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by Mike Gray
Recently, Glenn Beck interviewed John Stossel on his radio program and showed once more how libertarian thinking is a mixed blessing—sometimes brilliant, sometimes defective. Some highlights:
“I’ll give a thousand dollars to anybody who shows me something government does more efficiently than the private sector. I still haven’t found it.”
“That’s what they all say to us libertarians, You’re crazy. You want to get rid of stoplights and stop signs? But, in fact, there is a spontaneous order that emerges and in Europe they’re getting rid of lots of stoplights at intersections and they find there are fewer accidents and traffic moves a little faster because people take care of themselves instead of government saying come to a full stop. People look around and work it out.”
“I always assumed that fighting wars was a job for government, you didn’t want to trust that to a profit seeking enterprise, but … maybe they would fight wars better and if we didn’t like what they were doing, we could fire them.”
“People think the food doesn’t poison us because there are agriculture department inspectors out there, but the truth is, because Purdue or Oscar Mayer know their reputation depends on not poisoning people, they’re much more careful than the government inspectors.”
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Resources:
Glenn Beck’s book Arguing with Idiots.
John Stossel’s book Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity.
You can fire a politician. You can’t fire a corporation. You can choose to not use their services, but they’ll simply find another customer.
I can see it now:
Gov’t Bureaucrat, “Mil-Corp, we don’t like the way you’re fighting in Iraq. Per the terms of the contract, our agreement is terminated.”
Mil-Corp Executive, “Well then, we got some folks in Iran, Pakistan, China, et cetera, who are more than willing to pay for our services. We’ll just have to take things up with them. … Have a nice day.”
Daniel – Exactly! You’ve nailed it in one.
But there’s another component to war fighting that Stossel seems to ignore, the moral and civic dimension. Namely, wars should waged in self-defense on behalf of the people to protect them from aggression; the Constitution makes it explicit that such is the proper role of government. Stossel would reduce war to its purely economic elements and divest it of its morality. Libertarians do it all the time, dismissing ethics and morals as if they are of no concern to mankind and promoting a reductionist view of humanity as a freakish species, Homo economicus, rather than what it really is.
And that’s why I’m not a libertarian.
“People think the food doesn’t poison us because there are agriculture department inspectors out there, but the truth is, because Purdue or Oscar Mayer know their reputation depends on not poisoning people, they’re much more careful than the government inspectors.”
I’m not that into Big Government, but this strikes me as either delusive or dangerously naive – like a lot of libertarian thinking.
America was built on the independent, blood, sweet and tears of rugged individuals who built their own place with their on hands. This present administration is trying to take that concept away.