Voodoo
An American hero
- Joined
- Feb 26, 2011
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We haven't had true free markets, now, have we? They were just free-er.
The Carnegie foundation cured polio.
Standard Oil built the aqueducts - nationwide. OK, pipes to carry oil, but of a similar scale.
Carnegie's and then JP Morgan's steel industries built the golden gate bridge and the empire state building, as well as most of NYC and Chicago and ...
But of course, government and private sector partnerships have been great. Corporations get protections from their competitors by the government. They pay good money for it.
Replacing monopolies with a government monopoly is no better - in fact worse. Have fun at the DMV next time you go. Or dealing with the IRS in a tax dispute.
A monopoly might be a barrier to entry for competitors, but it creates opportunity anyway. Whatever happened to the company with the buggy whip monopoly?
As a Libertarian, I am not an anarchist. I do believe there is a role for government in society. I just don't think they should be picking winners and losers, favoring certain businesses over others, subsidizing any private venture, etc. We need police and fire and courts and printed money and military to protect us, etc.
So aside from all of the things that were factually untrue that you just posted, such as the Carnegie foundation curing Polio (that was Jonas Silas), and that JP Morgan built the Golden Gate Bridge (Amado Giannini was the one that financed the bonds for the state of California). I actually agree with a some of what you said. I think there is a lot of bad governing going on with a lot of corruption, or just simply incompetence going on all over the place. But who's to blame for this? Well clearly it's us as citizens, we should get more involved in all aspects of our democratic process. There are a lot of examples of public/private partnerships that are well managed, well governed, and well executed and all parties involved benefit. But unfortunately more often than not they aren't as well published as the failures which leads to folks such as yourself being ideologically opposed to anything to do with government.
Here's a very recent and interesting article on how public and private partnerships can lead to something pretty awesome actually:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/roanoke-virginia-redevelopment-what-works-214247
There are plenty of examples of this across the country, but I think the issue is that generally there aren't people that are in government, or in private sectors for that matter, that are interested in community building. Generally they are ideologues rather than trying to govern effectively, or in the case of corporate elites they are more interested in making billions, so there is an unhealthy tension going on between the two. If people on both sides actually attempted to work together, and used both of their institutions to do what was best for the community and removed the ideology out of it I think things would be far better managed and governed. But the problem is that Republicans generally don't want to use government for anything other than regulating my sexual preferences, my religious beliefs, or what drugs I can use. And on the flip side Democrats want to use government to fix all of their perceived problems whether it makes any sense for the government to do it or not.
Unfortunately this has lead people to the logical extremes thinking government either is the solution, or isn't the solution, and doesn't view things generally objectively and use scientific reasoning based on actual evidence and experimentation. Instead they just craft an ideological position on what they think government should do and stick to it thick and thin, whereas clearly the private sector does some things far far better than government. But, they are also extremely bad at doing some other things too, like prisons.
As to your point on the IRS and DMV's though, I think this is part of the problem too. There is an over fragmentation of laws and regulations across states that leads to massive problems, especially for private industry, if you want a monopoly on anything it IS government. The fact that there are so many regulations across so many states is actually incredibly inefficient and bad for, you guessed it, consumers, business, and the economy. You disagree fundamentally that government should be involved in any way in the economy, but this is the crux of the argument because that is where I strongly disagree. I don't not want government, I just want much more effective and efficient government, as I am not a fan of my rivers turning unnatural colors, and the air I breath toxic. I guess I am more of an old school Republican economically than I am a Libertarian, but socially I am 100% libertarian.
