I'm pretty sure the roads would suck in a Libertarian Utopia.
I imagine a lot of these "responsible" people would drive without insurance too
If a freeway is built near my house, and my commute is shortened from 30 to 10 minutes, but I also have to tolerate some freeway noise
Does anyone else notice how much most people's political and social viewpoints are dictated by the love of their cars?
Here's something to chew on: if the national government (I like that better than federal, too) hadn't grabbed enough power to create the interstate system, then people wouldn't have had a free method of getting to work 20 miles away, localities wouldn't have passed draconian zoning restrictions that prohibit the creation or maintenance of cities, and we'd all live next to a rail station and have only one car - a big gas guzzling pickup for fishing, hunting, and camping, not for sitting bumper-to-bumper for 40 hours a month.
The roads/cars/freeways/tolls situation as we live it each day simply doesn't apply to the libertarian philosophy, since, had we been following it in the 20th century in the form of limited constitutional government, our current situation most likely wouldn't exist.
But since the interstates were built as a military necessity, that leads in to this:
The realities of contemporary modern warfare demand a very high state of training for any Army to be effective. This cannot be achieved without a standing army.
No, the realities of contemporary nation building or preemptive war demand a very high state of training. In the last century we fought two world wars
and won, with almost nothing to start with. Once we started fighting preemptively, with standing armies with high states of training, our record started getting a lot more spotty.
That doesn't seem like a good argument in favor of having a standing army.
Libertarianism is about not wanting to pay taxes and wanting to legally smoke joints while bloviating about the lesser of two evils.
Some people assume that "harming your neighbor" means only physical harm.
It could be anything from loud music late at night to public indecency.
While a few members of the LP really believe in freedom, I suspect the vast majority of them just want to be able to legally smoke pot.
Define the phrase "no one is harmed directly"? If I overeat and weigh 500 pounds, I am harmed by overeating.
And so continues the experiment of legislating morality.
The only people I talk to who I hear making these arguments are the good, moral, Christian people of Larry Flint fame. As I recently had to give up running the Sunday School because nobody would volunteer to teach the high school kids and I had to do it, I think I can get away with the following. In short, I'm commenting on myself too, so keep that in mind.
While you may think that they do a lot of good to clean up society, laws that enforce morality actually only serve to emasculate Christianity.
Your Church - and I'm going to go out on a limb and say any religious body, Christian or not - is the organization which is supposed to promote clean living and care for your fellow man.
It's also supposed to resemble a hippie commune more than what it is right now - which is a bunch of disconnected individuals more interested in complaining about how things are run in a particular building for an hour a week than creating and maintaining their own society.
I submit that when we legislate morality, it only serves to remove power from religion. The state becomes the authority on what is good and bad for you. Since religion then only directs society in what laws to pass and uphold, it is no better than a special interest group. Indeed, the "religious right" isn't religious at all, it's a lobbying organization, comprised of individuals who disagree sharply on other major theological issues.
Now if people are given the freedom to smoke pot or become prostitutes, is society really going to suffer, or is it just the individuals who will suffer? People like to point to the Netherlands as an example of the moral decay that can happen when you legalize this stuff - but as someone who has been there, I gotta tell you I don't remember seeing a single, solitary house of worship in Amsterdam, and I walked through most of it.
Is that because nobody wants religion in Amsterdam, or is it because the state has assumed moral authority over the citizenry, and they don't need religion? Is it because Dutch society rejected religion, or because religious society abandoned Holland?
Individual freedom can be boiled down to an evil, in that it gives us the opportunity to choose the wrong thing - but it also gives us the opportunity to choose the
right thing, and that makes all the difference. When you outlaw prostitution and marijuana, there is no moral right/wrong question for these activities: the motivation to not do it is staying out of jail.
To me, and someone correct me if this is the wrong way of looking at this, Libertarianism is the belief that the state has a bare minimum of moral authority over us, based on natural individual rights; and as a consequence, it has no moral responsibility to protect and care for those of us who make the wrong moral decisions.
But society can't possibly function like that!
But
that is where religion comes in.
You can't morally use the state to force me to pay taxes to fund police to ticket people who don't wear seat belts because too much of my other taxes are being used to support vegetables who got that way from getting in an accident while not wearing a seat belt. Outside of my Christian perspective, I can very easily deny that whole morality and say "screw him, he took his chances, let him die and stop charging me for any of this".
You can absolutely expect my religion to ask me for help taking care of him, though, since there's a divine mandate for me, personally, to care for him.
Personally, I don't think ponying up taxes to Caesar really fulfills that mandate.
