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>As a libertarian / ancap who believes taxation is theft, I don't support anything involving spending tax dollars, no matter how noble the end.

That's pretty hard core. How would you fund services like police/fire departments or infrastructure improvements (roads, electricity), basically anything where its existence benefits many (as opposed to say redoing education to require parents to pay for individual tutoring of their children) - voluntary tipping, usage fees?

How would you pay for courts and enough government to enforce contracts?

This is, unfortunately, not something where I can easily give you a short, sweet and concise answer. There's a massive body of literature (and much debate) on the answers to those questions. I guess the most concise answer I can give here, without having to write a huge essay, would be to say "a combination of all of the above" (that is, "voluntary tipping", "usage fees", and "other").

> voluntary tipping

"Looks like 341 Maple Street is burning down."

"Eh, let it burn, they're terrible tippers."

> usage fees

"We'd be happy to put out your house fire, sir. Just swipe your MasterCard here."

I imagine that fire services would work more like insurance companies, most (all?) streets would be come toll roads, etc.

And when you can't afford the insurance for the fire department? How are these people taken care of by such a system? I'm sure we all know people who've hit very hard times at some point in their life through no fault of their own. As much as I like the idea of Libertarianism it can't see how these people would make it through those times.

For the record, I'm not not a libertarian, and I'm not proposing or defending this system - but smacktoward's comment was just too silly to even be called a strawman argument.

And when you can't afford the insurance for the fire department?

I would assume it would be the same if you couldn't afford your property taxes in today's system. You don't own a house?

I think the answer is "sell the house and move somewhere cheaper."

Does the libertarian anti-tax concept go to the extend of HOA fees?

> How would you fund services like police/fire departments or infrastructure improvements (roads, electricity), basically anything where its existence benefits many

Wouldn't food also fall into this category? Its existence benefits many. Would you want to nationalize food production?

Food meshes well with the market while some other servives are market failures.

> How would you fund ... fire departments

Well you'd just wait for Marcus Crassus to come down with his fleet of slaves to offer you a rock-bottom price for your home in exchange for his firefighting services -- so you can at least get your possessions out before it burns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_firefighting#Rome

The Wikipedia entry on Anarcho-capitalism[1] dives into these details. It's a fascinating philosophy that, in my opinion, severely underestimates the human affinity for greed and manipulation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

Over all my other problems with anarcho-capitalism and minarchism, the biggest is how much more time I'd waste and how much more anxiety I'd have.

Just thinking about all the new stuff I'd have to keep up with to avoid getting screwed gives me a headache. Food safety guarantors, some sort of court and law associations, drug safety certifiers, all kinds of insurance I don't have to worry about now, and so on.

Having to keep track of all that, who's best, who's had scandals and should be avoided, who's (known to be) subject to regulatory capture (think only the government is vulnerable to that?) or various other forms of corruption. Which ones give me bundle deals, are those actually better than buying the things individually from other providers. Ugh, it'd be miserable. Like all the problems of government and all the problems of real-world, imperfect-information markets in one. In my head it's like shopping for individual health insurance in the US (which is please-kill-me bad) or buying cars, but having to do that every. single. day. for one thing or another.

But I guess in all the relaxing free time I'd have left after that stuff (none, to be clear), I'd be really, really free to do whatever I could manage to pay for?

I don't see the appeal.

> I don't see the appeal.

Disenfranchisement, as per most modes of radicality. I have observed as a near-universality among ancap types that they have identified at formative times of their lives as being "othered." They're not the in-crowd and they're not fundamentally of it. My suspicion is that they have a secret (or unsecret) opinion of themselves as misunderstood ubermenschen. (I recall that phase of my life, but then, I was fourteen.) With emotional and social development it became obvious to me, and to most recovering right-libertarian/ancap types I know of, that countless people helped me along the way because we decided, structurally and socially, that people should be helped. (We don't help everyone equally or sufficiently, and an expansion of it is decried by the you-got-mine, pulling-the-ladder-up-after-me types, but we try.)

I have made a pet interest of confronting the ancap types I occasionally run into--in tech, you sometimes stumble across enough of a True Believer to let their flag fly high--with questions of, what do you do when you're born into poverty? What is your recourse when you have nothing to sell? What do you do when somebody--but not the state, because the state doing it is Wrong, but Jim down the road with a real big gun and a couple muscley friends is just participating in economic activity--takes everything from you? The answers start evasively, but I've read as much von Mises and Rothbard as most of the vocal adherents and I can speak their language enough to fight on their own terms. Laughable handwaves of insurance companies and private security aside--and we called these "barons" in a prior age, but history and economics have already been laid aside to get into their weird twists of philosophy, so no it will not turn into feudalism, that's a silly notion--the answer is and will always be "and then you lose and you die". What chills me is that while most seem to have enough of an emotional intelligence to know that this argument doesn't win, I rarely hear even a shred of doubt when you finally get to that hard little core--because the idea of losing so totally as to be rendered economically incapable is not part of the equation. Other people lose, not them. This is also why there is so much overlap in this crowd of the worship of eat-your-dead meritocracy; that ancap nonsense devolves inevitably into feudalism is a feature, not a bug. Because they believe, as is their right, that they will be the knights, if not the barons and dukes and kings, of their new order.

I've run a few drafts of this post to leech out most of the pejorative nature I feel the ideas and the ideologues are due, and what remains should be taken more to be a mark of how truly alien (and I mean that in the sense of "inhuman") you have to get and how much reality you must pitch out the window at highway speeds to bend into a mode where the ancap arguments even make sense, let alone appeal. I am convinced that there is something rather fundamentally unwell about the whole thing. I have tried very hard to relate to it for years and my conclusion inevitably ends up being something around a predilection for cultish predations or never-outgrown teenage immaturity, and neither are satisfying but both fit the facts in evidence. I mean, I can have a discussion with a Communist. A Marxist and I are operating in a fundamentally relatable frame of reference. I don't agree with where they're going, but Marxists do not eject the entirety of human history to reach their conclusions--we can talk and actually agree what words mean. Every ancap I have ever met has washed their brains and adopted the weird sublanguage of the movement (Orwell was right...) and I can't do a thing with them except hope like hell they never stumble on a lever of power.

Some of us just think that we, as a society, can do better than enforcing our beliefs and demands at the end of a gun barrel. And we prioritize principle over outcome, acknowledging that every system has it's pathological edge cases - including the current system.

The big problem though is that the pathological edge cases of our current system are much better than the extremely pathological normal cases of a system without checks on what people are allowed to do.

I mean, anarcho-capitalism is basically what sovereign nations are at a smaller scale: Factions of humans who make decisions without any real checks on their behavior beyond the environment and the reactions of other factions. And I'm supposed to want a microcosm of global politics in my back yard? No thanks, taxes are fine, please fix the roads so I can get to Chipotle.

The only reason I could see for anyone wanting anything approaching individual sovereignty is if a) they somehow believe that there is no bigger fish in the pond, or b) they're really so naive to have no idea what other people could be capable of doing to them.

LOL, so true. I'm starting to get the same feeling about Georgists. They're in a bubble of their own making, in denial about their own reality, and prone to making up new definitions for common words, making it difficult to communicate. It makes me a little sad, because I'm sympathetic to their cause, and read a bunch of articles from their writers around fifteen years ago.

> It's a fascinating philosophy that, in my opinion, severely underestimates the human affinity for greed and manipulation.

Ironically, exactly the same can be said of Communism.

I had a teacher that explained politics not as a left/right spectrum, but as a political circle. At the very end libertarians and communists end up being very close to each other, with slightly different mechanisms.

Reminds me of the recent cases that made national news where a property owner didn't pay the fire department fees/taxes, and when the property caught on fire, the local fire department watched it burn to the ground.

Oh, here we are: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/firefighters-watch-home-burn-own...

OP is an idiot/troll. I don't understand why so many take the trouble to respond.

Because people like to debate on HN? Your "idiot" comment adds less value than the OPs.

Slightly off-topic, your questions remind me of this satire: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertaria... (never fails to make me laugh)

Libertarian here as well.

I am more of the opinion that the government should set rules on the cost of education for any school accepting government aid or any school who accepts students who pay with government loans.

Want to get the price of education back in line, drop the open checkbook.

The issue I take with taxing to pay for everyone's college is that apparently there is no determination what constitutes a good education or good student. As in, I do not want to see money thrown at majors that can never pay back the investment or require such skill and luck to achieve pay back relative to the cost. Then comes the student, if your just a fail student why should anyone foot your bill to stay in school? You get the same number of years as anyone else. If you don't achieve the diploma you pay back a percentage

As in, I do not want to see money thrown at majors that can never pay back the investment or require such skill and luck to achieve pay back relative to the cost.

Good point. Paying for somebody to get a degree in, say, Medieval History, so they only job they can get post-college is "Barista at Starbucks", seems suboptimal to me.

narrow-sighted logic.

Diversity is what makes life. If you attach future earning potential qualifier to the free education, then you'll have a disproportionate amount of people attempting fit their square potential into a round hole.

Over a long period of time, you loose out the natural diversity that would otherwise exist in the general public - of people each dedicated to skill set they are best match for.

Not everything human produces ought to have an economic component.

Painters, Poets, Musicians... ?

Yes, and this is one of the reasons I don't want the government involved in education at all. But, since they choose to be so involved, I find myself feeling that government spending on education should take the value of that education into account. But you're exactly right, in that it's hard to actually do that.

In the end, there are no perfect answers to any of this, it's just a question of "which variables do you optimize for?"

If an education produces a non-libertarian, would you consider that of higher or lower value than an education that produces a libertarian?

I'd say that any education that "produces" a graduate with a specific ideology has failed in a sense. I'd like to think education should be somewhat neutral, presenting a NPOV and that people would make up their own minds what they value most.

Otherwise, you have to ask "is this education, or indoctrination?"

Not everything human produces ought to have an economic component.

This is great. But then we need to stop talking about "investment" in college education. This is instead "consumption," like taking a ski trip to Aspen.

How much should the US pay for people to take ski trips to Aspen? I promise you they'll enjoy it.

Does the study of history have a direct economic impact to communities? In most cases no. I assume you recognize the importance of history for human culture?

So in the context of an environment where we encourage extended education via monetary assistance, we strip away all forms of assistance for the study of history due to some qualifier. Is this wise?

If you just want more people to have a better understanding of history, produce some good history documentaries to show on TV.

They might not watch, but they might not attend college, either. Well, we can get them to attend college if use the college degree as a job credential so they can't get a good job without it, but that seems like a cruel policy, especially cruel to the least smart in society, so I don't think you'd want that.

I think this is still narrow sighted. What we're talking about is collectivism vs individualism.

Sending everyone to community college to learn various things produces a benefit to society that might not translate to economic benefit for that particular person.

An educated populace is good for a democracy.

I agree that diversity of opinions, perspectives, skills and backgrounds is important. That's one reason I oppose the monocultural idea that has crept in over the last few decades, that the one true path for everyone is spending their youth sitting in classrooms.

>>Not everything human produces ought to have an economic component. Painters, Poets, Musicians... ?

Can you explain why someone needs a college education to become a painter, poet or musician?

To be in an environment with like-minded individuals so one can foster ambition, inspiration, and collaboration.

Your sentiment can be applied to any skillset. The same reason why a college degree is not needed for programmers.. One can learn concepts and languages from books outside of college. However the resources available in a community of like-minded individuals provides great benefit for the study of said topic.

>>To be in an environment with like-minded individuals so one can foster ambition, inspiration, and collaboration.

Colleges are not the only such environment. But it is the most expensive.

>>Your sentiment can be applied to any skillset.

Not really, no. Would you let a doctor without w college degree operate on you? Have your city's bridges and buildings designed and built by engineers and architects who learned their trades from books?

As in, I do not want to see money thrown at majors that can never pay back the investment or require such skill and luck to achieve pay back relative to the cost.

Sounds to me then like you're in favor of "government planning" of the economy, which is essentially what it is when the government is picking and choosing which majors (and which people!) to subsidize. Strange libertarian position.

The government is already picking and choosing - there is already criteria to decide what schools should be accredited and funded. It's not unlibertarian to defend they should have better criteria.

Limiting the number of years is rather inflexible and can lock people out for mistakes or significant changes in the market place (such as graduating into a global recession).

I personally have found that due to rules in my state, that I am prevented from going back and pursuing a computer science degree, because there are such limits in place.

This also doesn't consider that people from worse are backgrounds tend to take longer to get through school. This can range from personal or family sickness (caring for parents is common). We always hear from the proud examples of people who overcame their circumstances, but it creates a survivor bias.

From an economic perspective, we are missing out when people get locked out for life who could contribute more to the economy. That's less wealth being created.

I just point that out because while it's easy for us to come up with seemingly simply solutions, but without any built-in flexibility we're back to the same place.

That seems more likely to create a class structure than anything else. I find that a lot of people with good jobs are not well educated; they have skills but no cultural knowledge. Often, they discount the necessity of that knowledge.

Interestingly enough, that's a totally working class sentiment. If you want to move beyond that, though, and have genuine leadership and thought generated by these government funded programs, you can't limit people to studying only things that have a direct correlation with paying back the investment.

Those are called "price controls."

This... just.. no.

You prefer basically to enlist in the hope that more communities win the lottery of making a super rich person happy, than you do finding a way to extend access to pretty much everyone? I can't even fathom this line of thinking.

Myself, I prefer the vision of a society that, through enacted laws, reaffirms a belief that it is worth all of us paying for people to be educated.

You're heaping praise onto a system that worked so well for you, yet balk at expanding access to that system to more people. Why? It's really hard for me to view that as anything other than extraordinarily selfish.

If the community college you went to was funded by taxes, and taxation theft, then do you view yourself as guilty of being a thief, complicit in that theft? I sure don't think so. The reason being that it isn't theft.

You're heaping praise onto a system that worked so well for you, yet balk at expanding access to that system to more people.

I'm not "balking at expanding access to that system to more people". I'm suggesting that the way we fund it should be changed.

If the community college you went to was funded by taxes, and taxation theft, then do you view yourself as guilty of being a thief, complicit in that theft?

It would be reasonable argument, but it's also irrelevant because I can't change the past. And my political ideals weren't as well defined when I was 19, as they are now.

> I have issues with the Obama plan[...]

It started as a Republican plan in Tennessee, funded with state money in a fairly anti-tax state as states go.

> Some local rich millionaire type (a real estate tycoon) setup an endowment to provide free tuition at BCC for any graduate of any Brunswick County high-school.

What happens when no local, benevolent millionaire decides to dedicate their fortune to free tuition? That takes many millions. Besides, sending kids to college for things you don't care about is boring--most rich philanthropists want to influence what their money will do. You are much more likely to see a real estate tycoon build a new building, which happens all the time.

> I'd love to see a concerted, nationwide effort to build a coalition of philanthropists of this nature to fund this "free college for everybody" thing, instead of taking it out of the federal govt. budget.

Because a tax is far easier and is almost exactly what you describe. This is absurdly inefficient and would only serve your worldview.

Since taxes aren't going away anytime soon, I'd rather that taxes be used for education than military and prison building.

Agreed, actually... I don't like being taxed, but if it's going to happen, I at least want my money spent wisely. And I absolutely think education is one of the best (if not the best) outlets for that.

Exactly, $60 billion over 10 years is a drop in the bucket compared to the $610 billion every year for "defense".

I would like to point out that under the BCC program you mentioned, the donor was paying in-state tuition for students, so most of the funding still came from taxes.

http://www.brunswickcc.edu/new-page-453/

While in-state tuition is $1152/semester, out-of-state tuition $4224/semester, or quadruple.

So if community colleges are not paid for by taxes, benefactors would have to pay quadruple.

And I'm guessing you would want K-12 schools to be free too, so if those have to be funded by philanthropists too, then the bill would skyrocket.

It's definitely not an easy problem to solve, I'll say that.

> I'd just like to see more of the scenarios like we had at BCC back in the day. Some local rich millionaire type (a real estate tycoon) setup an endowment to provide free tuition at BCC for any graduate of any Brunswick County high-school. I'd love to see a concerted, nationwide effort to build a coalition of philanthropists of this nature to fund this "free college for everybody" thing, instead of taking it out of the federal govt. budget.

I don't understand the libertarian perspective. Why is it so important that people should have the freedom to not participate in "concerted, nationwide efforts" to fund services that benefit the whole society, while you're simultaneously acknowledging that those services should exist. Taxation seems like such a straightforward, simple way to achieve what you've described, at the cost of a freedom (the freedom to not participate), which is a freedom we don't want everyone to exercise anyway (as it means the collapse of the social service in question).

Serious question. What funds Policemen, Fire departments, Emergency Medical people like EMTs and Paramedics? If we didn't pay taxes, and we didn't have any of those, it would be pretty lousy.

As far as I understand, most libertarians who believe in abolishing taxes also believe that these types of services should be provided by the free market. You pay some kind of subscription fee to a fire company, security company, etc, and you call them up when trouble hits. If you don't subscribe to such a service, your house burns down or get shot, too bad.

Yep, it's free until you have to pay for it. Hope you can afford it.

If you cant, you either lose your possessions or you die.

Sounds like a great deal! sign me up! /s

So basically the poor who more likely need those services more (more violence / robberies in poverty stricken areas) get really screwed. Sounds like a wonderful place to live. I might be tempted to call it Pakistan or somewhere that you have to pay bribes to the local service members.

> instead of taking it out of the federal govt. budget

Why is education for the citizens of a country considered something that a countries government should have no part in in the US?

If education really is something important for the country, would it not make more sense for the country to prioritize and fund it as opposed to leaving it to the whims of whomever feels like funding it that day?

If food really is something important for the country, would it not make more sense for the country to prioritize and fund it as opposed to leaving it to the whims of whomever feels like funding it that day?

Most of the benefit of food is private: when I eat, I am no longer hungry. That means I take care of my food myself.

Most of the benefit to education is, as well, private. If I become a lawyer, I capture most of the benefit.

It's when the benefit cannot be internalized that you need government involved. A public good is one that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. National defense and most environmental causes are examples there. Education is a private good, since it is both trivially excludable as well as (if you listen to any NEA paper about student-teacher ratios) rather rivalrous.

> If food really is something important for the country, would it not make more sense for the country to prioritize and fund it as opposed to leaving it to the whims of whomever feels like funding it that day?

We... do?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_Drug_Administration

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ag...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_farm_bill

Actually I support a guaranteed income so that (among other things) people can be sure to be able to feed themselves. It is in a nations best interest to not have a starving population.

It is also in a nations best interests to have an educated population.

> Why is education for the citizens of a country considered something that a countries government should have no part in in the US?

10th Amendment says:

  The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

If you follow this Amendment, the States are free to educate their citizens any way they want, it's just that the Federal government isn't allowed to (a good restriction, in my opinion, since competition usually increases quality).

Why is education for the citizens of a country considered something that a countries government should have no part in in the US?

It's not that the government should have no part in education; an ancap believes "a countries government" shouldn't exist at all. That's the an(archo) in ancap.

> As a libertarian / ancap who believes taxation is theft, I don't support anything involving spending tax dollars, no matter how noble the end.

It's a good thing most of us don't feel that way and you're able to express yourself through a medium initially funded through Government research.

That sounds like a good argument for government funding, except we can't see the privately funded "internets" that might have been crowded out by public investment.

To make an analogy, Comcast could say to the critics of their monopolization that "it's a good thing that we are here, otherwise you wouldn't have any internet at all!", but would you buy it?

No I wouldn't buy it because your analogy doesn't make any sense. There was no private investment in the 'internets' to crowd out when it was being built. There are plenty of options for an ISPs like Comcast.

There was no private investment in the 'internets'

No? Then what were CompuServe, Tymnet and Telenet, for example, all of which started their network businesses without using the Internet/ARPANET protocols?