[ExI] Call To Libertarians

[Richard Loosemore]

spike wrote:
>> ... On Behalf Of Richard Loosemore
> 
>> ... people coming together and realizing that it is in everyone's best
> interest if the community is forced to pool their resources to pay for
> things like roads and theaters and bridges and schools and police forces...
> 
> Indeed?  The critical difference in my thinking and yours is found in this
> one sentence.  People coming together for roads, bridges, schools and
> police, yes.  Theatres?  No.  That is exclusively the domain of private
> industry, and the root of the tension between libertarian and statist.  It
> is not in everyone's best interest to pool resources to build theatres.

The inclusion of "theaters" was strictly optional:  not essential to my 
argument.  A throwaway.

So let me see if I understand:  you are saying that without the word 
"theater" in my description, what I said bore no resemblance to the 
philosophy of libertarianism?

Would it be more accurate, then, to say that Libertarianism is about 
SUPPORTING the  government funding of:

    Roads,
    Bridges,
    Police,
    Firefighters,
    Prisons,
    Schools,
    Public transport in places where universal use of cars would
       bring cities to a standstill, or where poor people would
       otherwise be unable to escape from ghettos,
    The armed forces,
    Universities, and publicly funded scholarships for poor students,
    National research laboratories like the Centers
       for Disease Control and Prevention,
    Snow plows,
    Public libraries,
    Emergency and disaster assistance,
    Legal protection for those too poor to fight against the
       exploitative power of corporations,
    Government agencies to scrutinize corrupt practices by
       corporations and wealthy individuals,
    Basic healthcare for old people who worked all their lives
       for corporations who paid them so little in salary that
       they could not save for retirement without starving to
       death before they reached retirement,
    And sundry other programs that keep the very poor just above
       the subsistence level, so we do not have to step over their
       dead bodies on the street all the time, and so they do not
       wander around in feral packs, looking for middle-class people
       that they can kill and eat...


.... but it is about NOT supporting the government funding of theaters?


In that case I misunderstood, and all western democracies are more or 
less libertarian already, give or take the 0.0001 percent of their 
funding that goes toward things like theaters and opera houses.




Richard Loosemore