My problem with the philosophy as an active political agenda is two-fold, I guess.

First, capital doesn't seem to take any long view. The goal is to maximize the return on investment, period. Dump PCBs into rivers, sewage, too, and the hell with the people downstream.

The tobacco companies are a great example of how invested capital is in a longer view. Not interested, thanks, our stockholders are interested in a dividend this quarter. Anything which gets in the way of that is a violation of the fiduciary responsibility of the Board of Directors. That's legitimate, and someone has to have the interest of the rest of the world at heart.

Some things deserve a longer view. The environment. Basic research - there's no immediate money in basic research, in a particle accelerator, in cancer. I think the NIH has done a lot of good, which wouldn't be done any other way. The Centers for Disease Control - no profit in that.

Second, especially as the population grows there is a need for regulation of actions. The US doesn't have a culture which promotes respect for each other the way the Japanese do. I think we need Stop signs, red lights, green lights and uniform roads (couldn't be built without the doctrine of "Eminent Domain", by the way). There's no way to establish those if the role of government is only to protect from "force or fraud".

I bitched and railed against the end of backyard burning (I remember our burn barrel in the backyard in LA when I was a kid) and the establishment of vehicle testing. Loudly. Believe it or not, I can be loud.

And, I was wrong, those are a good thing. No money in them, though. The government couldn't establish them under the "force or fraud" limitations.

A fire department operating on a subscription basis ain't a good idea.

And governments aren't run well. I once instituted a couple of policies in my part of a large bureaucracy. Anyone wanting a new form had to present as part of their suggestion another form which would be eliminated. The point was that just throwing a form at a problem wasn't going to work anymore. Consolidation was OK, but not just a new form, which was usually a CYA affair, anyway. The new forms were generally to show the person filling it out had followed procedures and wasn't responsible for the problem not being solved.

The next one was that a problem which occured once every 4 or 5 years or longer didn't necessarily need a blanket solution, complete with new form and incorporated in a manual with everyone trained in it once a year. Those problems could be dealt with very often on a case-by-case basis. Might take part of a staff conference, 1/2 an hour for 8 people, as opposed to taking 15 minutes a year for 100 people. And then STILL having to "staff" the situation when it came up.

Young bureaucracies are great. Old bureaucracies are hidebound, overridden with rules, regulations, paperwork. Every bureaucracy needs to be disbanded, with the functions handed off to another new one every 10 years or so.

I'm in sympathy with the goals, don't know that anything as extreme as a Libertarian view would do most of the people any net good.

Arf