Thanks, someone said it. I see a "Libertarian Utopia" quickly devolving into an oligarchy run off of slave labor. Anarcho-capitalism...yeah, great idea.
There are things that a civilized society values that a free market does not value. Things like minority rights, the rule of law, not letting sick or injured people die preventable deaths, etc.
And that's not even getting started on the whole "tragedy of the commons" thing.
Under more competitive governance, people could move to places that supported their values, leading to potentially better support for the things you list.
Perhaps the confusion stems from mixing two different levels of abstraction. What we're talking about here isn't a free market within countries, it's a free market in countries themselves. Since there is no true global sovereign, we arguably already have this, but due to various factors (including high barriers to entry, high switching costs, and the quasi-sovereign US) there is currently not much choice in governance. With few exceptions, pretty much every country runs some variant of Anglo-American representative democracy. Perhaps, with a little competition, we can do better.
As someone who has been tempted to move from the United States to...somewhere else for political reasons, I see where you're coming from.
Maybe in the future, the barriers to entry and switching costs will be lower, and people will be able to move as freely around the globe as money does now.
Why would you expect "entrepreneurial solutions to government" to forsake human rights? Were the framers of the U.S. Constitution not political entrepreneurs?
I would expect "entrepreneurial solutions to government" to be at best neutral on human rights. Protecting human rights requires a great deal of political will to codify and then enforce. And it usually goes against the perceived best interests of the powers that be. It took a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation (and the 14th Amendment) for the US to codify equal rights for minorities. On a cultural level, we still have way too many people who pine for the days when they could lynch a black man with no repercussions. I see no reason to think this enterprise would be able to muster the kind of political morality and will to go out of their way to protect human rights.
Yes, the Framers were a sort of political entrepreneur. They were the type of political entrepreneurs who allowed slavery to exist and came up with the 3/5ths compromise.
Because he thinks government beating people over the head, robbing them, and then giving the money to him is "protecting human rights", and the idea that people should be allowed to live in peace, without being subjected to this violence, is a "violation of human rights".
Putting words into someone's mouth, especially when they are such a profound misinterpretation of meaning, isn't the quality of discourse I have come to expect from HN. We can do better than this.
