Milton Friedman, my favourite libertarian, advocated for a negative income tax as the best form of social safety net. It means that the minimum amount of money any person gets is not zero!
He also liked to point out that a lot of other government programs were in fact regressive: paid for in taxes by working class people and providing the benefit to middle class and up. A classic example of that is funding for higher education. It’s pretty darn regressive to pay for higher education with taxes collected from working class people whose children don’t even attend higher education!
He has a lot of other arguments that make a ton of sense. He is against any and all forms of subsidies for large businesses and he is against laws which create and protect monopolies and oligopolies.
The one thing I’m not clear on is how to organize society to protect against future government interference and especially corruption by special interests.
You need solid anticorruption laws the same way you need solid antitrust laws and they need to be liberally enforced. The problem is that neither have been since the 70’s. Regulatory capture by big business is a massive problem, and I am not sure if it is possible to 100% defend against.
I self identify libertarian but lean left. I’d argue that while things like funding higher education may currently be regressive, if free education extended from the current cap of 12th grade to encompass at least an associates level degree you would have a lot more lower and working class taking advantage of it and making it less regressive. With the country having jettisoned it’s manufacturing and blue collar industry, I would further argue this is necessary for the country to compete on the international stage.
Germany has government funded education throughout. It’s still regressive! They stream people into either working class tracks (hauptschule and realschule) or academic (gymnasium). In effect, this means working class students have far less opportunity to go to university in Germany than they do in the US, despite the latter’s problems with affordability.
Friedman would go 100% the other way and abolish public schools entirely, along with abolishing the minimum wage, subsidies for universities, subsidies for business, and tariffs. His argument is that the minimum wage puts a floor on the productivity of a worker which means many people who could be hired at a lower wage and be trained on the job instead do not get hired at all and have to pay for their own training through school (either directly with tuition or indirectly through taxes).
The current system ends up creating large classes of people who get an education in subject matter that’s totally irrelevant to their career (like someone studying sociology in order to work in HR). Why should we, as taxpayers, be paying for this? Employers should be paying to train their own workers on the job!
There is some merit to that, and free education has the same issues in other countries besides Germany. My planning process was to treat the 2 year associates degree like we do with high school, no performance testing or path tracking. Everyone is entitled to a high school diploma of they want one, and with an associates degree being the new high school diploma it makes sense to include it.
It is what we as a society have determined makes the bare minimum education standard for then learning the rest on the job. The employment sector has moved this bar from high school graduate to associates degree, and the education system should reflect that.
The complete abolishment of public everything and allowing the market to dictate and provide is great in theory, but the same was Marxist communism is. There are always those that will break the system for personal gain.
There are also efficiencies of scale that business in a healthy, non mono/duopolostic environment can’t take advantage of that the government can. This is why I put education and healthcare under the “provide for the common defense and well-being of the people” that it exists for. This is why we the taxpayers should be paying for education in what may be or appear totally irrelevant: it results in a net gain as far as expenditure across the country as a whole and makes companies better able to train workers on the job. It also allows easier job transitions allowing more economic mobility, and also helps maintains balance of power between the worker and the employer.
In a libertarian ideal the worker is not trapped working the job or for the specific employer because that is the only job they are trained for and where their healthcare comes from. It is a contract of mutual gain. It is unreasonable for a worker to start over from scratch to change jobs if an employer is not maintaining market wages. It also allows a worker to more easily become an entrepreneur and open his own company, as this requires a broader education basis to succeed at than the job he does for another.
Strong but limited regulation is need to keep markets free. Regulations preventing pollution of the environment as a common resource, truth in representation of goods and services, prevention of anticompetitive actions and regulatory capture., etc. Without this markets inevitably fall to monopoly and the system switches from mutualism to parasitism.
There is a careful balance to maintain and government overreach is just as easy in the other direction. This is true is any economic and sociological system though. Perfectly free laze fair markets do not exist the same way perfectly egalitarian communism doesn’t exist above the small commune level and for the same reasons. Or perfect democracy where everything is voted on by everyone and everyone is making fully informed and educated decisions. If none of these are possible in the real world, all we can do is take the best parts and attempt to create the best possible real world results.
