By Obnoxio
This is part of an ongoing series of posts outlining my understanding of Libertarianism and its benefits and consequences.
And
then there is the Tenth Commandment. 'Thou shalt not covet thy
neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his
manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything
that is thy neighbor's.' The Ten Commandments are God's basic rules
about how we should live — a brief list of sacred obligations and
solemn moral precepts.
The first nine Commandments concern
theological principles and social law. But then, right at the end, is
'Don't envy your buddy's cow.' How did that make the top ten? What's it
doing there? Why would God, with just ten things to tell Moses, choose
as one of those things jealousy about the starter mansion with
in-ground pool next door?
Yet think how important the Tenth
Commandment is to a community, to a nation, indeed to a presidential
election. If you want a mule, if you want a pot roast, if you want a
cleaning lady, don't be a jerk and whine about what the people across
the street have — go get your own.
The Tenth Commandment sends a
message to all the jerks who want redistribution of wealth, higher
taxes, more government programs, more government regulation, more
government, less free enterprise, and less freedom. And the message is
clear and concise: Go to hell.
– P.J. O'Rourke
Taxation
The
Libertarian Party of the UK has already promised to abolish income tax
completely. It can afford to do just by removing state funding from all
the unelected quangos in the UK. If these quangos are genuinely useful,
they will attract funding from local businesses and local individuals.
If they are not, they will wither and die, and a lot of interfering
busybodies will have to find something useful to do with their lives.
In
an ideal world, the state would not be needed and taxation would
consequently not exist. However, Libertarian taxes would generally be
consumption taxes, like a Sales Tax with rates aligned to the “social
costs” of the type of product being bought. What I would expect,
though, is a much simpler tax code and much less resistance to paying
it, because the outcomes of the money should be more obvious.
There would also be a lot less to spend it on. Anybody who reads Timmy
knows that government job-creation is actually a cost to society, not a
benefit. Government programs hoover up our taxes and spend them very
inefficiently on things that the government thinks is important. We may
not agree about their importance, but we have no control over it in the
current political climate. But even if we did agree that those things
were important, we could achieve them far more cost-effectively than
the government could.
And at the end of it all, those government
spending projects remove money from the economy that could be used by
us to do things that matter to us.
Europe
Because
Libertarians believe in determining their own future and because we
believe in not being subject to any laws but our nation's own, we would
withdraw from the EU. We would still happily trade with any nation that
wanted to trade with us including any nation within the EU, but we
would not be willing to subject to any externally sourced regulation.
The NHS
I'm
pretty sure that this will draw a lot of emotional response, but in a
truly Libertarian world, there is no place for state-controlled
provision of medical care. The NHS would be dismantled and individual
people would be able to interact with individual care providers and
move between them freely.
Since hospitals would no longer be
able to draw a business-saving government subsidy whether they killed
people indiscriminately with MRSA or not, I would expect a dramatic
improvement in cleanliness. Given that the government would also not be
micro-managing their every objective, I'd expect a massive refocusing
of resources away from management and back into primary care.
Oh,
and before anybody starts: the NHS is not free. It's funded by
taxpayers. I personally paid more into the NHS this month than a fully
self-funded medical insurance package would cost me. That's without the
queues; the rude, nosey receptionists; the appalling service and the
outrageous parking costs.
I, for one, will not miss it in the slightest.
Syndicated from Obnoxio the Clown and LPUK
