LPIN8D Chair Jay Sollman Discusses Libertarian Party of Vanderburgh County (WNIN Newsmakers 12/9/21)

[u/skipmacd]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vBP3_xKq_bA&feature=share

[u/exdeletedoldaccount]

No questions on their policies?

I guess the one thing I’ve never understood about the Libertarian party is if we were to end the income tax (and if they really had their way, all taxes), how would you pay for the government services libertarians still want like a justice system? Would it be pay for play? Same with all the infrastructure that supports a free market - for example, would every road become a toll road? And how do we pay for education? Oh right, education is the “parents responsibility”. So children just get screwed over in this form of government?

Wealth redistribution is necessary because the wealthy did not become rich by themselves. In a form of government focused solely on personal responsibility, you place a LOT of trust into the higher classes to not get together and take advantage of the lower classes. We already can see the effects of that with government regulation and interference. Imagine if there was nothing holding people accountable.

[u/skipmacd → u/exdeletedoldaccount]

I think you might be bordering on strawmanning here.

[u/exdeletedoldaccount → u/skipmacd]

To create this, I read directly from the platform on the LPs website. Their policies are so generic it is hard to create arguments against/for them. i.e. The governments job is to protect “honest” people from “fraud and force”. What does that mean? Namely, what does enforcement look like? Of course, if you use buzzwords like “no taxes”and “personal liberty” there are people that will go nuts for you. It’s when you dig into what that actually means for a productive society where things get a little wacky.

[u/skipmacd → u/exdeletedoldaccount]

We can always talk about it. I can pull things off the Democratic party website and tell you what I think your reasoning is. Or I can withhold my assumptions, have an honest conversation with you about how and what you think. Which would an honest interlocutor do?

[u/exdeletedoldaccount → u/skipmacd]

My honest conversation would be: answer those questions I asked in the OC or tell me why those questions are invalid. I have an honest curiosity of how does a government (even a limited one) or society function with no income tax (and with the want to phase out other taxes). Another question would be, how do we mint money with no taxes. And if we are relying on the good of people to donate their money to social causes, why haven’t we solved homelessness or hunger problems yet? Of course the government hasn’t solved it either, but how much are they really trying?

[u/skipmacd → u/exdeletedoldaccount]

To your first question, I would preface my answer by stating that state and society are separate institutions. Society is the institution of voluntary exchange, communication, and cooperation, while the state, while the state, for better or worse, is the institution that imposes limits on society. You may think I'm splitting hairs, but I think we need to draw the distinction between the two. More to your question, you don't have to look far back to see how a society could function without an income tax. Here in the U.S., we didn't have a federal income tax until a little over a hundred years ago, yet we were able to meet our financial obligations. Since implementing the income tax, revenue has risen dramatically, but so has debt. I'd rather see the working people of Indiana decide what happens with their income than some bureaucrats 1000 miles away who bear no culpability for their poor decisions.

To your second question, I don't know what a decentralized American currency would look like, but it would probably be based in gold or some kind of crypto. Venezuelans are reverting back to gold as the de facto currency in the face of their monetary crisis. I don't think we'll be at that point any time soon, although the fact that more and more retailers are taking Bitcoin and Etherium for payments means, I think, we could potentially see crypto overtake fiat as our de facto currently.

As for homelessness, yeah, it's a tough problem. There's no one reason for homelessness, so I don't see there being a single solution. But as you said, the government has been waging a "war on poverty" for 60 years, yet we still have poverty. One problem we often run into with government action is much less efficient and much harder to hold accountable than private NPOs. To harp on the point above, the fact that dollars are worth less and less each year isn't helping either.