So I consider myself Libertarian. By and large, I want the government out of business and life, and really think history teaches us by repeat example that power corrupts, political bureaucracy is slow, inefficient, and often fails, and that the best democracies involve fewer people rather than more. I made other posts on this blog about why the US political system is shyte, and how to circumvent some of these failings through the economics of money and people.
But I don't agree with the entire Libertarian platform. Minimizing the fed to the smallest possible degree is an absolute must, because it least represents the will of its constituents of any level of government. States are not that much better, they are just smaller pools of representation so they more accurately reflect the views of their people. But they still have some pretty dramatic dissent across them, and a great example would be my home state of Pennsylvania.
This year, PA elected Obama. They elected quite a few democrats to Harrisburg too, and they reelected Bob Casey Jr. However, my county of Berks reelected a Republican to the house by an overwhelming margin, because I like in the boonies hick country where half the people are Mennonite and the other half are old and racist. This includes Reading though, which like any large concentration of people is decidedly "blue" (even though I reiterate my disdain of categorizing along the black and white axis of American politics).
I'm just going to go out on a limb and say my area is pretty "conservative" as a whole, even with a population center of liberals. If they had exclusive say over their own politics, ethnic minorities probably would be enslaved again if a few layers of government and constitutions didn't forbid it. Meanwhile, if Philly is as liberal as it votes, they would have a socialist state where private business did not exist.
So there is some pretty complex disparity between regions in a state. Especially an American state - in my proposal, I'd rather have organic states redrawn every census that contain around a million people each, whereas modern PA would be 12 of these. But that definitely isn't small enough - while I definitely think a better system of government would make people inherently more mobile and not as tied down to areas against their ideologies like they are now, you can't expect everyone to have the capital to move away from a state containing a million bodies whenever they don't agree with the going majority viewpoint.
So I advocate local politics and enough social mobility to get people get out of areas they disagree with. I said it before, but it is against the libertarian platform because they want states rights, not local rights. They assume that the original 13 colonies were the "right" size, and in many ways don't even question it. Even though the largest of the original colonies at the first census was... (gasp) Pennsylvania, at 430 thousand. A third the population of modern Philadelphia.
And that gets to my point - the American system of governance does not facilitate population growth organically. Jefferson wanted the constitution rewritten every generation because he knew they couldn't predit everything. This is absolutely one of them, it is in my opinion the root cause of almost everything wrong in modern America. You have too few representatives ruling over too many people everywhere. Under my proposed system, you would have regions of ~10,000 people (1/6 the population of first-census Rhode Island, the least populated state at the time!) ruled by a council of 10, writing laws for themselves by their own beliefs. One of those 10 gets elected to represent them at the state level. So a council of 9 directly votes on laws, selects leaders of local departments (police chief, chairmen of a local hospital, boss engineer, firechief, etc). Those 10 should know their people. Personally. Each one on that council should know, on a personal level, the ~1k people they represent, and the people should have selected them for their humanity, not their spin. They can directly question people in their district about matters of law and with so few people the average person can sit in on discussions and make their voices heard.
You can't do that with a congress any larger. 10k people is about the size of most large high schools, and stuffing that many people in an Auditorium is.. troublesome. But doable. You can get that entire community together at once. You won't do it almost anywhere else. And they can select their own laws, their own policies, and what works can attract new people to move and create a more concentrated sect of communities sharing opinion and law.
So that is the states-are-best policy out the window. The other major Libertarian stance I dislike is the concept that government can't run anything. The principle thing to consider, from my perspective, on this topic is cooperation against competition. Any business will be inherently competitive and that is meant to lower costs and cut corners to maximize efficiency. Any cooperative venture is vulnerable to inertia, bloating, and stagnation.
I don't think utilies and infrastructure can be effectively done in a competitive way. And I don't mean buses - those aren't really infrastructure. You can buy a bunch of busses and sell seats without tremendous opportunity costs associated with laying roads, because roads are a public utility right now. Private roads would be systemically infeasible, because whoever gets roads "to market" first surmounts the opportunity costs and any competitor would need to dedicate tremendous capital to "catch up". Especially with limited land to cover with roads, and the probably that once an established player enters the market, they would influence regional politics to block any new entry into the market arguing against consuming more land for roads.
Electricity is similar. Power companies produce juice and sell it on market, and people can buy from any distributor even if they aren't inherently using their power because the lines don't distinguish who is putting in or taking out juice, just how much enters or exists from any one point. The lines themselves are maintained publicly though, because if they weren't, the entry costs, again, of "setting up shop" by repopulating phone lines with new power lines would be prohibitve, and again, competitors would manipulate government into artificially limiting markets.
The internet is so horribly shit in this country and Canda for exactly the above reasons. As Verizon lays fiber, they corner the market. They own the wire, and nobody can ever hope to overcome that opportunity cost once Verizon is in the market. The potential for profit is much lower when there is anything but a monopoly in such a circumstance, and costs are too prohibitive, and governments are too easily manipulated to deny new entries into the utilities market.
Same thing with public water, and public rail. And it is the same reason private airliners work. If you have companies sharing the "lines" the system can work, if they need their own wires they don't. If cable lines are public, the system is open to new players. If they are not, the cost of entry is too high and too easily manipulated by the entrenched player, and they can pull all the strings they want if you try to "share" their line. It is in their best interests to keep you out of the game and themselves in a monopoly position.
I just don't see a system where you can have private utility lines, roads, sewage, or rail. The redundant reproduction of similar infrastructure is prohibitively costly, and any player that owns the line controls the market. It is a guaranteed monopoly. Internet is a strange circumstance, because there are a few more factors that really ruin everything for us besides just the lines (and is a reason why we had dozens of dial-up providers in the 90s and nothing since).
First, servers and routing stations are expensive. Like the cost of laying line, adding new players to a market dramatically reduces potential profits through competition, and setting up new routing farms in new areas that already have some providers is something no business will touch because it presents too much risk and too limited profit (it requires giving more speed away at lower prices to entice entrenched users to switch). So building routing centers is another prohibitive cost.
Second, wireless spectrum is restricted and limited. There is no open spectrum to set up your own 3g tower on, you either need to own it or get your pockets cleaned out by someone who owns the spectrum, or get sued into dirt. It doesn't help that only the 300mhz - 3000mhz range hits the sweet spot in the tradeoff of data rate against signal range. We need this entire spectrum reset and open to anyone that wants it, and we need to let the market organically manage it rather than having an overbearing fed had it out like candy to whoever funds the most recent campaign when spectrum crops up.
Third, the wires are still prohibitively expensive. Fiber channels for 75% of America would revolutionize everything, and as long as you don't target the prohibitively remote populations that make figures of "to lay fiber to every American would cost 15k a person!" 'legitimate' it is perfectly affordable as a public works project.
Fourth, ICANN and the other routers and network back-ends are in many places private, so you need to pay them off and be in their good graces. New players in the game need not mess with the in crowd, it is pretty closed off to new entries. So even if you can get the servers and the fiber to the home, you still need to bargain with the maintainers of the rest of the infrastructure to let you hook in. Good luck with that.
So internet, above most other things, really needs some public lines. And routers. The server farms and the infrastructure need to be public, and unlike other industries, this is something hard to do wrong. You only lay new cable every once in a while, if you can overcome the hurdle of public repair crews being shit and lazy because they get lump sum paid or unionized so you can repair damage is a reasonable time frame (including in the data centers) and keep this stuff well funded so the routers don't become oversaturated and the lines are updated regularly (which to be honest hasn't happend yet in the public space.. nobody ever reinvests in roads or rail or water or power after they have something that has a semblance of working in place...).
But it is better than private enterprise gaining near instant monopoly and stifling innovation every time. The infrastructure markets are just too biased to be effectively competitive. Because they aren't competitive, and they are what separate us from animals - no animal has evolved wheels, because anything that would spend its time laying roads for others would be selected against since they spent all that time helping others and benefiting the species rather than benefiting themselves. Infrastructure puts us one step beyond birds building nests. And it is an inherently cooperative thing to make us all better for it, because the labors of few will benefit us all in the long run, and you can't make that competitive or else nature already would have.
But in my system, local government could make this decision. It need not be a federal mandate. If any area wants to have shitty internet, they could. The only problem I see is that if one area wants good public internet, roads, and power, but all the neighbors are shoddy privately owned industries that try to suck the one regions dollars dry if they want to pass through their neighborhoods, there needs to be some arbitration so the locality providing well to their people need not suffer their neighbors indignities. 10k people should be enough in theory, and you at least produce some competition in who a local area should pass through to access the broader market, but I see room for corruption and exploitation whenever you cross local borders.
Maybe that could fall under "inter-region commerce" and interstate lines could fall under interstate commerce, so that the next level up has to manage these connections. Because then the majority would want their regions to have free passage through everyone else, so they would all agree to open borders and lines of infrastructure.
Other issues, like healthcare systems, I feel would be handled organically. If it isn't something that is interconnected across boarders as much, each area can take its own approach and whatever works will spread and become popular. The people that want direct payment of medical service can move somewhere doing that, the people that like insurance can move there, people that want single payer can move somewhere doing that. And in those systems, there will probably be someone doing it "better" and good ideas would spread.
Like I said in my ideal society post, taxes would be a solved problem. I'll talk more about my tax theory later.
So in summary, small local governments writing the majority of law, so that good ideas are spread and adopted, and experimentation occurs everywhere. People move where ideas agree with them, and every census as these regions expand and grow more and more localities, they take over their regional and state governments, and the area will adopt similar policies at higher levels.
The only real weakness I see are changes in the global environment altering what was once great policy for the worse. If the nation adopts a free trade agreement as a whole that is beneficial for all at some point, they can only change that at the national level by revoking it and requiring a change of ideal to trickle back up to the national forum. While it is a very good system of checks and balances, it requires a (hopefully) slow federal legislature to revoke law, and then for states to revoke their own older policies on the matter, and finally for localities to change it, then for states to vote it back up. It would be a slow process. It is good that it is slow though, and I figure it could be done quickly if necessary (federal overwhelming vote tears it apart overnight, next day states dismantle it, and then localities change it the day after) so you can change a broken law in 3 days, and maybe eventually the changed system will trickle back up as the new standard, also resistant to immediate change.
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