I love the "I can take my private sector business elsewhere" argument

[daveon]

Over on somebody elses Facebook I've stumbled into a discussion about insurance and the market.  A friend who used to live in Texas has been taken to task by some of his former State Dwellers for his heretical views on insurance.

Anyway, I think we need a new form of Godwin to describe the point when a Libertarian says something like: I want to have a choice in who I mail with, I bet FedEx et al could do it better but they're bared from law.

Funny thing that.  My brother used to be a senior bloke with DHL - that private global logistics company owned by the German Government...  anyway, they regularly used to have to model business operations to see if they could run a conventional daily first class mail service in various countries and the conclusion was HELL NO!

They wanted to cherry pick certain things, like deliver all the monthly credit card statements for AmEx - where they'd be able to model the load and locations.  Easy.

Move to running a nationwide daily postal operation and things get messy real quickly for your profit margin.

Which got me thinking: why is it that Libertarian types don't seem to notice when they're being screwed over and that what they think is competition is, at best, an illusion?

Comments

[coth.livejournal.com]

There's a British more-or-less equivalent complaint that annoys me which involves (usually) rich white male journalists railing at the Freedom pass that allows over-65s to travel free on public transport as a middle class bung that we can't afford and should be abolished. You can look at it like that if you must, but it's actually a classic public good. Public transport networks always operate with unused capacity, and in the wider scheme of things it is very sensible to extend people's individual capabilities and resources by using otherwise wasted public resources. You wouldn't build a system to do that, but once you have systems already justified for other reasons, the additional cost of the scheme is low relative to the benefits it offers.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

To be a libertarian is to ignore reality in favor of a cool-sounding theory.