The Libertarian Society
One of the prevailing memes online against libertarianism is a caricature of a statist (Karen haircut, bad fashion sense, face drooped by attempting to control gravity itself) arguing with a libertarian (handsome, male, bald, bearded) about how society would look if we didn’t threaten to hurt anyone or take their stuff.
“Who will educate the kids?” Private schools.
“Who would feed the hungry?” Private charity.
Who would build the roads?
Ahh, the perennial gotcha for libertarians! Private citizens can’t build their own roads!!! Checkmate! Touchdown! Third victory condition!
I remember being asked this question in a uni tutorial and our “the state must prevail” programming had us blue screen in front of the tutor. (Thanks, whoever you were.)
Well, if you’ve ever heard that unsatisfying chirp curving toward Melbourne’s Punt Road off-ramp to join that permanent conga line of chuds clogging Hoddle Street, then yes, you have definitely experienced a private corporation building and running their own roads. Not as a pure market force but under the always evil eye of government. You know, those non-businesspeople deciding who may profit in their planned economy and the circumstances in which they do. Screw you, Jacinta! Again!
Libertarianism would (literally) free us from our mental chain
Let’s say that a genuine libertarian party swept the ballot box and turfed out the Liberal/Labor duopoly on its ear. A chainsaw wielding maniac by the name of Miller or some such becoming Prime Minister. What would our utopia look like?
We can look to our only real-world analogue, Argentina, under President Javier Milei. Tasked with taking a hatchet to decades of reckless left-wing Peronist spending, inflation plunged from 21% in December 2023 to 4.1% by May 2024 – it’s now at a RBA-shaming 1.9%. The poverty rate dropped 14.8% under his leadership. Though GDP was up 3.6% in the third quarter of 2024 (year on year change) the economy has posted 0.1% negative growth at present.
Unfortunately for Milei, his easing of the levers also resulted in an overvaluation of the Argentine peso. In April, underwritten by an IMF bailout of US$20 billion and a $22 billion tax amnesty, Milei lifted the currency controls that set the devaluation of the peso at 1% per month. By the end of September, he reversed course; the Argentine Central Bank set the fractional reserve rate at 53%. This was an effort to curb the Argentinian phenomenon of rulo or puré, where Argentinians buy pesos at the official subsidised rate and through arbitrage, sell the same peso at higher market rates for a profit.
So much for the Argentine libertarian utopia. That said, Argentina is riddled with monetary and economic issues – including charges of endemic fiscal corruption - spanning back decades. Puré is a very Argentinean thing, like negative gearing is a very Australian thing. Just you try to get rid of it!
But hey: he did a lot more good than bad in a short time.
So, what might our libertopia resemble? We can always turn to fiction, usually of the scientific variety, for a glimpse. A lot of post-state visions are dystopian. Like mercenaries patrolling the gated communities of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, or mega-corporates amassing their own armies under the banner of loyalty programs while killing people to create buzz for a new shoe drop, ala Max Barry’s Jennifer Government. Or we might end up like L. Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach, where contented people live beyond the age of 150, bottlenose dolphins invent interdimensional travel, and the US Congress only meets when necessary because their alternate Constitution declares just governments “derive their just power from the unanimous consent of the governed.” Oh, can you believe people travel via air, because unfettered innovations rendered road travel obsolete? Mind blown!
No liberal democracy, especially in what I call late-stage statism (amid the Anglosphere), escapes without its bloated bureaucracy alive and corpulent as ever, its grabbing hands grabbing all that it can. If you want to start something that will last forever, establish a government department or commission. If our theoretical Prime Minister Miller kicked the public service afuera like Fred Flintstone did Dino, you know what would happen: Dino would lock Fred out and he’d be banging on the door to be let back in. Dino being the public sector Leviathan, of course.
Private citizens can’t build their own roads!!! Checkmate! Touchdown! Third victory condition!
In fiction we can turn night into day with the stroke of a pen; the parts of the world you stop believing in that don’t go away – well, that’s reality. The reality is libertarianism would (literally) free us from our mental chains, mired in the belief that we must coerce and punish people into equality – that it’s even our moral duty to uphold such nonsense. We don’t need to sell people on a billion-dollar vision thing - libertarianism sets up the conditions for flourishing - then it’s over to we the people to achieve it, whatever that may mean to us.
Perhaps our baser instincts will prevail in a deregulated society ala Mad Max – but if the profit motive is innate (perhaps the dopamine reward motive is) – far more cooperation is required to push us into widespread prosperity than cut-throat competition ever could. For example, yet another shitty statist argument: barkeepers will sell paint thinner cocktails to keep costs down and “get away with it because no government” – but if you kill your customers, you won’t get repeat business. (I told you these guys don’t understand how business works.) If you set up a healthcare apparatus that keeps people just healthy enough to require government money over and over to treat chronic conditions… that’s somehow better?
Though grand and lofty visions of libertarian societies might look promising on paper, we have to accept we change one mind at a time, and our ideas will surely (hopefully) prevail. Fairness, justice, freedom of speech, the rule of law, the free exchange of labour, goods, and ideas. We’ll take a little bit more of each to start. We’re not saying utopia will spring up overnight – but it’ll be a lot better than what we have now.
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Yes. On the roads question, there are many examples of government services that people think depend entirely on government (natural monopolies), but which were in fact initiated in a free market by commercial or charitable religious organisations. For example, hospitals, schools, railways, libraries, electricity generation and distribution. We’ve just got used to governments doing this. But even nowadays, roads and car parks around shopping centres are often private.
Looking at Argentina, perhaps a transition towards a form of libertarianism that is radically different from a statist totalitarian status quo would be better if managed in some way. Managed by a libertarian, of course. Thank goodness for Javier Milei
But there is still a question. Is there any room for government at all in libertarian philosophy? I think there is.
In my understanding, the basis of libertarianism is similar to that of liberal democracy: free will of individuals, which is a right not to be restricted, bounded only by a duty to do no harm. ["The only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant." J.S Mill]. Within this bound, individuals are free to maximise benefits per their own (limited) personal effort. And they are free to interact with others, which may improve their benefit per effort. Interaction would likely include making products for use by others. Thus, by the way, we have the foundation of an open complex system. Evidently, benefit per effort for individuals can be enhanced if they form groups such as commercial firms under governance systems for protecting property rights, and even by forming nations. [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388155865_Assumptions_for_a_libertarian_effort-management_economic_theory] .
Approaches based on free will within this bound lead logically to the strain of libertarianism called 'national libertarianism'. Instead of anarchy, we would have governance based on libertarian principles. By the way, it seems difficult to have an anarchical system in which there is a capability for supporting property rights.
BUT, any form of group or organisation such as a commercial firm or government is no more than a superorganism of people. Similar to a person, a component of a superorganism can tumourously attract resources to serve its own interests. This disease process leads to a loss of ability of the superorganism to sustain its survival, without life support from government. As we see throughout the world, government-funded superorganisms seldom exit the economic system; they continue to exist as a living-dead zomby ... unless the nation or nations that support them go out of business too.
How to fix this for the future? Perhaps we need to build in a process to periodically euthanise organisations, and even governance systems, long before they get so powerful that they start blocking competition. Or, instead of antitrust rules against commercial organisations we should have antitrust rules to completely eliminate any organisation that begins to block competition. Why not start at the top with the UN and those organisations above central banks.