Give Attorney Jeff Jared credit for his persistence and energy, repeating the Libertarian philosophy – albeit one that’s doomed to fail, one born without certain enzymes to survive.
The internal contradictions in Libertarianism preclude any coherent policy agenda. On the one hand, they want freedom and liberty. They don’t want to pay taxes, and they want to dismantle the services provided by the public sector– social security, medicare, unemployment insurance, environmental protection, state agencies that protect us from frauds and injuries. Roads, transit, schools, police, fire, or the maintenance of the money supply.
This is the first failure of Libertarians: having no principle or method, they’re unable to agree on what’s necessary to keep– they know that some of these things actually increase their own freedom.
Always ask a Libertarian–what do you want to cut?
Which brings me to a second failure of Libertarianism: it is utopian. It is closely akin to anarchism. Like anarchism, it wouldn’t last five minutes before being taken over by large scale gangs. There would be a gold rush to exploit everything that was deregulated, poison the rivers, consume the commons, cheat, rob and steal. A blatant corruption, and a dictator (a monarchy) would emerge.
Jared calls for cuts in many agencies that would have predictable, harmful results. For example, an end to the Federal Reserve, fractional reserve banking, abolishing the FDIC, etc. and instituting a hard-money regime. Under a gold standard, what do you do when bad people accumulate all the gold, pulling your money out of circulation, and enslaving the entire population? Why do you think we invented the Federal Reserve in the first place? After a few centuries of the robber barons, bank collapses, monopolies on gold and silver, no country is so stupid any more. They all operate fiat currencies.
Which brings me to a third failure of Libertarianism: conceiving of government itself as the problem, when in fact, the problem is the lack of restraints, ethics rules, or controls over politicians and bureaucracy who run it. On one hand, we need effective government. It is better than a rule of the jungle. But when you hire one man to look after the interests of another, you need effective systems of incentives and accountability, and our systems have not been sufficient. They are a work in progress.
Todd Boyle, retired CPA, Kirkland
