A New Year But Two Old Parties

The two party system is set up so that third parties are mostly shut out of the discussion.  Occasionally a third party will bring up a valid position on an issue but once it is adopted by either major party, the third party originator of the idea slumps back into obscurity. 

But what if it didn't have to be this way?  What if magically we could have a new start to go along with this New Year?  What would a libertarian country look like?

Libertarians have one answer for most economic questions:  the free market.  Austrian economists (notable among them, F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman) teach us that prices are transmitters of information and that anything that distorts prices (usually government intrusion) adds static to that information.  For example, when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac distorted the mortgage market by allowing un-creditworthy people to buy homes, prices rose.  These prices were lies that the government was telling its people.

Free markets could do everything from prevent the next real estate bubble to providing kidneys to people on transplant lists.  Markets are examples of spontaneous order.  If people have a want, need, or desire, someone else will fill it for economic gain.  When people move into an area in large numbers invariably churches, supermarkets and retail stores follow.  If the desire for pizza in an area increases, it is only a matter of time before another pizzeria opens. 

All without one central planner, markets provide efficient solutions to problems that don't even need to be vocalized.  Government does a bad job of planning even for vocalized problems with resources that vastly outnumber private sector giants like Wal-mart.   

On social issues, a policy of noninterference is what most libertarians would like.  People regulate themselves remarkably well and as long as they are not hurting anyone else, it is no one else's business anyway.

Unfortunately government is the biggest intruder into the "culture war" issues taking sides on issues like gays in the military, gay marriage, the amount of salt allowed in restaurant food, banning happy meals, redistricting fast food chains out of urban areas, banning alcoholic beverages that contain caffeine, banning smoking in public places, banning lingerie football, banning trans fats, even banning singing and dancing.

Private proprietors are free to do most of these things (excluding, at least, the first two) and I would even prefer a restaurant that bans smoking entirely but when government makes these decisions for people, it treats them as children.  Top-down solutions always have unintended consequences such as when smoking bans hurt bar revenues especially in areas that border states that don't have that law.  If half the bars voluntarily banned smoking and the other half let it stay, maybe a happy medium could be reached through spontaneous order and everyone could be made happy.

Although conservatives would applaud libertarians' economic policies and liberals would applaud at least some of the social ones (on the other hand, many bans were initiated by do-gooder progressives, one good reason libertarians tend to side more with conservatives than liberals), there are some issues which put libertarians on the fringe of both the right and left. 

Libertarians advocate an end to prohibition, not just of marijuana laws but virtually all drug laws and all laws banning prostitution.  Do libertarians really desire to put heroin in their arm and then have sex with a prostitute?  Well, not really.  Prohibition is the opposite of a market.  Prohibition raises prices due to the danger involved with the business, then it attracts the criminal element to run it.  Even worse, when a dispute occurs, there is no legal way to settle it so the most violent criminal tends to prevail.

By enriching the pushers while stuffing our jails full of johns and users, we create a worse situation than would exist with total legalization.  At an average price of $30,000 a year to incarcerate someone, we need to focus on those who are breaking laws that impinge on other people's rights, not merely our social norms.  As I said before in Just Say Now, we lose 14,000 people a year to drunk driving and still never talk about alcohol prohibition.  We realize the current system of creating a legal market is the best of the realistic outcomes. 

Of course there is no such thing as magic and libertarianism will likely remain in the shadows.  However, with growing disenchantment with liberal fiscal policy, a mounting debt that will come due in the next few decades and younger people continuing to drift leftwards on social issues, libertarianism looks like it could be the philosophy of the coming generation even though the mainstream might never adopt the fringe issues and likely won't fully embrace free markets.

Norman Thomas, an American socialist once said that,  "The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened." I believe that in time America might simply become an economically conservative and socially moderate-to-left country and one day we will all wake up in a libertarian country.