The Truth @ The Spin Factor

Non-Ron Paul supporters: Do you understand libertarianism? Really?

Non-Ron Paul supporters: Do you understand libertarianism? Really?

From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism [Libertarianism]

“Libertarianism is a political philosophy maintaining that all persons are the absolute owners of their own lives, and should be free to do whatever they wish with their persons or property, provided they allow others the same liberty and avoid abusing their liberty.”

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty [Negative Liberty vs. Positive Liberty]

“The philosophical concept of negative liberty refers to an individual’s liberty from being subjected to the authority of others. In this negative sense, one is considered free to the extent to which no person interferes with his or her activity.”

Department of Eating Out and majority rule vs unanimous consent.

Whenever the government creates a new organization like the Department of Homeland Security or raises taxes, it interferes with your liberty. We wouldn’t make our neighbors pay for our haircut or our next meal. So why does the government do it? The answer is that the government does it because we accept the tyranny of the majority at the expense of the minority.

Think about it this way: You are with your friends and you want to order a pizza. Well, eight of your friends do. Your last two friends have been eating pizza for the last week and will absolutely not pay for your pizza. In most situations you wouldn’t force them to pay for your pizza; if you did you might not have very many friends, soon. So your two friends abstain and instead choose to go separately to a Chinese restaurant. The rest of your eight friends are divided between Papa John’s and Domino’s, most don’t really care, because they just want pizza. So you flip a coin and Domino’s it is. Six of you want pepperoni and three of you want anchovies. You could force the three to eat your pepperoni pizza, but that’s not a fair solution. Instead, you order two large pepperoni pizzas and one large anchovy pizza. Furthermore, three of you want onions and mushrooms and the other three don’t care. So you end up with one large pepperoni, one large anchovy pizza, and one large pepperoni pizza with mushrooms and onions. And Chinese take out.

Seems like a very good solution. But what if we created a fictitious U.S. Department of Eating Out? What would the order look like? Well, they’d ask you for each individual’s social security number, look through their records, and determine that they will send you two medium anchovy pizzas for everyone in your eleven-person party. You argue with them on the phone and you tell them that most of you don’t like anchovies, but it turns out that three of your friends didn’t register with the the department of Eating Out. That’s why you are only getting two medium pizzas. And that’s why they made them with anchovies. But don’t worry… Your pizzas will arrive in 40-70 minutes and they are free. That is until you look at how much the government is paying for your two pizzas: each pizza is costs 15 dollars, but the total isn’t 30 dollars. The total is 570 dollars because the government pays minimum wage and it was just raised to 13.00. The person who made your pizza dropped a bucket of tomato sauce on the floor and his friend slipped and had to be sent to the emergency room.

But who cares right? If it wasn’t for the goverment, we wouldn’t have pizzas. Everyone would have to buy their own pizza, and who would deliver it? Does anybody outside the government even know how to make a pizza? No thanks. We’ll eat our cold and tiny anchovy pizzas and pay 570 dollars for them. We are scared of the consequences of abolishing the Department of Eating Out.

As you can see, the only happy people in your party are the three anchovy aficionados. Eight of you are completely unsatisfied. This is an example where the tyranny of the “majority” affects the “minority”. Except it wasn’t the majority because the government had incomplete records and no incentive to please you.

Now apply this scenario to Health Care or the Department of Education, or Homeland Security. These organizations are inefficient and have no incentive to please you. On the other hand, Papa John’s and Domino’s Pizza make money by pleasing you. Their greed is an incentive to make your pizza better, faster, and keep you coming back for more. When you were ordering the pizzas from Domino’s your friends figured out exactly how to order without government interference. Your friends who didn’t want to eat pizza got their Chinese food and were happy. Everyone else got a share of the pizza they wanted and were happy as well. And it was done through unanimous consent, not majority rule. This is the way libertarians envision an ideal society.

But if the government doesn’t make our pizza who will?

If Papa John’s and Domino’s didn’t exist, someone would learn to make it and make a living off it. The first company to sell pizzas might sell at relatively high prices. But if this is the case, someone else will take advantage of those high prices to sell pizza at lower ones. As long as the government stays out of the pizza industry, pizza will get better and cheaper. So there is no need for the government to make our pizzas. As long as there is demand for pizza, the free-market will provide it.

But what about the poor people? They can’t all afford pizza.

No. Pizza isn’t free. Someone has to make it. To give pizza away for free would be to devalue the work of Someone. When we start giving free pizza away or raise minimum wage, we trigger a domino effect that reduces the value of our currency and the value of our work. Then other people can’t afford pizza either. But it’s free right? So they don’t need to be able to afford pizza… Well, wrong. Because nothing is free. In order to make pizzas, the government has to raise taxes.

But the rich can have all the pizza they want. It’s wrong for them not to share. What have they done for us anyway?

Well, the rich create jobs. When you raise their taxes and raise minimum wage they can’t afford to hire as many people. That means next time they need to reduce spending, they might have to fire you, because maybe you are not worth the new minimum wage.

But in an ideal world everyone would have pizza.

Not everybody likes pizza. If your neighbor doesn’t like pizza why should they pay for it? Think back to the example at your party. Everyone got what they wanted and nobody paid for anything they didn’t want, through unanimous consent.

Health care is different. Health care is a necessity.

And that’s why it is more compassionate to let the free-market take care of it. When you use a medical coupon you are entitled to all kinds of evaluations and free tests. And the hospital or clinic gets a free pass, so they can order as many tests as they want. What happens then? The price of health care increases and the price of taxes goes up. Furthermore, because everyone is expected to afford health care the price goes up.

So, in reality, government subsidized health care increases the price of medical services. That means the poverty line will gradually increase until people who might have once been able to afford health care no longer can.

What about the war on drugs?

If we stopped fighting war on drugs, we would spend less tax money on a problem we created. By fighting a war on drugs, we increase the market value of drugs. This means drug dealers earn more money from selling drugs. So in reality the war on drugs is relatively good for drug cartels and dealers. It’s not so good for people who get caught in the cross-fire. One would think it would be preferable that someone who wants a drug simply got it and left everyone alone than for our government to kill that person during a drug raid.

Furthermore, our jails are filled with people whose crime was victimless. They would be more productive and less costly out in the real world.

So if the government stays out of everything, who takes care of the environment?

You wouldn’t trash your neighbors house, so why should you be allowed to trash a privately owned park? It has been shown in experiments that people protect and value things they own more than those they don’t. When people own private property, they take care of it. By privatizing all land, we can protect the environment.

So if the free-market works so well, how come Ron Paul isn’t doing well at the polls?

On the contrary. Ron Paul does very well on all post-debate internet polls

But those aren’t scientific. I get the impression that the internet is filled with Ron Paul spammers.

The internet is definitely filled with Ron Paul supporters. The reason for that is that there is a great demand for Ron Paul and the main stream media is ignoring him. The internet is very much unregulated, and it allows people who are interested in him to follow his progress. Thus the internet is saturated with Ron Paul. A way to solve this “problem” is to ask the mainstream media to cover Ron Paul a little more often.

Ron Paul Blames America for 9/11.

False. Ron Paul blames our foreign policy. He was baited at the SC debate, but he didn’t bring up 9/11. It was brought up as a loaded follow-up question by the moderator and Giuliani.

Ron Paul is an isolationist.

No. Ron Paul is a non-interventionist. He favors global trade and diplomacy with all nations. He wants to pursue terrorists and wants to defend our country. However, he is against nation-building.

Ron Paul’s fiscal policies will help the oil industry and other monopolies.

Ron Paul favors a true free-market and is against subsidies, special interest groups, and corporate welfare. He would not subsidize the oil industry or any corporation. In a true free-market society true “monopolies” do not arise because the government does not hold back the competition through ineffective regulation.

You may also find these articles very interesting:
http://www.isil.org/resources/libertydocs/pizzacracy.html [Pizzacracy]
http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Essays/rdPncl1.html [I, Pencil]

If you want to know what libertarians think about current events take a look at: http://cato.org/ [The Cato Institute]

July 24th, 2007 Posted by eaglescout | Politics, Libertarianism, Freedom, 2008 Election | 10 comments