How will libertarians help those who are disadvantaged?
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Question
In every human endeavor that has been measured, humanity shows a distribution of talent, ability, error, height, weight, intellectual capacity, etc. that follows the traditional bell-shaped curve. That is, unless it is skewed by local factors of education, various selected populations, and so on. In other words, half the people of the world are on the ‘left’ side and half the people are on the ‘right’ side of this curve.
So, then, my question: How do libertarians, with their ‘pull yourself up by your boot straps’ outlook, propose to deal with those on the left side of the curve? To blithely say that ‘privatization of welfare,’ private charity, and so on will take care of these more unfortunate folks is simply ‘pie in the sky’ thinking.
Answer
Libertarian societies are wealthier than other countries because the poor are given the opportunity to work. European immigrants, for example, came to the US to escape the guilds and trade restrictions that kept them out of the labor market. Thus, the first thing a libertarian society does to help the ‘left side’ is to shift as many people as possible further into the middle. Because almost everyone is better off in a libertarian society, more charity is available for the few who cannot support themselves. When help is given privately, approximately 80% of each charitable dollar gets to a worthy recipient. Only 20% of each tax welfare dollar reaches the poor; most of the money goes to pay the salaries of the social workers. In addition, welfare harms the poor by discouraging them from entering the work force. After ten years of personally working with welfare recipients, I can attest that the system does the poor more harm than good.
Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken expresses a similar predicament. This poem is about choosing between two paths. Neither path can be predicted, as it is impossible to see all the way down either. However, one path looks as if it hasn’t been traveled nearly as much. The speaker knows he cannot remake whatever decision he makes. This gives him pause. He knows he cannot predict the future, and that he will never be able to travel the path that he does not take.
After nine years, J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, decided she was not quite done with telling the story of ‘The Boy Who Lived.’ Released on July 31st, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child broke pre-order records for both Amazon and Barnes and Noble, the same year that we, as libertarians, are breaking records.
