What would America be like today if our government had always been run according to the platform of the Libertarian party?

I think if we look at the response of libertarians, vs. what would have actually happened, there will also be a disparity between the two sets of answers. For example, I would expect a Libertarian to answer, “The Free Market would solve the problem of educating the poor by having someone set up low-cost schools, because that’s better than having no job at all, or because their religious system dictates this.” However, I think that represents an idealized view of humanity, where everyone behaves rationally all the time.

Also, we can look to times when the laws were more Libertarian to see some answers. The environmental movement really took off, for example, when the Cuyahoga river caught fire from all the crud dumped in it, in the absence of environmental regulation. Cleaning up isn’t good for business when you have to pay for it, and you don’t even get a PR boost from it, so there’s not much social pressure to do so (especially if you have to raise prices).

Prior to Social Security, the old folks did depend on their savings and their families. And then the Depression hit, where savings were wiped out and families rendered unable to care for even themselves. This is when Social Security was born, as a response to the tragedy. Without that, it would be like it was before this: survival subject to the whim of every downturn, although supposedly “people would know this and make preparations.”

Would Libertarians even believe in a military?

Th e Interstate highway system wouldn’t exist. We would not have a space program. Education would be available only to those who could afford it.

Children would start work as soon as they could. Job safety would not exist. Taking medicine would be risky. And food would not be safe.

Obviously, there would be problems instituting a “perfectly Libertarian” state, just as there are problems instituting a “perfectly Socialist” state, or any other political philosophy, for that matter. But, if the US were following an essentially Libertarian philosophy, it is my opinion that it would look something like this: http://www.nationstates.net/desperaclitus

@dreamwolf – The libertarians I talk to (which may not be a representative sample) tend to advocate for the (defensive) military and enforcement of contracts as being the two bigger reasons to have a government.

In fiscal year 2010, the Federal government spent $3.5 trillion. Warfare and welfare made up the vast bulk of the spending.

This means that 75 percent of the total United States budget goes to making war or paying people to do nothing. Of course, in theory, the Social Security Trust Fund is supposed to consist of money the government confiscated from workers and set aside on their behalf. But Congressional thieves long ago looted the fund, making it the Ponzi scheme that Governor Rick Perry was reviled for characterizing it as a few weeks ago.

THIS is one of the primary reasons why I am a Libertarian!

@CaptainHarley So, are you completely against Social Security? Or, just that they are stealing from it?

Libertarians believe in a military, but only for national defense.
We would not have entered WWI, and we wouldn’t have fought against the Nazi’s in WWII.
So, it is safe to say America would probably not exist, since our failure to stop the Nazi’s allowed them to develop the Bomb, and we didn’t have it.

@JLeslie

Only that they have been stealing from it for decades!

@CaptainHarley Me too. It really pisses me off.

Are there any countries that have developed with Libertarian governments that have made it for many years? I think strict Libertarianism is not sustainable for a country. Not large countries anyway. As populations grow, government becomes more important. Or, that is how it seems to me.

@JLeslie

I think it would be more accurate to say that government tries to convince people that it’s more important. : )

@CaptainHarley But, are there prosporous industrialized nations, with good living conditios overall, that have Libertarian governments?

I think a very difficult component of these types of discussions is the natural tendency to want to compare hsitorical perspectives that make realistic comparisons impossible. As @JLeslie points out today’s America is no where near the same America that our Constitution was written for nor even close the the same America Hoover and Roosevelt instituted many of the Government programs that are hot button political footballs of today. But one thing is clear that this Government that has grown over the years is too big for it’s own good.

The real problem is leadership, funding and in place policies that make doing what needs to get done nearly impossible. Libertarian ideals would help reshape the size and function of our Government back to it’s original core purpose as outlined by our founding fathers in the Constitution. I am not blinded by these ideals and neither are most Libertarians in that I think most Americans would also agree that todays problems are much different than there were 200+ years ago and today we have inherited 200+ years of mismanagement of the role of our Government.

9/11 exposed the disconnect all the National Security elements of our Government between the FBI, CIA, NIS and the military….Katrina exposed the inefficiencies of FEMA which is another program Democratic Government Program full of earmarks that hogties the ability of local governments to respond to disasters in their own states. Plus the Government funded insurance programs virtually guarantee tax dollars are going to be spent funding rebuilding in areas that never should have been built on in the first place. Private, free enterprise would not allow that to happen.

All in all we are faced with fixing and undoing 50–100 years of a bloated Government attempting to appease who ever the current administrations constituents are. Something has to give…and Libertarian policies would be the shortest path to making these drastic changes we really need to make.

The problem is the way our current Government fucntions in that it is all too easy to allow corporate interests to directly influence and shape our Governemnt policies. Earmarks, special interests benefit the elite few while ALL taxpayers pay for these things.

What would be huge for our country right now would be serious top down campaign reform, term limits and cutting the cords that allow corporations to funnel huge sums of money into political campaigns. Bulldozing K Street should be the first thing we do…NOW!

How would America look today or in the future?? You would have a much smaller Government. I would expect FEMA to be ditched and disaster recovery managed by local governments and civilian volunteer groups that have been doing this role quite well since the beginning, National Security under one roof by one agency, Education back in the laps of the States, Government labor contracts and benefits more in line with private sector benefits and environmental issues can and would be handled by grass roots programs who all along have been the impetus for changing the mindset of the public towards a more conscientious effort to appreciate and protect our natural resources.

Saturday, I will lead 100 volunteers in my communities effort to clean up the shores of a major waterway in our town. This is in tandem with a local environment group that is the steward for 100 miles of this river who is coordinating 22 other similar efforts up and down the river. Grants from the US Coast guard support this group to compile date from the trash collected so we can trace and monitor the sources of pollution.

Yes we can do much of what our individual towns need on our own without the bloated teat of the government to suckle from.

@JLeslie

I don’t know for certain, but Chile comes close. Making comparisons between nations is hazardous at best because there are far too many variables.

@CaptainHarley I know very little about Chilean government, I’ll google it. I agree there is more than one factor regarding a country’s success.

@Cruiser Did Katrina expose FEMA? FEMA seemed to work ok in FL.

@Cruiser and others that refer to putting some things back to the states: Do you believe States should also be run on a Libertarian basis?

The US would have spent a lot less lives and money on foreign adventures
All rivers or sections of them, would be privately owned and thus protected by their owners just like any private property would be
Most public highways would be toll roads
Schools would be private and people who chose to educate their children would send them there or home school them. Shitty parents would not, and nothing changes there.
People who did not prepare for their own future would have to rely on charity, just like now, except it would be private charity, and thus problems of mutual resentment.
Its tough to imagine, since nobody has ever seen anything like it.
But if it had been established for 3 or 4 generations, it would make perfect sense. And you wouldn’t be bothered by hours of TV broadcasts of politicians, since their role would be minimized, and they would not be taking so much of your money.

Well… this is a tall order, so let me start with some fundamentals.

I think that a “mostly libertarian” America would be pretty well-off, the richest nation on Earth, with an over-abundance of obese adults and children, addicted to video games and sports and television, would have a drug problem and a lot of stupid people doing self-destructive things (like drugs and alcohol to excess, for example) and consuming more than its “share” of the world’s resources. We’d have so-so schools and mediocre students – where parents would put up with that – and great schools and amazing students where parents insisted upon that. Crime would be a problem. People would never have enough money (they never will).

In other words, pretty much the same as it is today.

The difference is that we wouldn’t have the overhang of government taking nearly 40% of our earnings to ensure that we have what we would have anyway, at lower cost and with less nagging and risk of prison for “noncompliance”.

There’s no Shangri-La. No Liber-topia. We’re still human and have human problems to deal with. Greed, envy, jealousy and rage don’t go away because we change our form of government. On the other hand, they don’t have to be enacted into law, either.

We’d still have problems with religious fundamentalism – but not in government. We’d still have problems of people wanting something for nothing – but having no way to enforce their wishes on those who believe otherwise.

To address some of the real concerns such as clean air and clean water, part of the reason these developed into problems is that there was no “ownership”. Rivers, lakes, and the air itself don’t have owners, yet we all need them. This is a classic “problem of the commons”. It’s the reason that fishery stocks in oceans are becoming dangerously depleted. If we were to allow private ownership of things that we now consider “public”, then we could have also have developed mechanisms to protect the things that we own or have shares in. I don’t think that would be a terribly difficult problem to overcome, though in truth I can’t say how it would be done – only that with some ingenuity and cooperation we could manage it. It’s how we managed civilization, after all.

@JLeslie Depends on what you perceive to have worked. Lots was learned from Katrina and still being learned to this day. One thing is obvious to me at least is whatever did work was NOT because of FEMA but because of a more organized, trained and prepared local support network. What people don’t realize is disaster recovery is all done at the local level and FEMA is primarily there to supply Federal funds. Problem being is FEMA is all red tape and little action when it is really needed and that is in the 1st 24–48 hours of a disaster. It is the boots on the ground that makes things happen and FEMA after the fact is and has been a boondodggle of red-tape that THEY get to decide who gets the money and is where the inefficiencies begin to pile up.

FEMA is the number one reason I joined the MRC all because we don’t have an active local chapter of CERT in our area. It is these very groups of volunteers that rally together to provide trained and effective responses to our nations natural and man made disasters NOT FEMA.

@zenvelo Yes I do and very much so. It is a long drawn out answer that I would rather you go here to read on Arizona’s Libertarian Party’s solutions to problems at their state level. You will see very practical well thought out everyday solutions to the problems I feel we all face and would greatly benefit from removing and privatizing much of what our state and federal governments are doing a piss poor job at.

@Cruiser

Yayyyy! : D

The economy would be much more volatile. Huger ups and downs. There would be more fraud and less trust in business and eventually we would have settled into a kind of permanent depression where people would be so afraid of instability they would do much of anything.

Of course we’d have freedom to ingest any chemical we wanted, and we’d probably have much higher rates of drug addiction as a response to a poorer economy. There would have been no restrictions against homosexuality, but then again, there would have been no protections, and so we would have had a more violent society. Indeed, perhaps we would have a near police state as police forces are expanded, or as private police forces are expanded to protect those who can afford it.

There would, of course, be far more pollution. No public forests or national parks. Most of that land would be stripped of trees and other natural resources. Our rivers and streams would be highly polluted and most of us would have environmentally related health concerns.

Only the rich would have health insurance, so most of the population would be fairly sick. They might have cheap plans, but those plans would be pretty useless for serious conditions or chronic conditions. The native-born population would be smaller than it is now.

However, the borders would be open and despite our economy, we might see immigrants pouring in from even poorer countries. We might be worse off, but they would probably be even more worse off. Of course, they would go to Europe if they could, because Europe would be the driving economy of the world.

In any case, our population would probably have a majority spanish-speaking contingent, and there would be moves to make Spanish the primary language. Of course, these would fail, because Libertarians would care what the language was.

The internet would be all sex all the time. There never would have been any restrictions on television or on print publications, so people would have seen porn as the majority of media for centuries. When the economy lagged, porn would surge ahead, and people would be used to having all kinds of sex whenever they wanted, if they wanted. There would be no rules against adultery, and divorce would be free. There would be no alimony, only the relatives of the abandoned woman coming around to extract their own justice from the ex husband.

In any case, with more sex and more porn and no relationship regulations, there would be a lot more STDs. AIDS would be rampant because there would be no public health programs. Religions would be organizing all the time in the name of morality, and if things kept on going that way, there might be a religious revolution that would re-establish stringent religious rules and would essentially be a religious dictatorship.

The country would take a 180 degree turn, the way Iran did after the Shah, and things would, if possible, get even worse. We would have a religious economy, which would be to say even worse than a completely laissez-faire economy. Porn would be outlawed. Religious morality would be enforced by the threat of capital punishment. Jails would be full to the bursting, not just with the hedonists, but with socialists and business people, alike.

Eventually the country would implode and become a third world economy. Immigration would be replaced by emmigration. Some powerful nation, like Canada, might take pity on us and invade us, or annex us, or offer a partnership if only we would stop being so stupid. We would decline the deal and become a pariah nation in the world. Hollywood, which had existed to turn out porn, would be moribund. We never would have reached the moon. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would have fled to Europe to start their companies. Warren Buffet would probably be a Mexican. Need I go on?

@wundayatta

Careful or that overheated imagination might go into mealtdown mode! Heh!

@saint It is nice to see a new jelly in the ranks who gets it.

@CaptainHarley Oh God! I wish. It just keeps going and going and going. Notice how the paragraphs go? The next idea formulated by the last in the previous one? I think it’s my training. Just look a consequences of this and that. You may find it scary to note that I have been trained as a futurist, and have conducted studies about the future. Not only that, but I love science fiction, which is another kind of training in extrapolating to the future.

This, of course, was a distinctly dystopian future, but those are the most fun to create.

But no meltdowns. Not so far….

Well, that’s not true. There have been meltdowns, but not due to this kind of thinking. I’m a certified whacko. Make of that what you will.

My answer should say “thus without problems of mutual resentment.

Oh, one more thing on the economy: capital formation would be very hampered because of lack of oversight of Corporations. Thus, being able to fund a lot of the innovative entrepreneurs that have developed technology so quickly would not be possible. Besides, being off fiat money would greatly restrict the economy because the money supply would be so constricted.

@wundayatta

No thanks. I think I’ll just leave that one alone! : D

@wundayatta

I fear that you misunderstand a lot of economics. One of the reasons we have a lot of timber cutting in National Forests, for example, is because the Forest Service provides and maintains the roads. In other words, this activity is now subsidized and promoted by the federal government. There is absolutely no reason why the Sierra Club and other organizations couldn’t pool their own resources and privatize land for their own purposes. In fact, I’m sure that would be done on a larger scale than it is now. Also, since none of the enterprises cutting there have an ownership interest in the land, they have no sense of stewardship, either. I’d bet that your lawn and garden are in pretty good shape. How are the lawns at any public housing facility you’d care to examine?

Swings in the economy are precipitated by this idea of “too big to fail” organizations and the various inflationary “rescues” that are developed to forestall the failures. Most people probably don’t remember one of the first government bailouts, when Jimmy Carter bailed out Chrysler Corporation in 1979–80. George Will made a very cogent observation then that “The danger isn’t that this bailout will fail. With the resources of the federal government behind it, there’s no way that Chrysler can fail now. No, the danger is that this bailout will succeed, and become a model for the future.” And here we are.

The Federal Reserve has also contributed to economic instability by failing to protect the value of currency. Inflation isn’t a “private” matter; it’s a sure tax by the organizations in charge of money creation and coinage – and a hidden tax that politicians want to remain so. “Acceptable inflation” rates of up to 3% or more are a certain tax on people earning and spending money.

Your dystopian view of health care, environmental disaster and hunger is not borne out by the fact of “supermarkets”, for one thing. If “health care” is so important and vital that it has to be taken over by the feds, then why do we have supermarkets – in private enterprise? Surely food is more vital. Why don’t we nationalize that industry?

@CWOTUS I think if we were at a brew-pub with pints in hand, I would have to give you an incredulous look and change the subject. I suppose I could take on the logical inconsistencies of every point, and then you would do the same of mine and I suspect we’d get bored pretty quickly. My heart isn’t in it. I concede the point, publicly speaking. Personally, I think exercises in fantasizing are fun for a little while, but you sound like you are taking it far more seriously than I am.

So let’s just hoist a few more and change the subject to something serious—like women—hey?

It sounds a lot like anarchism. It is an ideal that I would be distrustful of. While it sounds like liberty for all it would in practise become slavery for the many with no protection for the individual against the power of the interest groups that would rise up. In my view the United States has gone too far in this direction already. Big American corporations are too powerful and not sufficiently regulated. Government should represent and protect the people and should have no other purpose. This is how it differs from every other organisation.

@zenvelo I would argue that point as R&D is where a coproration does innovate new technologies but it is costly and when an economy is this bad the first budget to get slashed is the R&D budget. But right now the R&D innovation game is played by corporations giving gobs of money to politicians who will grease the wheels for bureaucratic approvals they need to get their products to market. Plus a lot of research is further funded by grants awarded to the corps who give the bigger donations. PLUS, tax breaks and tax relief is again afforded to these companies that do R&D thanks to their lobbyists efforts.

Take this old game corporations play off the table and the free market will be there to support the innovative companies with venture capital there to provide this funding. Get the big government out of the corporate R&D process and watch the innovations take place. Nobody is innovating because the Government removed almost all incentives to do so. All you see now is new and improved old products.

But the bottom line is there is over 2 trillion dollars of corporate money sitting on the sidelines just waiting for this administration to get it’s act together so they can feel confident an investment they make today will not become a bigger tax liability tomorrow because of a waffling ineffective administration.

@Cruiser On what basis would you evaluate the companies stock? Because they said so? Because Arthur Anderson said so? Because S&P said so? It is bad enough in a regulated environment; without the SEC to perform a modicum of regulation (and believe me, I know they are incompetent), the stock fraud would return to what it was in the 1920s.

@zenvelo Publicly traded companies have year end reports where you can read all about their R&D efforts and the dollar amount invested. Any smart investor knows this and wouldn’t invest a dime in that company without reading these reports. From there it is simple math to crunch the numbers on the “value” of said company.

Some of these posts are a little troublesome. It’s one thing to have become a nation of sheep, it’s another altogether to like the idea. Government 1, you and me 0.

Everything works out in shades of grey. When you look at government intervention should it be omnipotent or non existent. Probably somewhere in between. Our government created laws against monopolies. Probably a good law. Monopolies can drive competition our of the business and fix prices in a away that is unproductive and uncompetitive. But at the same time our government does the same thing. By subsidizing one company while penalizing another, they create the same unproductive and uncompetitive business practice. So did we solve the monopoly problem or merely shift it to government control?

We tried to solve this problem by giving government very limited power. Over time that power has expanded beyond any reasonable control. Government now tries to protect us from business and even protect us from ourselves. What sort of activities we can perform and what protective gear we need to do so. How to discipline our children and what they can be taught. There are good reasons to justify the Libertarian revolt against government overreach.

Personally I view the Libertarian ideology as attractive but a little short sighted. We need a bit more government involvement than they preach but far less than we have today. Government should not be managing our economy nor our lives. And government agencies should not be allowed to create regulation without oversight. Congress should not be able to create legislation without constitutional authority. There’s a lot to like about Libertarianism. But it’s not a panacea either.

@Jaxk I like you take on this subject…very tempered amd insightful. Quite obviously any Libertarian infusion into our Government would be limited and symbolic at best. There is just too much control by the 2 parties to let anyone ideologue get very far with revamping much of anything.

@Cruiser

Indeed! There are far too many people with far too much money to want things to change very much, and epecially not in the direction of “power to the people.”

I think it’s important to add that over a long period of time we have been conditioned to believe that we need the government, and have become dependent on it. And as @CaptainHarley there is a huge motivation by the powers that be to keep it that way. Propoganda exists in MANY forms, and it would have you live in FEAR over what would happen if people became more self sufficient gasp, imagine that?!

I asked about Libertarianism in another question and someone’s reply was “look at the deregulation of the airline industry, imagine if more things were deregulated.” And I will repeat my response here: I can fly from Florida to California (and I will be next month) for far cheaper than it would cost me to drive from South Florida to North Florida, and I’ve payed the same cost for that coast-crossing ticket for the PAST TEN YEARS. The ONLY thing that has changed is the failure-of-a-government-agency known as the TSA, and the inconvenience they now cause me trying to get on that plane.

I remember learning about propaganda in school, and how dangerous it can be, and I remembered it again last night when I was watching a commercial on TV for the US Marine Corp. And please realize that the armed forces isn’t all our government uses propaganda for, and most of the time it isn’t as blatant as a TV commercial.

Anti-libertarian sentiment would have you believe that Libertarians would abolish the military. No! We would have the military for what it’s initial use in America was, to deter foreign invaders. Yes, illegal wars would stop, but that isn’t a bad thing! More propaganda: “TERRORISTS WANT TO KILL US BECAUSE WE ARE FREE.” Really?!?!?! Maybe people want to kill us because we invade their lands, take their things, and than impose our way of life on them, like an Imperialist dictatorship rather than a TRUE republic that we were founded as. But the propaganda machine will have you believe that if you oppose the “good will” of the US and its impression on other countries, you are unpatriotic, and perhaps a terrorist yourself.

I could go on and on about it, but at the end of the day, everyone drinks their own flavor Kool-Aid, and nothing’s going to change that. Until we hear one too many stories about the man who lived in the “land of the free” but wasn’t free to even plant a garden in her front yard, on HER property.

It’s getting to that point, but it’s going to take alot more time.

@mrrich724

You bring up a good point. If Julie Bass wins her case, do you suppose I could get a farm subsidy for not planting a garden in my front yard?

@mrrich724

It’s a matter of considerable dismay to me how many people in our republic live their lives in fear. : ((

Here’s a somewhat more objective-sounding report of the same mind-boggling story about Julie Bass. I’m not finding updates following the court date of July 26th, though.

@Cruiser I don’t think you are getting what I am saying. Companies that are unregulated don’t have to put out annual reports; companies that are stock scams can put out fake reports. The question is what would it be like if we’d been Libertarian all these years- my response is that there would be little or no trust in the capital formation system.

@Jeruba

They’re going after the Basses’ dogs now.

@zenvelo I think you are stepping out of your comfort zone as all publicly traded (read influential enough to be germane to this discussion) do have to file year end reports and there you will find all you need to know and anything knowingly omitted or withheld will land the execs in a tub of hit water. I am a privately held company employ 9 people and hardly influential to other than the Fed X driver I keep asking to come back for more boxes.

@Cruiser But why do all those reports have to be filed? Because of the Federal Government and the Securities Act of 1933. Go Libertarian/restricting the Federal Government, those reports go away.

@zenvelo Could you cite a source for that statement? I sincerely doubt you have one.

@Cruiser The states have to ask for federal help, the federal government is not allowed to go in without being asked, especially in the southern states. You know all that states rights stuff. The governor did not and would not ask initially, even when Bush directly asked her at first. In FL the governor asks for help before the hurricane even hits, so in the aftermath there is less red tape. Bush should have ignored the law and gone in, because the Governor was basically incompetent.

@saint I wanted to ask some follow up questions, if I may.

All rivers or sections of them, would be privately owned and thus protected by their owners just like any private property would be

Let’s face it… plenty of people do not properly care for their private property. If the person upriver from you doesn’t protect their portion of the waters, what recourse do you have when their pollution travels down to your portion?

Most public highways would be toll roads

Would there even be a system of interconnected highways such as we have now? I’m actually picturing many ‘fragments’ of highways, ending wherever their owners found it convenient to end them.

Schools would be private and people who chose to educate their children would send them there or home school them. Shitty parents would not, and nothing changes there.

I have a couple of questions about this one. 1) What if a family can not afford to ‘choose’ to educate their children at a private school, nor has the time or resources to educate them at home? 2) More importantly, what happens after several generations of such families? What is the impact of generations of uneducated children? 3) That would be a change, actually. Currently, it’s illegal to keep a child uneducated. If we made it legal to do so, again, what would the impact be?

People who did not prepare for their own future would have to rely on charity, just like now, except it would be private charity, and thus problems of mutual resentment.

What happens if that charity just isn’t there? If there isn’t enough money or concern? Do they die in the streets, or what?

@JLeslie Nepotism is a funny thing and why frowned upon in the workplace.

@augustlan
In my opinion, your questions reveal the reason that some people worry about fading freedom and the looming whims of tyrants.
The fact that human nature prevents people from always acting in a fashion in which you approve does not mean that Federal Government must step in do something about it.
The issues you describe are constant. They are not going to go away by establishing and worshipping a power hungry, money lusting central government.
It is the fact that nobody has the imagination or courage to confront the normal challenges of existence without turning themselves into sheep, being herded by the beloved Central Authority that is the problem.
Nobody ever said that there would be no laws that would address polutors upstream from you. Your neighor cannot toss dog shit into your yard and that is not a Federal affair.
Nobody said that an interstate highway system might not exist. The Libertarians are not anarchists. They merely say that the Central Authority should have very limited areas of interest.
I can’t do anything about crappy parents. Neither can you. In Atlanta, they changed kids test scores to make it look like they were smart. If the political state could actually educate people, we would all be geniuses, or bureaucrats. Which seems to be more likely at this moment?
Are we still wailing about millions of people “dying in the streets”? I thought people had sort gotten away from that kind of hysterical hyperbole. One thing is certain, if it gets to that, it won’t be be the Federal Government that comes to save them.

@Cruiser Points 2.4, 2.5, and 2.6 of the platform linked in the post at the top of this thread. Libertatrians don’t like regulation. That’s what this whole thread is about.

@saint See, what you said is inconsistent with the platform. Who would construct the interstate but the Federal Government? But the platform describes a very limited federal Government that would not , if it had been Libertarian the last 75 years, have been able to build it.

And your analogy of river pollutants to a neighbor dumping dog shit on your lawn is false. Who is to prevent a paper mill in Minnesota from dumping its waste into the Mississippi?

@Cruiser I don’t disgaree that Bush did some favors for Jeb. But, it does not explain why the Governor of Lousiana didn’t ask for help.

@JLeslie

The Feds these days pretty much do as they please. Hell, Obama has even said he wishes he could just sidestep the Congress and do everything himself. The path we’re on right now is one that leads to dictatorship and totalitarianism.

@CaptainHarley I understand why the law exists. Why the fed can’t just rush into a state with troops. Katrina was a life or death situation. Bush should have went in, and faced charges if Congress felt he should be brought up on them. Bush himself admits he should have done something, but he chose to abide by the laws that constrained him. If you walked by private property with a sign no trespassing, and saw a young child drowning in a pond, would you break the law? The spirit of a law, the intention of it is what truly matters in the end. The literal application can sometimes harm.

Has Obama broken the law, or used powers that have not actually been given to him with his position? I am asking, I am not sure of the answer. It seems at times he has tried to allow things to go through a process rather than just using his executive might.

@augustlan

I’d like to address some of your reasonable considerations, if I may – even though you didn’t ask me. In my original post on this topic I tried to explain that our society would probably have very much the same “look and feel” that it does now. I have no doubt that an Interstate Highway System – or something like it – would exist and function much like the ones we have now. But I think they’d be in much better repair, and we’d have better bypasses around cities. (Building interstate highways through cities was a purely political move to get local buy-in from the various city residents.)

Let me explain with a different example.

Right now we have drivers’ licenses, issued by a state DMV. There’s no reason why we couldn’t delegate the licensing and auto registration process to insurers. They have a vested interest in promoting safe drivers and vehicles, and would probably do a much better job of registering, training, licensing and to some extent even “policing” their policy holders. If they didn’t serve customers efficiently and well, then they’d lose customers to rival insurers, and if they were too lenient then they would pay claims that finally bankrupted them. And you could choose where to register your car and get your license.

We’re not restricted to “doing things the way we do because it’s how we’ve always done it”.

The Interstate Highway System is another example. Even though the “standards” for these highways are federal, the builders are all local, and the roads are maintained by state workers. The entrance and exit ramps all intersect with local (city) roads and state highways. Coordination doesn’t seem to be a big problem there; there’s no reason to assume that it would be if the systems were private. How the ownership / toll issues would be worked out is an interesting thought experiment, but could surely be resolved better than, say, the toll system on the Illinois State Toll Highway system, for example. (I once opined that Illinois placed the toll booths as frequently as they did so that drivers didn’t have enough “runway” to become airborne.)

As for schools, having raised two kids of my own, I understand the concern about not having enough money for education. But you’re ignoring for the moment how much it costs you to educate kids in public school – badly – and with no choice in whether you pay or not. Imagine that we change the model again. Right now high school students absorb excessively high debt to get a college education of dubious value. (I say that because so many of the students entering college have a ‘dubious’ high school education to start with.) Imagine that you had complete choice of educator for your child and could take out a student loan for the relatively smaller amount that it would take to get a “good” elementary / secondary education. And you could cut your homeowner taxes in half or better. You’d probably end up saving money and getting the child a better education. And if you didn’t think so, then it’s entirely your choice to go elsewhere. No vouchers to apply for. No hoops to jump through. No bureaucrat (other than employees of the school you choose) to request permission or grant approval. It’s like picking another grocery store to shop at.

Schools may even elect to have an alumnus funding program for indigent students. Colleges do this often. There’s no reason not to extend that downward to secondary and elementary education.

A libertarian life doesn’t have to be Hobbesian: “nasty, brutish and short”. Libertarians want to extend and invent new ways to cooperate rather than compel. That’s all.

One of the key phrases in @CWOTUS last statement is “If they didn’t serve customers efficiently and well, then they’d lose customers to rival”(s)

I also agree with Libertarian ideals on education. I was private schooled my whole life, sometimes (unfortunately many times) it ASTOUNDS me how uneducated people are.

Schools in S. Florida are over crowded, and produce more hoodies (who can’t even compose gramatically correct sentences) than scholars. It’s almost better not to school them at all and save the money if that’s what we are going to get.

Redirecting the money poured into the public school system to the parents would incentivise schools to produce more quality, as if they didn’t parents wouldn’t choose that school to educate their children!

@CWOTUS – If you are not rich enough to have a car, who would issue you a non-license ID? Are you suggesting that there wouldn’t be one, or that private enterprise would serve the purpose (as they do sometimes now)?

I honestly don’t know, @laureth. I’m truly not smart enough to invent out of my own head all of the rules that would be required for various enterprises to do, and do well, competitively yet cooperatively (since one would assume that the driver licenses all have to be uniform to some degree within a political jurisdiction, have roughly similar requirements, etc.) what is now done by various government monopolies.

So I can’t say “this is how it would be done”. (That’s one of the problems with government entities, by the way: a group of lawyers gets together and then they assume that with their collective brainpower they are smart enough to figure out rules that should apply across large populations. That tends to stifle creativity and innovation.)

Maybe there would be different classes of licensing depending on coverage selected, or whether one drove for work or pleasure, or rigorousness of testing and qualifications that a driver might want to apply for. Who knows what might evolve?

I’m sure that anyone who was in the business of providing driver licenses would be happy to offer simple ID cards (maybe even as a “loss leader” service), because that’s a future customer for a full driver license, insurance, auto registration, etc. I would imagine that insurers would also absorb most “driver training” as a profitable and perhaps even necessary sideline to their main business of selling insurance.

@laureth shows the mentality well. . . “if the government doesn’t do it, HOW can it get done,” . . . fear that if you don’t let the government do it for us, we won’t be able to figure it out!

Where does this idea come from?!

I try to be a little more charitable than that, @mrrich724. (After all, @laureth did acknowledge that some private entities do issue ID cards now.)

It’s pretty natural for people to be stuck inside a particular way of doing things, “because that’s how it’s done”.

I like to trot out the health care topic from time to time: Imagine what health insurance would be like if employers were out of the picture. They’re only in the picture because after WWII the tax code was modified to reduce corporate taxes in order for employers to offer health insurance as a benefit to attract employees. There’s no reason that this form of insurance couldn’t be offered on a retail basis – like most other forms of insurance that consumers purchase.

Imagine if nurses weren’t prohibited from treating minor surgeries and injuries requiring stitches, or illnesses requiring antibiotics? Why do we need to have a government-sanctioned monopoly on “doctors” (or for that matter, “attorneys”) who are the only ones qualified to do certain work? Yes, there is risk if we allow people with less training or qualification to treat our illnesses or draw up our contracts, but we already assume a lot of risk in putting off visits to high-priced professionals because we can’t afford the treatment or work to be done!

Getting back to the health insurance debate – because a lot of people automatically assume that the “greedy insurers” would rape us if we purchased our health insurance at retail: imagine that auto and home insurance was marketed the same way that health insurance is now. You would be pretty much restricted to the insurance company that your employer decided to do business with, and otherwise more or less priced out of the market. If you lose your job, then your coverage is dropped, too. How ridiculous is this? Why do we put up with it now? (As it is now with health insurance, I’m not really “a client”; my employer is. I’m just “an expense”. No matter how badly I feel treated by my employer’s health insurance agency, I don’t have a lot of choice in the deal.)

My point is that “there is always a better way to skin a cat”. But when the ways that we have to skin cats are established by law (and tax penalties), then we don’t get a lot of chance to innovate in the cat-skinning business. Apologies to cat lovers who happen to read this far.

@CWOTUS If you leave education only up to competition and private enterprise we most likely would have wound up being educated like the third world. It would have been primarily religious education, and the poor would be uneducated, or very little education. Do you have an example of a country that has high education rates that education is left to private funding solely? Think about it, we were a land of immigrantsm primarily poor immigrants. This country became great because we educated everyone in my opinion. Plus I believe part of American assimilation is the education process.

As far as the highways, I agree many private roads would have been built, but I doubt they would have been organized as well as our interstate system. Maybe some states would have coordinated their efforts. There would be a lot of toll roads. IL toll roads suck. A toll every 5 miles. WTF?! Whatever happened to turnpikes? Collect a ticket when you enter, and pay when you exit. But, hey, the FL turnpike is a toll road south of North Palm Beach. North of there it is a Turnpike. How they decided not to do it the same across the entire road I don’t know.

Now, some states might build free thruways to compete against against toll roads. Certain states have a distinct advantage because of geography. They might decide to tax locally to build free roads to attract more thru traffic.

Can you imagine paying every time you want to go somewhere without a reasonable alternate route? It definitely would work against the poor. Work against their ability to even commute to work.

Actually, @JLeslie, I do have a good example country. Pre-Revolutionary American (what is now the Eastern Seaboard of the United States) had literacy rates of between 74–100% (for white males, granted) compared to English literacy of 48–74%. Source

@CWOTUS But, do you think that would have been maintained? I worked with a guy who said when he was a boy (he is white) in Louisana, very few people went to school past the age of 16. Of course the Louisana Purchase was after the Revolutionary war if I have my timeline right. So, they were literate, but not sure how educated. And, white men is not the problem so much in America, it is the minorities. Even minorities like the Irish, Russians, Polish, who came in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. They were educated because of our public school system, don’t you think?

@CWOTUS Just to add, your link implies some people take issue with that stat and how literate people actually were. And, I wanted to admit that we have an embarrasing high illeteracy rate in America now, and we have had public education for a long time. Poverty seems to be the biggest problem.

Why does English Literacy count only? If they are new immigrants that is a big demand. The Declaration of Independence was Published in German and English, because they wanted to make sure The German speaking population in the country would have a full understanding of the document.

@JLeslie the parallels aren’t perfect, obviously. But since we were English colonies at the time it made sense to compare literacy in “America” vs. England.

Do I think it would have been maintained? Yes. Education was pretty good throughout the 1800s in the USA. Even though people did quit school earlier – we still had most people working on farms, after all – their education was “sufficient” for those who decided that “reading, writing, and arithmetic” were all that they really needed. I’ve read some course work from elementary school children of the time – average kids, as near as I can tell – and the quality of the writing is amazing, compared to what we see from average students today. I suspect that kids who quit school after sixth grade had a rough equivalent to most high school graduates from public schools today.

Consider that kids who didn’t want to be in school – weren’t. They weren’t “maintained” in a system that simply “housed” them and (basically) kept them out of the labor pool. If they quit school, then they worked. I think a lot of “schooling” today (and minimum wage laws for certain) are designed and intended simply to keep kids from working. (Not that we want to revert to child labor – or that we would if laws against it were dropped.)

I think that most people with any sense these days recognize that since we’re not leaving school to work simple jobs on farms, then education is vital. We’d find ways to make that work. But we wouldn’t have “compulsory” schooling; we wouldn’t have “free public schools”, and schools would be directly accountable to their customers and clients: parents and school children, instead of “the Board of Education”. And there’s no reason that couldn’t have local public schools in jurisdictions that wanted them. After all, nothing in the Constitution prevents states and towns from making their own rules on such matters.

But I don’t think they’d be managed the way they are now! And we surely wouldn’t have (and don’t need) a Department of Education in the President’s cabinet.

I may be wrong, but wasn’t schooling free in Pre-Revolutionary America? It may not have been compulsory, but did they pay for it? If so, what was the structure like? Was it out of reach for poor families?

@CWOTUS – re: ”(After all, @laureth did acknowledge that some private entities do issue ID cards now)”

And the private entities I was talking about, generally offer those services under the table, if you know what I mean. Sort of like, “Fiat ID,” to immigrants and the like. Part of the implication here is that sure, anyone can make you and ID card with your picture and a name on it. But surely, we must agree that it needs to have some agency backing it up, else fraud and forgery is going to be even more of a problem. Who else but government can do that?

@CWOTUS I’m interested to know if the schools were free pre revolutionary war also, like @augustlan. Who paid the teachers?

I have no confidence the south would have or would now give a damn about educating black southerners if they were not forced to be federal laws. There is an autobiography written by coach Bill Russell about being born in LA, and the final straw that led his parents to move the family to California was his dad, a blackman and a couple of other men went to buy lumber to build a school house for their black children. The man who owned the lumber yard made a deal, took their money and then would not honor the deal when they came back to pick up the wood. Saide wasn’t going to sell wood to blacks (he probably used a different word) and when the men said then give us our money back, he said he didn’t have to honor any deal with blacks. Since it was three against one, somehow they got their money back, but his dad came home saying they had to leave because eventually he was going to be killed or kill someone living in Louisana. I say it was the last straw, because he had had a gun stuck in his face for wanting to leave a gas station, because when he attempted to put gas in his car he was told he needed to wait for all the white people, no matter where he was in line. This was only 70 years ago.

The revolutionary war didn’t concern the south much if my history is right. :) I wonder the demographics of the original thirteen colonies.

@augustlan & @JLeslie

Schools certainly weren’t “free” during Colonial times, but I don’t have references as to what they cost or who paid. Certainly the institution was much different from what we now enjoy. If the schools and teachers were paid for by “the public at large”, which may have been enabled by local taxation, they certainly weren’t paid lavishly. In fact, the entire system of education was difficult for all: teachers weren’t well paid, there was usually only one for a town’s entire one-room schoolhouse, public transportation to and from the school was non-existent and the facilities were spartan. But “education” was valued; I think it still is, but we seem to take it for granted now: we pay huge taxes in support of it, then sit back and expect automatic results. I think one of the differences between then and now, apart from the funding, is that it was not considered “a right”, but “an achievement”, and was pursued as such.

@laureth

Ah, I see, you were being somewhat facetious about “private identity cards”. I wondered about that, but I decided not to challenge it, because I don’t know of any private enterprise offering legitimate ID cards to individuals. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be done, and reliably so. After all, the Internet has created a need for “private ID firms” that offer something like this, such as VeriSign, Symantec and other “Authorization Services”. I have a Microsoft certificate that I use for “code signing” my own VBA macros on Microsoft Office products, so that people can reliably know that it came from me.

If it’s fraud that you’re worried about, private enterprise has no monopoly on this. In the State of Connecticut some years ago a batch of trucker’s driver licenses was stolen from the DMV by an employee, then offered and sold for several years before the fraud was discovered. A private firm doing that could have gone out of business. I’m still paying taxes to Connecticut, and getting my license at the DMV. I only presume that it’s valid…

@JLeslie

In response to your concerns about racism and other impediments to education, you still seem to be stuck in the mindset that “others” should be educating our children. I’m not saying that all or even most children should or could be home-schooled, but if we’re doing this for ourselves and for our own children, there’s no reason that anyone excluded from the school that they would like to attend – for whatever reason – could still form their own. This is how religious schools got started in the first place. And “religious schools” are not all madrassas and brainwashing institutes. Some of the best-educated people I know attended Catholic schools, and they aren’t now and never have been Catholic.

@CWOTUS I have no problem with Catholic schools. I would be willing to send my own child to a Catholic school if that were the right option for him. But, and here I go again, the southern US is not very Catholic.

Homeschooled? So, all women are at home? Even back in the day communities built schools for their children, because the women helped on the farm and other chores, or new they were limited in their own knowledge. I am actually very pro home schooling present day, but the expectation that minority women can homeschool their children seems unrealistic.

And, my mindset is we should educate our citizens for the good of society.

To go back to your comment about educational needs being very different 150 years ago, I agree. Working on the farm did not require 12 years of education then, maybe not even now. And, we still have farming communities off course, and their is nothing wrong with working the land, I think it is wonderful. I went to Michigan State University, you know, moo u, and many of the people I knew were farmers. I just want the child of the farmer who excells in Math and Engineering to have the opportunity in the school system to pursue his natural abilities and not be limited by the community he lives and is raised in. An American born in Wisconsin should not be at a different disadvantage or advantage compared to the kid born in Alabama. At least, that is what I would like to see.

@CWOTUS – I suppose private IDs are all fine and good, but I’m trying to imagine what benefit competition between various private issuers would lend to the concept. We might need many IDs in our wallet; one for driving (issued by our insurance carrier), one from each of several competing issuers (for various stores and purposes, because you know that some would be no good at certain places)... it would seem that one simple streamlined source would solve many problems, and when you combine that with the governmental need to know who all is living in the country, it makes organizational sense to have it be government issue.

I understand that fraud and abuse can happen anywhere, but it just seems that it’s more apt to happen if several issuing businesses compete and offer their ID cards. “I know a guy….” ya know?

@JLeslie

I don’t really understand your point about schools. Do you know of many excellent public schools in the South? It’s precisely such places: the South, Appalachia and inner cities in particular, where people want better alternatives for their kids than what’s available via “free public” education.

I know a lot of students who work hard on and for their education. Should they be held back in their classes by the nonperformance of slackers and truants? It seems to me that “No Child Left Behind” and other such initiatives only mean “no one goes faster than the slowest”. I’m also not suggesting that we should merely abandon students who want an education and for whatever reason – family finances, handicap, location, whatever – can’t get that. We can make “special case” allowances; I just don’t think the “one size fits all” is working now.

As for “women in the home”, one of the reasons that so many work now is not because they especially want to, but because they need to in order to make ends meet – because taxes are so high.

Read what I wrote yesterday about “alumni funding” and endowments. There’s no reason that what works for Harvard and other Ivies (colleges all across the country, in fact) can’t attract and endow scholarships for future students.

@laureth

I don’t know about you, but I already carry around several forms of ID, aside from “government issue”. I carry store cards for Stop & Shop, CVS, my auto mechanic and several other retailers. I don’t think my driver’s license would get me into many military installations, past the “public” areas; I don’t know what additional ID my son carries for the USAF, but I’m betting it’s not just a driver’s license. (Yes, I’m aware that “military ID” would be “government issue”. The point I’m making there is that it’s not “one simple streamlined source”, especially considering that driver licenses themselves already come from 50 different states and I don’t know how many territories.)

But I couldn’t wait to get to “governmental need to know who all is living in the country”. Oh, really? Where did that come from? I take strong issue with that. If you will read up on the history of the US passport, for example, you’ll see that except for the Civil War and WW I, passports were not a requirement for US citizens traveling abroad until 1941.

Even if we assume that we want to maintain control of our national borders and know with certainty who is coming and going, there could certainly be enterprises whose business would be establishing bona fides and guaranteeing them. Bonding companies do this day in and day out already.

Anyway, once people are in the country we don’t (yet) have police stopping people with great frequency and regularity – and for no particular reason – demanding, “Your papers, please!”

@CWOTUS – Re “But I couldn’t wait to get to “governmental need to know who all is living in the country”. Oh, really? Where did that come from?”

The Constitution. There’s a Census in there. ;)

But my main point is this. Jimmy-Joe’s ID Supplier and Taco Bar might say I’m valid to be in the country and that I am me, but it all depends on how well you can trust Jimmy-Joe’s IDs. Heck, I could start an ID shop, and they would be just as valid as anything else, under this concept. First, isn’t there pretty much one arbiter of “valid” for these purposes (i.e., government)? I mean, Stop ‘n Save might want my Stop ‘n Save card, but that’s only good at Stop ‘n Save. Second, any new startup issuing ID cards is likely to not make it, because who would trust Jimmy-Joe? It’s up to big, known corporation names (like PayPal, maybe, or VeriSign) to make reliable IDs, which pretty much relies on Big Corporations just as we now rely on Government for that. I’m not sure it’s a better solution. If your aim is to increase the number of private enterprises that do things, it’s weak on that point. And if your ID issuer is known for being phony, or unreliable, or goes out of business, you have to get new ones somewhere else. This is known as “market pressure,” but I call it “stupid inconvenience.”

@laureth I picture it being much different than “Jimmy Joe’s ID and Taco Bar”

I picture it like USPS vs. FedEx/UPS.

If USPS was finished tomorrow, nothing major would really happen in terms of mail service (for me anyway). To me, it is obsolete. If it were gone, I’d still have FedEx and UPS. Two huge, and trustworthy, nation-wide institutions that get the job done much more efficiently than USPS anyway. Not considering all the jobs would be lost, if the USPS went under, mail would still go on.

People use the DMV because they have to, but if one or two or three other companies that the gvmt. decided to recognize the issued ID for privatized the service, they would make a WAY better experience than the current situation you experience when you go to the DMV. No three hour lines, no facilities too small to house the customers during the day, no HORRIBLE attitude-bearing customer service.

If people agreed to recognize it, and it was funded like other private sector entities that operate on mass scale, it doesn’t NEED the government to work. And that’s my main point. You can do it without government control, and probably better!

In fact, would you really bet against a legitimate company that said “hey come to us instead of the DMV” anyway? I guarantee if they provided better service the DMV would be a ghost town.

@CWOTUS Should the south take a minute to wonder why so many of their public schools are substandard? I still don’t see how the poor will wind up educated if there isn’t a law requiring them or free access. A woman I know taught during desegregation in MS in the public schools, and she asked white parents not to take their children out of school, to an underequipped private school. But, off they went. Now of course there are plenty of very good private schools, but there is still race playing a hand in southern schools, and other schools around the country. I still think you are opting for a method that around the world has shown less educated populations.

I agree there is a problem with children and class rooms being slowed down to help some children, that is a problem. I was never in favor of no child left from behind, you may know Obama just signed something saying states can ditch the program. Also, educators and parents have ignored many studies showing that even if you help children learn reading and writing earlier, by 3rd grade pretty much all the kids even out. It is a waste of money to focus on very young children, but the thing is the government, parents, and educators bought into the idea, and even ignored studies for many years, because most people are unscientific in their opinions, and then resistant to change their opinions even when presented with evidence.

One size does not fit all, but througout school I was not really treated like that. I was able to take advanced math, on level reading, explore accounting, home ec, anatomy and physiology, psychology, so many possibilities, that are not always found in private schools, along with vocational opportunities, which I think is very important.

@JLeslie

You’re suffering from a conceit common among many intellectuals and other well-meaning folks who think that certain classes of people need the state to take care of them, because they’re incapable of doing it on their own. It might be true in a relative handful of cases, and people from different cultures and with different environments may not look after their own best interests in the same way that you or I might, that’s true, too. From many objective measures you might say “these folks aren’t living as well as I am”, and maybe some of them feel the same way. But people can and generally will take care of themselves if and as they are allowed – and required – to do that.

I don’t doubt for a minute that 95–98% of “the poor” understand the value of a decent education and will do whatever they can to achieve it. If you believe that there’s a vacuum of decent education in the South, and if a firm involved in private education saw the same opportunity, don’t you think they’d set up some schools there if there was a market for that?

Don’t forget that much of the racism throughout the South (and the North too, if we’re going to be honest about it) has been institutionalized – formed into the marrow of our government and its policies – whether explicitly and harshly stated (as in Jim Crow laws) or implicitly and ‘gently’ (”they need us to take care of them”). I’m not saying that private enterprise would do away with racism or even with the possibility of bad schools (or none at all, in some places and times), but at least there would be a chance for others to form competing businesses.

@CWOTUS I am sure we would agree on a lot of things that the government has done that has negatively influenced the poor and minorities, but it is going to be really hard to sway me on education. If we talked about government aid contributing to keeping families unmarried and other topics, again, we would have some things in common.

My dad would have been in a terrible spot without public education, being poor, a son of an immigrant father who was paranoid schizophrenic, although did hold down a job. My fathers free education has meant he has paid taxes into the governments thousands of times what the government paid for him. So, that is who I think of when I think of poor. My white, intelligent, father, who could have easily been on the streets trying to make his way, with a much much harder path and life to achieve an education if he was ever able to get it. I think you might suffer, to use your words, from always having had money. Maybe also not being an immigrant or first generation. I could be wrong.

I don’t think businesses would have opened schools innthe ghetto in great numbers if the bottom line of the P&L would wind up red.

I don’t know if all poor people understand the value of an education. For some their world is narrow, the white world out there seems at a great distance (a jelly from way back used to comment on it, he grew up in the hood in NYC, but found his way out) a foreign place, and they don’t know how to navigate it, especially young people. My own father’s mother was upset he was going to go to college, because she wanted him to work and buy her a new sofa. She was old world, uneducated, and not very bright to be honest, and rarely left her block in the Bronx. One of my sister’s friends grew up in an Irish family, and when she wanted to go to college, they accused her of thinking she was better than the rest of the family. There is all sorts of cultural BS that goes on. But, I do think the majority of the poor want educations for their children, and think of it as a way out of poverty, but dealing with their children becoming a little different, seeing the world through different glasses is a little tough on the family, and sometimes there are negative messages given to the student, that they are changing. It really is very complex.

I think somewhere at the top you or someone else said something akin to the American atitude is to take education for granted, there I agree.

@CWOTUS And, about women working, and taxes creating a situation both people in families need to work. I think there are several reasons women work. One, America has become too worried about material things. Two, women got screwed all too often by men and the atitude in industry that if you take a break from your career you becoe a less desireable employee. Also, poor people don’t even pay income tax, so tax is not the reason they can’t stay home. Unwed mothers have to work generally speaking to support their families. Not to mention tax rates in 1950 were higher, (see table of tax rates) and the 50’s were when many women stayed home.

@JLeslie

Poor people probably pay a greater percentage of their income in tax than anyone else.

No, not in Income Tax, perhaps, but in the form of FICA and Medicare taxes, they pay at least 15% right off the top. (I’m counting the ‘Employer Share’ of these taxes as a tax on the individual, which it certainly is – an ingenious ploy to hide the true cost from people.)

After that, they have zero exemption from states’ various sales taxes, property taxes, fuel taxes and other hidden taxes.

Anyone who makes more than the baseline incomes for FICA (or Medicare) automatically has a “tax reduction” each year when they max out on FICA or Medicate “contributions” (another ingenious use of words to hide a tax).

Poor people are also much less likely to receive capital gains, so all of their income (when it is subject to income tax) is taxed at the rates for ordinary income.

Finally, a word about “money”. The money we earn today is worth a whole lot less than it was in 1950. “Inflation” is another tax – the best-hidden tax of all – on all of us, but especially on the poorer families who can’t afford to invest in appreciating assets. And that tax is paid straight to government and politicians. (My father supported a family of seven – with a ‘winter house’ and a ‘summer house’ – on an income in the 1960s that was around $10,000 per year – which was pretty good money in those days. I live alone now, and not lavishly, on a substantial multiple of that income, and I would be very concerned – and immediately so – if it were ever interrupted. And I have to scrape up enough cash to have a boat that I can keep in the driveway.)

@CWOTUS I agree with what you wrote about the taxation of the poor through sales tax. As far as FICA and other taxes, let’s not forget under EIC the poor sometimes get money from the fed. My dad made around $8k when I was little in the late 60’s early 70’s, but that same job would probably pay $60k today. He would be living about the same. Although, I agree in the last 15 years salaries have barely moved while some costs have gone up. But, some costs have barely moved also. Clothing is bazarrily inexpensive in my opinion considering inflation. Same with some other products that are now manufactured in parts of Asia.

To call “inflation” a tax is to misuse the word “tax” (or at least to use it ironically) – taxes are fees collected by a governing agency to keep the country running. So inflation is not a tax in that sense, any more than lottery tickets are a tax on the innumerate.

Inflation is often because of an increase in the money supply. Without this, the money supply cannot grow, and when your money supply can’t grow to accomodate more people buying and selling goods and services, your economy can’t grow either. Then, we topple into a deflationary situation, which is even harder on anyone with debt, which is often the poor. (Rich people – those with a bunch of money saved up and no debt – might prefer a deflationary economy, so it’s no wonder they fund think tanks that tell us how bad and dangerous inflation is.) However, mild inflation is a sign of a healthy, growing economy.

I just used an inflation calculator and $8k in 1970 is $44k in 2010 according to this particular calculator.

Whose platform is pimping out toddlers (on TV or elsewhere) is about freedom?

I didn’t answer the OP because it is in the detail. What a question though.