You know, I’m half reluctant to even post to this thread because I agree that this is gonna degenerate into partisan name calling, and Bush is gonna be called a libertarian, and somehow libertarianism is gonna be blamed for everything wrong. But I’m gonna take a stab at trying to contribute a meaningful constructive post, and hope that my comments don’t just get sprayed with polemic tripe from the bleachers.
I would have to admit that I have thought of myself as basically libertarian for a number of years. I’ve been very anti-government, and largely in favor of free markets and allowing people as much freedom as possible. I find the ideology of this very attractive.
However in the last year I’ve come to seriously question this. At this point I think it’s pretty safe to say that deregulation of various industries, particularly financial industries, has been a full blown disaster.
While free markets sound great, clearly in practice they suffer from issues. Some of these issues we admit to and try to address, (like monopolies and bank runs) and others we ignore or deny. (like greed getting out of hand, looting of companies, fraud, corruption, and theft)
But while I’m losing my taste for libertarianism, I’m totally baffled as to how to best regulate markets. From my perspective the govt is not capable of doing so. (Witness the financial reform efforts, and all the totally captured regulators)
Which leads me to my biggest issue. In the past, the argument has been big govt vs free markets. But I suspect that this is not what determines our success or failure as a society. What does determine our success is the amount of corruption vs responsible behavior. While I’m no economics expert, and I’m not sure where to find the data, I’m of the opinion that there are economies that do surprisingly well despite large govts. (I’m thinking Sweden, maybe Norway, etc) They are successful because despite large govt sectors their corruption isn’t that high. Whereas other economies with large govt sectors often have massive corruption, and so they are disasters.
So, I suggest to you piggs, that the issue really isn’t libertarism vs socialism, or republicans vs democrats, it’s how do we convince people in our society that it really is important that they fight corruption and act responsibly? If we have free markets, and everyone participates in these markets fairly and honestly, not ripping off others prosperity will flow. Likewise, I’ve come to the conclusion that having socialism is fine too, provided we can convince those in the govt to be responsible, not corrupt and to play fair. But both of those last two sentences point out the problem. How do you convince people to play fair? I wish I had a clue, but sadly I don’t. Guess that explains why I’m pessimistic about our collective future.
