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Shit libertarians say.
(lemmy.world)
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A true libertarian community would have a collectively funded Fire Department and publicly funded roads.
Libertarians do not want to pay "taxes". Taxes are a portion of your money the government forcefully takes and does whatever they want with.
Public services that a libertarian uses, they would feel like they would have to pay for.
Joe drives to work. He takes a toll road (not saying toll roads are a good solution). He pays for the road that he is using.
Steve rides the bus to work. His bus ticket will have the cost of the roads fixed in.
Joe doesn't want to lose everything in a fire. He gets insurance. Insurance company doesn't want to lose the whole house. They get a fire department.
Right now we pay 100% of the fire department in taxes. While paying full price for insurance. Insurance companies get to use the fire department for free.
The idea that giving up ~40% of your work in hopes that the government takes care of you is ridiculous (Social Security is a government ran ponzi scheme). The idea that giving up ~40% of your work in hopes that the government takes care of someone else is also ridiculous.
The government used every penny of taxes you have paid or ever will pay to not even make a dent in the bail out of privately owned banks. Hell, they probably handed Tom Brady more than that in just the PPP loans he received and never had to pay back.
But life can't function without government taxes /s
No taxation without representation. Do you feel represented?
Not saying the current system is good, but replacing it with a "libertarian utopia" will be even worse. At least the system does the bare minimum work, we do have roads, we do have medical care, we do have trash pickup. It's not much but it's enough for most people so you would have to do a lot better to convince people why they should topple their comfort and pleasures.
It all sounds like it makes sense but it's not realistic. Rapidly we will end up in a situation where you have pass through 200 different forms of toll/fee collection to get to work, because without strict regulation of all companies, both public and private, they are going to exploit your lack of options. I haven't had anyone explain to me why we should expect a society of hundreds of millions of people to all suddenly be able to say "That's enough, line doesn't need to go up anymore." It's not how humans function.
You would need a central authority that would audit and review all these "fees" that pay for our roads and medical care and fire departments, and make sure they are allocated where they're supposed to go. And if we're doing that, why not just send the money to this central authority to begin with so there's no hiding shit? And now guess what we have. We have the system we have because it's how things evolve.
Our argument isn't that we should do away with a central authority that distributes our work, it should be that we want that work to pay for things we actually want, not the things that a few defense contractors and banks want. I don't want to do away with government, I want one that makes less self-interested decisions with the money we lend them. And so far all the alternatives save one or two, they just make it easier for these people to make self-interested decisions.
Liberterian utopia is giving power to corporations and taking freedoms from individuals. You want to go here? Too bad you don't have money to pay. You collectively don't want to pay? Tyranny! Central authority!
Imagine a world where corporations that aren't even involved in your life can decide where you can and can't go, where you can and can't live, if you can receive medical care or not, what you can and can't eat, and so on. If we can break every aspect of society down to a system of "fees" to have basic services, we will rapidly have an entire nation of shanty towns, with about 0.1% of the population living in fucking castles on the mountains.
And this is what they want. Because the people pushing this tripe always think they're the ones who will live in the castles.