Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Analysing Nazi Anti-Semitic Propaganda Imagery (so nobody falls for it in the future)" video.
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@TheImperatorKnight "Can you not pay for these things directly through the market?"
No, you can't, because you can't buy public safety just for yourself, it is inherently communal. (You can buy private security, but it doesn't perform the same function.) The criminal who would mug me or rob my house would also mug you or rob yours, putting him in prison benefits you as much as it does me - it benefits all of society, not just the person he happens to be caught robbing. You can't pay for tanks and fighter planes to defend your own life and property but not mine, war obviously doesn't work that way. Either all of us are defended or none of are. Also things like pollution - we all breathe the same air, I can't pollute my air without polluting yours as well, so either it is prohibited for everyone or it isn't prohibited for anyone. You can't buy your own clean atmosphere. It's a combination of the problem of free riders and the tragedy of the commons. Libertarianism has yet to come up with any answers to these problems.
And these are hardly socialist ideas. Edmund Burke would agree with me 100%. I am pretty sure Thomas Sowell would as well, at least as far as national defense and public safety are concerned. Socialism is redistribution of wealth from individuals to other individuals to be more "fair", not banding together and pooling resources to handle issues that are inherently communal like national defense and public safety. In fact, those are the primary purposes for which governments were instituted, as America's founders stated in our Declaration of Independence.
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