I think Libertarianism is so popular in America right now because in the US, we don't have much to show for our tax dollars. Our infrastructure sucks, we still have a ton of poor, and the middle class still has it kind of rough in general. Christ, we're just barely starting to help poor people pay medical bills legitimately instead of sneaking off to a different ER every time their kid gets sick.
Because they don't have the money to pay for it themselves... or they misappropriate funds themselves. I'm not saying all of them do, but there are kids who would not be seen dead in "Generic Shoe" and their parents over-spend on crap because they give in. If people buy in their means they can live a much better life. I've done it and still do it. I don't have kids today because I can't afford kids today. I may be considered rich by some of my friends, but it's only because I set aside money and if I couldn't afford something with what I have left... I do without. I have one friend who lives in a trailer park with his wife and two kids. He caves in every time his kids ask for a toy. I can't visit him anymore because there are toys laying all over the place and I can't walk, let alone sit in their trailer. If they didn't buy all that crap, they'd be able to visit the dentist more than once in a blue moon. I feel bad for the kids, but I can only blame the parents in that case. I help them when I can, but I can't rightly go into their home and say, "No more toys until ____." That's Mom and Dad's job, and I've hinted that to them... I never had that many toys as a kid and maybe that's why:
I consider myself thrifty, but I buy nice things when I know those things will last. My furniture is over 15 years old. The couch is showing signs of wear but I'm now just considering buying a new bed, so it will wait. My sole credit card is paid off and I intend to keep it that way. It kills me when my friends brag about something they just bought because I know they are going to throw it away in a few weeks for one reason or another. They laugh at the holes in the couch, but I tell them that it's an extra $800-1000 in my pocket right now that they wouldn't have... and it still holds their weight each and every weekend they come over.
In other nations (like many European nations), taxes are somewhat high but they actually have something to show for it, whether it's good transportation infrastructure, college funding, good health care for its citizens, et cetera. In the US, we have... bureaucracy? Seemingly orders of magnitude more military spending than anyone else on the planet? Waste?
Agree, and it also makes me mad. We could cut a fraction of that war chest and fund so many programs that need money. The problem is that (in my opinion) the Congressmen are trying to prove a point: We need more taxes. We don't need more taxes. We need properly spent taxes.
The irony is that, in my opinion, the small-government low-taxes quasi-Libertarian crowd tends to support policies which exacerbate the problem. For example, in the recent debt fiasco, Republicans were damn near ready to swallow bleach rather than raise any sort of taxes on anyone, even the very rich, and they think the solution to us not getting much out of our social programs is to cut them even further, to the point where things become even more of a hellhole for those without means.
They only exacerbate the problem because of your next point:
Those people would do well to realize that one reason this situation exists in the US is not because we tax too much, but because we don't tax the right people in the right way.
This is why many Libertarians, while pushing tax cuts, also want audits and spending reform. The sad part is that the Republicans that want to win this crowd over don't listen to the reform part. They make blanket cuts.
Now, there's another side of the argument as well. Take government funded schooling. If each person is able to use their own paycheck to pay for whatever school they want their child in, government cuts to schooling wouldn't matter because they wouldn't exist. It would also encourage people to have kids only if they could afford to educate them (...Well, it should, and each parent should be aware what it's going to cost them to have another kid. I guess you could mandate that all children you have requires a "trust" fund that has $N put in it each month to pay for education expense. That's the only way I came up with on the fly. I'm sure there are holes.) With "free" schooling, parents don't even calculate that cost into raising a child because someone else is paying for it. (Heck, I'm sure many parents don't even think about the cost to raise a kid because they think the tax deduction is supposed to pay for that... or they just assume someone will help them.) With parent funded schooling, nobody could use that threat to get funding for their bills with earmarks to benefit their friends.
That's an extreme example, but the logic could apply to any number of social programs.
What doesn't help is the over-emphasis in American society on individualism over collectivism.
I'm not sure this is entirely true. While you are encouraged to "make it on your own" there is a very serious push on de-centralization of power within that same Libertarian crowd. It's more of a push to collect in smaller groups. It promotes competition. If you live in a town that enacts a new law that you do not appreciate, it's far easier to move to a new town in protest than it is to move to a new country. An example I posted recently: There is a vote at the end of this month to remove one of the board member of the HOA I just moved into. He's abusing his granted power by pushing lawsuits (paid for out of the HOA fees, using his lawyer friend) on the home owners themselves. (One of them he didn't like the light-gray colored shingles on their roof...) That's very local corruption and it's going to be very quickly resolved. Had that been on the state scale, nobody would have noticed the $800+ other fees that were involved in that suit. The neighborhood might not have even known it was happening because the homeowner might have been afraid of the State... instead, they can file a complaint with all the other residents of the association.
If your mindset is strictly competitive, as is the case with a for-profit institution (especially something like a corporation, where individuals have less influence than cold corporate cultural and bureaucratic mechanisms), then the fact is that it simply doesn't matter to them. Why put poison in milk? Why care if there's poison in your milk, if lack of oversight helps you maximize the bottom line? We've seen this before in history. Five-year-olds working in coal mines, people selling radium water to cure illnesses (this one got less popular after the spokesperson's jaw rotted off, and all kinds of fraud and misbehavior. This is especially easy to do in the modern, global age, because even if you're personally allowing these kinds of decisions (instead of it just being the result of policies and red tape), those decisions are likely affecting people you don't know, don't particularly care about, and will never seen in your life. It's far easier to care about whether or not you're poisoning the wells in the nearby town than care about whether, say, some aspect of your business's practices are indirectly poisoning the wells in a remote village in Africa.
Here, I agree. I consider myself Libertarian. I do believe some regulation is required... on business, and in streets and infrastructure. Anyone that claims Libertarians want a Government so small that it can't provide infrastructure is blatantly lying to push their agenda.
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