lol Somalia.... give me a break.It's still a tribal country, all of those African countries were until colonization a couple hundred years ago but just because theres borders on the map there now doesn't make them any less tribal.
I forgot to thank dickmojo for the link to the hockey speech. http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2012/04/the-end-of-the-age-of-entitlement/ It echoes a lot of my thoughts and if we could get a Liberal party that closely resembled its constitution and a public that woke up to the dangers of the path we are heading down then I would be a lot happier.
Arrrrrrrgh. This was my thread. As the op I want to point out there are about 3 valid posts contained within 6 pages of discussion about why libertarian ideas won't work. You people arguing about all your rubbish reasons why libertarian ideas won't work are the very reason I worry they can't work until the current mix corporate capitalist and socialist dies a natural death. You are the predictable product of a system where general population are treated as brainless morons. Where you have been conditioned to believe you are not even capable of looking after yourself. As long as you perpetuate these lies the following generations will only become more reliant on government handouts and government "jobs". Anyone here who believes a minimum wage is capable or providing a minimum standard of living is simply deluded. As long as the wage is denominated in fiat dollars the standard of living provided by any minimum number of these dollars is completely at the mercy of those running the printing press. You must see this by virtue of your membership here. The thing that really bothers me is that you don't have to give up any of the security provided by the current welfare state in order to pursue libertarian ideas. This is the exact reason I asked the question in the first place. How could we transfer to a more libertarian system without an absolute crash to initiate the change? Those who talk of mad max, Somalia etc are only seeing the crash many think is nessicary to allow positive change to begin. The reason I want to discuss alternate ways of change before the current system crashes and we have to start from a mad max style beginning. This very resistance is preventing any meaningful transition from the system of spending vast amounts more than is produced. This debt can't continue to rack up infinitely, we must chose a path with more personal responsibility and less regulation, handouts and loopholes ripe for corruption. Would the haters who have spent the last week sabotaging the idea of liberating ourselves from this current system have any problems with the following 2 steps? 1 A change in policy setting direction in parliament towards discussion of repeals rather than additions to the current mass or rules and regulations. With new rules and regulations to be introduced only if they simplified and clarified current legislation. 2 A charitable trust category set up. Offering a 100% tax credit for donations made to charity's performing competing services to those currently provided by government and taxpayers. Reducing the legislation administered by government and opening the provision to provide social support services to competition would not leave anyone abandoned and helpless as often suggested by supporters of big government. I am open to all criticisms of the ideas I have offered. I only ask that you first ask yourself is the criticism your valid thoughts? Or is this a knee jerk reaction you have been conditioned to have by the current system?
What I've said above isn't a knee jerk reaction, it's simply an explanation of why we have the system that we do. We already have charitable trusts that receive 100% tax deductible donations. They do "compete" with government provided services. We had a welfare system that was run entirely by chartable trusts and we got rid of it about a hundred years ago because it was under-funded, inconsistent and wasteful. Reducing legislation is an admirable goal, but doing it can have just as many unintended consequences as enacting the legislation in the first place. Good luck to whoever takes on the job on unpicking the spaghetti ball of laws we have on the books now and lets hope they don't abolish something that turns out later to be important so find out the hard way why the law was there in the first place.
Problem is Big AD, government spending is inherently LESS efficient than private enterprise. You seem to believe that a pay-off between efficiency and "fairness" is ok, but I don't. I want Australia to be strong, and that means being the leanest and most efficient as possible. You criticize the 19th century era of unbridled capitalism, but I laud it. It was that period of unprecedented expansionism that laid the foundation for America's dominance of the 20th century. And if the welfare state was so much superior, how come it's sending the countries who pursued it most vigourously bankrupt? Meanwhile, Australia, which has been the most neo-liberal country in the world since 1983, also has the best economy. Just coincidence? And if you think that the best system is a balance between the two, that is just an argumentum ad temperantiam fallacy. Undoubtedly you will point to the Scandinavian countries, and hold them up as an example of why your preferred system works, but this is all just a massive myth! When you actually look at the statistics, Scandinavian countries have been out-performed terribly economically: http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/510 This and the fact that Norway is basically the Saudi Arabia of the Baltic, and Sweden is by far the the biggest arms-manufacturing country per capita in the world, and you can see that this leftist myth of the success of the welfare state (in the one place in the world where it hasn't been a complete disaster) is actually all just smoke and mirrors, based on the twin neo-con pillars of Fossil fuels and Military Arms exports.
Welcome back. Well you started the thread and then disappeared. As there seems to be many and varied versions of what 'libertarian' means, you could be a little clearer in defining what you mean by moving to a libertarian system. Is the list posted by dickmojo in post 109 (ie 'privatise everything') representative ? I think your first proposal of simplifying government rules and regulations is a great idea and I am all for it. Not sure of your reasoning behind the 2nd one. As Big AD wrote there are already charities with 100% claimable donations that do similar thing to govt services. Are you proposing something different to what already exists ?
I guess it's not about the existence or non existence of such tools. Rather a question of could these tools be used as a way to allow the current system to "get the hell out of the way" while the libertarian direction was allowed a chance to develop should a relevant politician, party or etc get enough support to have a fair crack under current "democratic" systems. Not just in oz but any country really. The world has changed an unbelievable amount in the past 100 years I'm sure anyone agrees? I wonder how the current system stacks up.... Funded by printing currency, selling national resources, and how much has the drain on those dwindling taxpaying workers increased? Hardly a healthy funding stream currently. If you count family's living in the same state house for 3 generations without working a day between them I guess we have unparraled consistency in our welfare state, institutionalised into a system where work is a foreign concept. I fail to see how so many people can be so sure libertarian ideas won't work with no working model to draw examples from. Dredging up examples of systems that were replaced a hundred years ago by what has become our current model isn't exactly reassuring. As for not sorting out the spaghetti ball of bullshit Does it matter if we instigate changes that unwittingly allow something important to be unpicked in clearing the junk. Surely the was a time where the law didn't exist, the need was established and the rule introduced. As this happened with the world coming to a grinding halt I'm confident we could redo the few we find that are relevant without such disaster. To rid the system of the many loopholes, and regulations that give advantage to the big corporate lobbiests who wrote the rules should be ample trade of for any small scale oopsies is that arise.
This is the line constantly put forward by so-called free market proponents and as a blanket statement is a total crock. Do you have any evidence proving this to always be true ? The US has a health system that is largely run by private enterprise and costs triple the cost of health in many other countries. Problem is the private insurance companies that have taken over the whole system and extract massive profits while providing no added value. Isn't that massively less efficient ? Do you truly believe that your electricity, water and public transport in Aus that is now provided by private enterprise that used to be provided by govt utilities is inherently more efficient ? I am constantly having to tell door knockers to piss off that I don't want to change electricity providers - how is that more efficient ? Yes, private enterprise is more able to remove the sort of deadwood that builds up in government bodies and achieve higher efficiency. But private enterprise also needs to generate a profit. One can cancel out the other and then some. And if in a pseudo monopoly position, private enterprise will naturally seek to maximise their profit as much as possible.
Thanks trew. In all honesty I was thinking of joining our libertarian party here in nz, but was a bit disillusioned at the prospect of their approach ever gaining traction. Seems its a bloody hard job to campaign for a job you don't believe should exist. I began wondering if there needed to be another tack on how to approach change towards a libertarian direction, perhaps under a different banner with less defined end vision. It seems libertarian ideas are highly polarising. Even on here where you would think the concepts would be popular this thread shows how open the world is to doing things fundamentally different. Rather than setting out after a libertarian paradise where govt didn't wastfully spend our future taxes on growing their own self important machine and line the pockets of their mates companies with govt contracts. Focus on smaller scale change that people can believe, change that a small party negotiating between bigger parties on coalition agreements could actually achieve. Here in nz I've seen winston peters and his NZ first party single handily play kingmaker to both labour and national (predictably red and blue for those not sure) by holding some simple common sense ideologies. Although I don't always agree with his policies I've often been thankful for his simply getting in the way and preventing stupid legislation getting passed into law. I hold a firm belief that approached from the right direction a party of libertarian direction without the scarey mention of full blown "fend for yourself" could gather enough common sense vote to win a similar kingmaker position. Doesn't strike me as a particularly threatening idea to offer support on policy decisions not to help left vs right in the race to add more rules with each turn at the talking stick. Rather to support the repeal of each others stupidest additions over the past 100odd years. Thus ask the question and follow the discussion. The wandering off into discussions of what is a libertarian idea and people's emotional objections have been great. I fear to ever gain traction these are the same emotional hurdles such ideas would need to clear. I'm in half a mind to sign up as an independent candidate or making up a party to have a crack. Seems its dumb to winge about all the stupid rules coming in, winge about there being no valid solution to vote for and not act on it. The general direction I think of is a simple decrease to the volume and complexity of governmental interference in people's lives and small businesses affairs. Thus offer a tool for people fed up with how thing are to not need a precised common endpoint to peruse; but more a current ridiculous situation to escape.
Okay, I'll try to stay on topic and ignore the rubbish from the scared and brainwashed. As Yippe said we've had a few discussions on this here and there. Obviously the main impediment is the need to orderly remove an entity that is over a quarter of the economy and has effectively been a monopoly provider of many services for at least a generation. First, most of the list that I posted in the 100 radical ideas can be implemented relatively quickly - i.e. within 3 years at most. Second, the more "difficult" ones (i.e. the ones where there aren't many sizable experienced private sector companies, not enough free capital in the short term and/or not enough trust and understanding by the general public should be signalled with lots of notice and with the privatisation of services and undertaken more gradually to help ensure that there is true competition at the start. The gradual privatisation of the electricity generators, retailers and networks (which is still ongoing) is a good example. Some like public education maybe can go through a half-way house of, say, a voucher system where the cost of public education can be redeemed at any accredited school (including home schooling). This will begin the process of schools competing based on quality and parents thinking they have true choice available rather than being forced to go to the public school that services their catchment area. A voucher system is still not perfect obviously so phase two may be to allow the schools to then compete on price as well with parents keeping any remaining cash. Other things like welfare may go through the creation of true fully funded public enterprises (rather than the current Ponzi scheme set up) which can then be privatised at a later date. As you are probably aware there are already a range of major insurance companies providing welfare insurances and hence it may actually be possible to simply gradually transfer much of the Government welfare to these entities in the near term until people are more familiar with how a private system would provide the same services and their responsibilities in such a system. Given the re-education I'm guessing it will largely be baby-steps followed by a rapid transition. The hard core Protectorate/minarchist functions like national defence, public infrastructure (eg roads) and the justice system should - in the main - be left to last except for various low hanging fruit that undoubtedly exists in all sectors. By encouraging the low hanging fruit, you will also encourage the growth of the necessary private institutions allowing them to find and fix the many teething problems as well as gaining the experience and confidence to provide significantly better, more innovative solutions to what the public sector provides. Given the significant reform agenda required to do everything before these Protectorate functions it may well be the second generation of people before they are seriously questioned and reformed. Another recent thread that discusses some of the things that need to happen is scattered throughout THIS ONE. Others will be around as well (especially a couple that were locked due to the "robust debate"). Finally, but certainly not least, as I mentioned earlier in this thread, one of the absolutely critical things that must happen is the removal of the central bank, legal tender laws (and capital gains tax on money) preferably along with reform of the commercial law to re-criminalise key current banking practices. Without this the whole Libertarian agenda will be a waste of time in the medium-long term and will be made significantly more difficult to boot (Yippe opened a good thread HERE).
Before I was enlightened I used to think much the same as you and now I can't believe how obviously wrong I was. The "arguments" for Government intervention in almost any activity are extremely shallow and don't stand up to any real scrutiny. I suggest you broaden your reading experience. A great place to start is to include the articles, essays, books, presentations etc of the Austrian economists. This excerpt from one of Mises books is a good starting point about the inherent inefficiencies of Government http://mises.org/daily/1471. Another fairly good one is HERE. Among other points, a key problem with Government "businesses" is that they have absolutely no objective way of knowing whether they are truly meeting what consumers really want - and the whole purpose of the economy is to provide what consumers want. "Profit" is not a dirty word, it is the only objective measure that businesses have to determine whether or not they are actually meeting consumer wants. It is critical to the success of Apple smart phones versus Blackberry smart phones, Coles versus Woolworths versus Aldi, Qantas versus Virgin etc, etc. Either you are making an affordable product that consumers fundamentally want and consequently make a "profit" or you aren't, and go bankrupt. It is the invisible hand itself. It allocates scarce resources to their most productive and best value use. Anything less (i.e. deadwood) means that the scarce resources available to humans are being wasted unnecessarily.
Nice posts Bord as always. In the most part, why the need to privatise these things at all? Things like National Defence and the justice system need to be there to ensure the others you have mentioned remain "free". Although I consider myself to be libertarian also, I am a big believer that things like defence, water, ports, electricity grids etc are always going to be a monopoly. Handing over monopolies to private enterprise where the core driver of efficiency (competition) is gone is a disaster waiting to happen. Sure the profit will be there because they can charge what ever they like. If a private water supplier has the only access in an area for a dam, then should they price gouge, there will not and physically can not be someone ready and willing to step in and provide that service at a more affordable price. Similarly, if the same happened at a local port, there, for a number of reasons would be no chance of someone simply opening up a competing port. For both of the above, it's highly likely that public funds were used to create such infrastructure in the first place. Why should a private enterprise get to profit from such projects when the people arent likely to see any real value from the privatisation when there is no competition?
Richin - In terms of practical small steps in the near term where the general population aren't as attuned and scared of change, you could take the approach of the Productivity Commission. Essentially, consistently advocate to introduce true competition in any areas of the market that the Government currently has a regulated monopoly. The mantra should always be competition, competition, competition for ANY current government activity (grouped with terms like "increased choice" and "freedom to choose" for news bites). For example, "I don't want to abolish Government involvement in XXX, I just want to remove the barriers to entry and to open the market up to other players so that families/individuals/YYY can have more choice about how these services are delivered". This obviously means different things for different state owned enterprises (SOEs) or activities, but at the end of the day you want to promote consumer choice with private providers being on a truly equal footing to any current Govt SOEs. Let nature take its course and eventually it'll become obvious that this, that and the other SOE should be partially privatised (or if you're lucky, fully privatised in one step). Once partially privatised it will largely be a matter of time before it can be fully sold off. There are many good examples within Australia and no doubt within NZ. Even though this approach achieves near term directional change, the downside is that you'll no doubt be continually expending political capital on the more contentious SOEs/functions (as Howard/Keating experienced). This expenditure of political capital may simply mean that all the good work over a decade or two is undone within one term by a Govt of the opposite persuasion (cf what's happened in Australia). Consequently, as with many other Libertarians, I am not very confident that such a slow but steady approach is really worth it as you'll feel like crap once the pendulum swings back toward the socialist side (and, in general the socialist pendulum swings are far greater than the libertarian pushes). Finally, the other mantra should be to decentralise all decision making that is currently centralised (particularly with respect to resourcing). Some centralisation is obviously okay, but broadly, take the power out of centralised bureaucracies and give it to the people much closer to the "shop front" delivering the services. Taking education as an example, give more decision, resourcing and budgeting power to the local principal instead of the national education department. Give local councils greater power over local spending etc.
I largely agree but would note that the credible threat of competition even if not physical competition is generally enough to "keep the bastards honest". Hence, the owner of the port infrastructure (not the operator which can be readily privatised) can be readily prevented from "excessive" charging by the threat of a major customer (or group of customers) being willing to, say, construct their own port nearby or to build a rail link from another port 200km away. They don't actually need to spend the capital, they simply need to have a credible alternative. Same with water supply and purification. We don't need the current set-up even if it is more efficient that other options. The fact that other options exist means that the owners will be unable to excessively price gouge (not that I necessarily think that is wrong anyway) for an extended period of time. Once alternatives have come into existence then in many cases, much of the original geographical or other reasons for the semi-monopoly will essentially evaporate. I'm sure you can think of lots of actual examples around Australia where credible or actual alternatives exist in water, power and transport infrastructure. Anyway, changing the provisions of national defence, roads, justice, etc is extremely challenging but (I believe) completely possible. If these are the things that people are really arguing about within my lifetime I'll be stoked. As with some people's arguments regarding the success of the Hong Kong economy, it may be that there are certain "primary" functions that benefit from the balance sheet of a Government whilst having near total economic freedom in all other aspects. [More specifically, the balance sheet being much larger much earlier than any possible local private provider hence, it can underwrite/cross-subsidise certain long term capital assets faster.] I think the arguments are contentious however, but we aren't currently in a place to properly test them. In short, I don't really care if someone is a minarchist or anarcho-capitalist or follow the Liberal Party constitution. In the absence of a horrible "system reset", then for all intensive purposes we are all on the same side for a good number of years to come and we can all debate again in the future. (Of course, we can still argue with each other in the meantime)
Rinchin, have you learned your lesson on why we don't bother with threads like this on SS anymore? To put it another way mate, just remember that just because people buy gold and silver, doesn't mean they have anything in common ideologically speaking at all otherwise In fact, the reason WHY people even stack in the first place isn't even consistent so it hardly comes as a surprise there's so much conflict on these forums discussing anything else! All you end up with is circular debates that go no where in the end and after 6 pages on this discussion it's clear this wont be any different
Now, you talk about total crocks, but this here takes the cake, every single grossly misinformed word of it. It is an elementary exercise to provide the proof you asked for, because there is actually a very sound explanation for why money spent by the public sector is inherently less efficiently allocated than money spent in private enterprise. You see, its because of the true-value price finding mechanism of the free market. So you see, what happens in the free market is that ALL data across the entire scope of the market is automatically collated and aggregated by the price-finding mechanism to signal with perfect accuracy how people may most efficiently and effectively serve one another's needs and best interests. However, with command economic models, a central bureau or panel can never have access to ALL the information and data, no matter how clever they think they are or how much of an "expert" they think they are. Its just not humanly possible, no human being or panel of a few people can have access to all the necessary relevant information which the price-finding mechanism of the free market automatically calculates. That's why money spent by the public sector is inherently less efficiently allocated than money spent in private enterprise. And I mean, historical experience bears this out. When you compare economies that have relied more on public spending, to economies that relied on private enterprise, the difference is stark: East Germany vs. West Germany, North Korea vs. South Korea, China (pre-Deng Xiaoping's economic rational free market reforms) vs. Hong Kong and Taiwan, USSR vs USA. There is simply no other conclusion we can come to except that free market capitalism is far superior to command economic socialism. And to suggest that a balance between the two is the best model is an argumentum ad temperantiam fallacy. If you were to say that we should lace the drinking water supply in our city with 10g of cyanide per litre of water, and I argue that we should not lace the drinking water supply with any cyanide, it would be inaccurate to conclude that a compromise of 5g of cyanide per litre would be the appropriate policy. Likewise, because of the true-value price finding mechanism of the free market, pure capitalism is the only sensible and viable economic model, and any amount of socialism is poisonous to the economy over the medium-to-long term. So, when you talk about the profit-mechanism as if its somehow a bad thing, you betray a fundamental ignorance, which is very widespread and commonly held, yet so wrong. You assume that its some sort of "zero-sum" game, and that if profits are being made, people are being ripped off, but this is just soo so wrong it frustrates me. Because, what is money? We here at silver stackers should know better than anyone. Money isn't real, its just a symbol, a representation. And what does it symbolise and represent? Value. Value as decided by humans collectively through the machinations of the market. So you see, when a company "makes" a profit, what is it doing? It is creating REAL VALUE in the world which didn't exist before. So, far from people being ripped off, when a company makes a profit, EVERYONE benefits, the bigger the profit the better! Because "making" money i.e. "making" a "profit" is just a euphemism for "creating value for the world to enjoy which didn't exist before". Regarding your other points, I hold that private enterprise could only ever hold a monopoly or a pseudo monopoly with assistance from the State i.e. it requires the State to pass regulations and requirements that are so onerous that only very large companies with very large economies of scale to hire armies of lawyers and lobbyists and accountants etc. can comply with them. Smaller and potentially more agile competitors, which could otherwise outcompete these bloated monopolies, are prevented to by Big Statism in cahoots with Crony Corporatism, and the only solution to this problem would be small government libertarianism. Regarding utility services in Australia, particularly electricity, it was only the retail arm which was privatised, not the wholesale supply I believe, which means no real competitive pressure can be brought to bear on the supply side, which defeats the whole purpose of private enterprise in the first place. Electricity supply is still extremely highly regulated and subject to riduculous market distortions such as feed in tarriffs and carbon taxing/trading, the whole thing is just a mess. You have no right to complain about it being "privatised" if in fact it is the most meddled with, regulated and distorted market in existence. Regarding the US health system, I mean you're just wrong. What do you think Obamacare is? What do you think Romneycare was? Politcians have meddled more in the market in America than they have in Australia. I don't want to write anymore to you, its just so frustrating to have to write these ideas out over and over, why won't you understand plain irrefutable facts? Educate yourself, listen to Peter Schiff, read Freddy Hayek, rid your head of stupid and false socialist and statist ideas for good.
OK won't post any more as obviously any questioning is not tolerated. Frankly I don't understand half of these last posts - guess I'm just too ignorant, poorly read and brainwashed Good luck with it all (convincing the entire population of your ideas that is) ....
Sorry... its not you I am raging at, its the info triad of media + education + entertainment. These are the people that use the GFC as proof positive that free-market laissez faire capitalism doesn't work, when all along it was central bureau and government manipulation of the free market (i.e. Greenspan setting interest rates too low, US Federal gov. implied guarantee of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac moral hazard, etc) which caused the Real Estate bubble which precipitated the whole GFC in the first place. But, the question is, if central planning and social democracy style mixed economies are so good, then how come all the economists who advocate for such a model were completely blind-sided by the GFC? If the only people who foresaw the GFC BEFORE it happened were Austrian economists, doesn't that tell you that Austrian economics is fundamentally correct, and that all the other schools of economics thought are invalid?
