“When one of your examples of a public good is a street lamp—‘how would we have street lamps under libertarianism?’ I mean, do people really think that way? That, if I had a house, or a business, or a neighborhood association, or if we lived in a community, that we would just let it be dark outside our homes? Let’s give the argument, so-called, the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say it cost $200 to put up a lamp, and I could say, “Well, I could go around my neighborhood and ask everyone to pitch in ten bucks to put up some street lamps, and, if someone says no, I’ll just have to pay for it myself, but no way, I’m not gonna do that because of game theory, so we’ll just live in the dark!” I mean, history is not like this. People [have] put up public goods on their own. I just can’t wrap my head around—some of these people really believe that without the state no one would ever do anything for anyone else or for themselves… I’m too tired to make these arguments! Maybe I’ve become jaded. But, if we end up living under a state because of street lamps, that’s just tragic. The Liberal is sitting their thinking, ‘Well, gee. We have this institution: it spies on everything we do, it takes half my income, most of what it uses that money for I disagree with, some of it I agree with but it’s not done well, it’s drone-bombing people, it’s making people mad at us so they come fly planes into our buildings, it treats us like criminals at the airport, it locks up hundreds of thousands of people ever year, it lets immigrants die in these concentration camps, it conducts torture, it does a bad to mediocre job at most things that I value, and most of what it does I really don’t think anyone should do, but you know what? If we didn’t have this institution, then I’d have to pay for my own street lamp.’ That just baffles me that anyone would think that. I would give half my income just to fund street lamps, if that’s what it came down to, so we could have freedom.”— Anthony Gregory asked about the Salon Article 3 Inconvenient Facts that make libertarians’ heads explode
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 19:10:44 +0000
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