Wednesday, April 04, 2012

Is Libertarianism ultimately all about the widespread (uniform?) adoption of private price systems?

Private or market transactions typically rely upon an environment supported, or at least affected, by public concentrations on the use of violence — and prices reflect their environments; thus political influence can significantly affect prices.

But even knowing that prices reflect the distribution of political influence, e.g. huge concentrations of political influence among small numbers of individuals and organizations, I think libertarianism economic policy can be best boiled down to a single instruction: adopt (or sometimes just allow) private price systems. Civic policy then would be just: achieve accounting nirvana, i.e. match prices (revenues) to costs (expenses).

To the degree that there even is a single, uniform medium by which we can, in aggregate, trade among all of our differing values — and assuming that money is one of these mediums! — charging people for the services they use, the products they consume, and the burdens which they impose on others, then is simply providing honest feedback about one's effects on the human world and human values.