Tom Valcanis
Life-long politics tragic, digital marketer and writer. Articles in the Age/SMH, the Big Issue, the Spectator, and editor of alt lifestyle mag Hysteria from 2016–2020. An advocate for free speech, free markets, and small government.
One of the prevailing memes online against libertarianism is a caricature of a statist (Karen haircut, bad fashion sense, face drooped by attempting to control gravity itself) arguing with a libertarian (handsome, male, bald, bearded) about how society would look if we didn’t threaten to hurt anyone or take their stuff.
‘Who will educate the kids?’ Private schools.
‘Who would feed the hungry?’ Private charity.
‘Who would build the roads?’
Ahh, the perennial gotcha for libertarians! Private citizens can’t build their own roads!!! Checkmate! Touchdown! Third victory condition!
I remember being asked this question in a uni tutorial and our ‘the state must prevail’ programming had us blue screen in front of the tutor. (Thanks, whoever you were.)
Well, if you’ve ever heard that unsatisfying chirp curving toward Melbourne’s Punt Road off-ramp to join that permanent conga line of chuds clogging Hoddle Street, then, yes, you have definitely experienced a private corporation building and running their own roads. Not as a pure market force but under the always evil eye of government. You know, those non-business people deciding who may profit in their planned economy and the circumstances in which they do. Screw you, Jacinta! Again!
Libertarianism would (literally) free us from our mental chain.
Let’s say that a genuine libertarian party swept the ballot box and turfed out the Liberal/Labor duopoly on its ear. A chainsaw wielding maniac by the name of Miller or some such becoming prime minister. What would our utopia look like?
We can look to our only real-world analogue, Argentina, under President Javier Milei. Tasked with taking a hatchet to decades of reckless left-wing Peronist spending, inflation plunged from 21 per cent in December 2023 to 4.1 per cent by May 2024 – it’s now at a RBA-shaming 1.9 per cent. The poverty rate dropped 14.8 per cent under his leadership. Though GDP was up 3.6 per cent in the third quarter of 2024 (year on year change) the economy has posted 0.1 per cent negative growth at present.
Unfortunately for Milei, his easing of the levers also resulted in an overvaluation of the Argentine peso. In April, underwritten by an IMF bailout of US$20 billion and a $22 billion tax amnesty, Milei lifted the currency controls that set the devaluation of the peso at one per cent per month. By the end of September, he reversed course: the Argentine Central Bank set the fractional reserve rate at 53 per cent. This was an effort to curb the Argentinian phenomenon of rulo or puré, where Argentinians buy pesos at the official subsidised rate and through arbitrage, sell the same peso at higher market rates for a profit.
So much for the Argentine libertarian utopia. That said, Argentina is riddled with monetary and economic issues – including charges of endemic fiscal corruption – spanning back decades. Puré is a very Argentinean thing, like negative gearing is a very Australian thing. Just you try to get rid of it!
But hey: he did a lot more good than bad in a short time.
So, what might our libertopia resemble? We can always turn to fiction, usually of the scientific variety, for a glimpse. A lot of post-state visions are dystopian. Like mercenaries patrolling the gated communities of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, or mega-corporates amassing their own armies under the banner of loyalty programs while killing people to create buzz for a new shoe drop, a-la Max Barry’s Jennifer Government. Or we might end up like L Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach, where contented people live beyond the age of 150, bottlenose dolphins invent interdimensional travel, and the US Congress only meets when necessary because their alternate Constitution declares just governments “derive their just power from the unanimous consent of the governed”. Oh, can you believe people travel via air, because unfettered innovations rendered road travel obsolete? Mind blown!
No liberal democracy, especially in what I call late-stage statism (amid the Anglosphere), escapes without its bloated bureaucracy alive and corpulent as ever, its grabbing hands grabbing all that it can. If you want to start something that will last forever, establish a government department or commission. If our theoretical Prime Minister Miller kicked the public service afuera like Fred Flintstone did Dino, you know what would happen: Dino would lock Fred out and he’d be banging on the door to be let back in. Dino being the public sector Leviathan, of course.
Private citizens can’t build their own roads!!! Checkmate! Touchdown! Third victory condition!
In fiction we can turn night into day with the stroke of a pen; the parts of the world you stop believing in that don’t go away – well, that’s reality. The reality is libertarianism would (literally) free us from our mental chains, mired in the belief that we must coerce and punish people into equality – that it’s even our moral duty to uphold such nonsense. We don’t need to sell people on a billion-dollar vision thing – libertarianism sets up the conditions for flourishing – then it’s over to we the people to achieve it, whatever that may mean to us.
Perhaps our baser instincts will prevail in a deregulated society a-la Mad Max – but if the profit motive is innate (perhaps the dopamine reward motive is) – far more cooperation is required to push us into widespread prosperity than cut-throat competition ever could. For example, yet another shitty statist argument: barkeepers will sell paint thinner cocktails to keep costs down and “get away with it because no government” – but if you kill your customers, you won’t get repeat business. (I told you these guys don’t understand how business works.) If you set up a healthcare apparatus that keeps people just healthy enough to require government money over and over to treat chronic conditions… that’s somehow better?
Though grand and lofty visions of libertarian societies might look promising on paper, we have to accept we change one mind at a time, and our ideas will surely (hopefully) prevail. Fairness, justice, freedom of speech, the rule of law, the free exchange of labour, goods, and ideas. We’ll take a little bit more of each to start. We’re not saying utopia will spring up overnight – but it’ll be a lot better than what we have now.
This article was originally published by Liberty Itch.
