…And justice for all
The political program of libertarianism boils down to the consistent reduction of the role of the state, that is, deregulation and tax reduction.
If movement in this direction leads to an increase in the security and wealth of residents until the state is reduced to the role of a “night watchman,” and further curtailment of state functions causes the level of violence to rise and prosperity to decrease, then the minarchists are right and the ancaps are not, and there exists a minimum state optimum below which it cannot be reduced.
If the state optimum is not found, and every reduction of the state brings only benefit to the people, then the ancaps are right after all; the state is a harmful parasite and must be completely eradicated.
If an optimum is found, but not where the minarchists assume it to be, but, say, at the level of “night watchman plus a poorhouse,” then the social liberals are right, and the hardline libertarians, with their meager brains, have failed to grasp the full importance of competent centralized redistribution of resources.
And finally, if it turns out that sustainable results are impossible to achieve because different societies have their own optimum of state functions, then the panarchists are entirely right: people are too different to be treated with a one-size-fits-all approach. Some need more state, some less, some zero—let everyone receive according to their request.
But in order to achieve all these results, a willingness of people to experiment in building a society convenient for them is necessary. However, decades of violent socialist experiments have largely discredited the very idea of consistently building something new. Therefore, we now more often see sporadic attempts to improve something, followed by rollbacks. But just as a long peace has taught people not to take the danger of a major war seriously, a long period of ideolessness can return the taste for reforms to the people. Our task is to ensure that at that moment, the idea of specifically libertarian transformations is floating in the air.
