Everyone has a role to play in the struggle for greater human freedom. Mine, it has turned out, is to convince you that we do not need involuntary governance at all.
A big stumbling block to that revelation, for many people, is envisioning how what is currently provided by government can exist in government’s absence.
Simply put, we become inured to the notion that certain things are provided by the market and other things are provided by the government. Any other notion simply seems foreign.
It never occurs to most of us, for example, that shoes would be provided by anything other than private companies operating in a free market. Anything else would be rather silly, right? And yet there was a time that the government of the Soviet Union was the world’s largest producer of shoes.
I was in the USSR in 1991. I talked to a lot of Russians and made a few close friends. They told me about the waiting lists for cars and appliances. I even waited in line with a girlfriend for a couple of hours for a bag of sugar. I remember the little paper chit, which she called a Талон, that she was to turn in in exchange for the sugar.
It was a short trip, but I learned a lot. And I can guarantee you that there were Soviet citizens who would have had difficulty conceiving of shoes being provided by anything other than the government. Fewer would have thought this in 1991 than in earlier years, before the truth had started to seep in. But even in 1991, there would have been some.
But shoes are just a product, you will insist. Lots of products and services can be provided by private companies operating in a free market. In fact, they’re way more efficient at it.
Okay. So now ask yourself—why does that logic suddenly break down when it comes to justice, security, and infrastructure? Why do you assume that those particular goods and services cannot also be provided by the market?
Could it be just because we are accustomed to government providing those things? Just like people in the USSR were accustomed to typical market goods being provided solely by their government?
As a Westerner, you very likely understand that markets are much, Much, MUCH better at producing goods and services. Unless you are completely addled by a university education, you know that emergent order works much better than central planning. You know that every time governments try to commandeer production of goods and services, they mess it up.
You also know that governments aren’t particularly good at doing the rest of the things they do, either. Government services are notoriously inefficient, unresponsive, and out of date. They suffer from massive cost overruns that would cripple any private business. In fact, any private business that conducted itself the way government does, in any of its endeavors, would go out of business in short order.
And even when governments do contract with private businesses, the bidding process is shady and the work is done less efficiently and more expensively. You’ve all seen it—one guy digging a hole and 15 other guys staring into the hole. Or how about the perma-construction along the length of I-95? There is no way that a private roads corporation would run its affairs that way.
But government doesn’t have to do roads efficiently. If you don’t like the way they do it, too bad—your only choice is another government road.
Government does not have to do law and justice efficiently either. The police do not need to protect you from crime. They just need to show up after and draw a white line around your carcass. There are no market forces impelling them to excellence.
Businesses stopped using government courts ages ago—they do everything through private arbitration. They know that any dispute they are trying to iron out will become irrelevant long before any government court even gives them a hearing, let alone comes to a decision.
If you are any sort of conservative, libertarian, or just honest observer, you know all these things. You know the market does everything better.
So again—why do you assume (if you still do) that the market simply cannot do justice, security, and roads. What is your stumbling block? What can I do to help you get over it?
In the meantime, I can tell you how you can help me. Buy be a cup of coffee. Or better yet, a cool, crisp glass of cider. That way, I can keep doing this!
Bravo! I get so sick of "but who will build the roads" ...., really, I'm pretty sure I know people who will do a better job than what we have......it's a weird autonomic response.
Governments exist to benefit people in the government.
Bar none.
Has always been and will always be.
What a charade to convince us otherwise.