some generic economic political system broadly across every country, big or small, financially stable or not, old population, cultural work, etc) is not a interesting or helpful as people seem to think.
Example: I love hear people explain how "Iceland nationalized banks and look how great it worked", meanwhile Iceland has a total population of a small US city, 0.01% the size of the US.
So it's entirely possible you're right. A more pure form of libertarianism, which may have worked well in the past when the country was 5% the size with immature industry, is likely going to be a disaster if it was imposed today. That doesn't mean it's not a good or superior model more fundamentally as a guiding force when shaping current polcy, or even within the larger system in thousands of isolated situations (such as schooling for example). Nor does it mean it wouldn't be ideal for a different culturally or smaller or geographically distinct group of people or for certain states within a heavily federated system.