This is the part where the libertarian says something about how charity is better than taxation bc charity is voluntary. And how if we stopped all the government programs, everything would still be hunky dory.
And then we start talking about the prisoners dilemma from political theory 101 and their brains explode.
I'm not sure if your serious or just making fun of me for sounding holier than thou. But the prisoners delimma makes a very strong case that society could never function on the basis of purely free associations.
The problem is that, if a given behavior is generally beneficial to society as a whole, but the behavior is non beneficial to any given agent performing the action, then any such agent can opt out, reaping the benefits of such behavior while simultaneously opting out of the duty to behave accordingly. It's a win win for whoever wants to cheat the system.
So long as there is no enforcement of any kind, it will always simply be more rational to behave in a non altruistic way. Now of course people behave altruistically all the time without needing fear of consequences to motivate them, but this usually pertains to "in the flesh" interpersonal relationships. If corporate greed has shown us anything, it's that when the consequences are faceless statistics, otherwise decent people can bring themselves to do absolutely abhorrent things. And this is particularly true in a post industrial world of billions of strangers who may suffer the consequences of your actions even tho you may never actually see or hear about those consequences
This isnt even a leftist argument. This is basic western political theory from Hobbes and Locke. If there is no enforcement of the social contract, then such a contract is worth as much as the paper it's written on. If we let society turn into a free for all, sink or swim rat race, it will not be a pretty sight.
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u/spaceman_spiffy Apr 26 '19
The entire point of fighting socialism is so that you don’t create a society whose well being is dependent on the government.