I’m a free market man by nature.

That’s part of the reason I feel so, well, dirty arguing the case for the BBC against Blue Eyes. Even if I do like the BBC and agree to some extent with the licence fee, I know that this contradicts my free-market principles. I’m just willing to make an exception there – since I’m not an ideologically driven person, that’s okay.

But really, I’ll go with free markets any time. The Government does things shoddily, and in the absence of the efficiency of a market it does things expensively and without proper oversight. Indeed, if we didn’t have to pay taxes and our incomes were based solely on our competence in the workplace, we’d almost definitely all collectively be good enough to donate enough of those earnings freely to the truly needy – the sick and the disabled and those who are unable help themselves. That society would be pretty good. Utopian, indeed. I’d be proud to be a part of it.

In fact, you know we would probably be better off scrapping the government almost entirely – libertarianism has quite a lot going for it in that respect. The free market will, by its very nature, bring everything to order. No really, it will – economics is right. Tax is Theft. What have the government ever done for us?

Apart from, of course, the standard exception of law and order. I do rather want to feel protected in my own home, and private sector policing would be essentially a protection racket. So somebody should probably administer some form of centralised police service.

And therefore, I suppose, we still need some form of centralised lawmaking. Everybody needs to be able to agree what the law is and how people who break it should be punished. So Parliament still needs to exist in some form, even if it’s just to administer the security of the nation.

Apart from law and order, though, what has the Government ever done for us?

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There is one thing bugging me, though, and that is the fact that we are just one country among many. Fair enough, as long as they are all well-intentioned toward us then there’s no need to worry about those other countries. At the same time, there’s the nagging worry that, at risk of violating Godwin’s Law, it only takes one Hitler to make a land-grab and then we’re all a bit buggered – and, to exonerate myself from Godwin’s Law, where would we have been without Churchill fighting on the beaches?

So it’s probably going to be best to play it safe and have some form of co-ordinated national defence system in place. A private militia isn’t too much better than a private police force, so I suppose the government would be best off taking the lead on that one.

And thinking about it, when travelling in those foreign countries, where the rules may be different, it would probably be useful to have some system by which to identify ourselves as citizens of this country – and actually, it would probably be nice to have some form of representation in those foreign countries that we could turn to in a time of need.

Just in case.

I hate to admit it, but now that we’ve got a centralised police force and law making system, we should really try and make sure it’s democratically accountable. So really we ought to have some kind of nation-wide vote on who the the law-makers are every now and again. That means we need some form of independent system to count, verify and administer these elections.

And, actually, that policing and protection and democratic electing will probably take some money to administer, so, grudgingly, I suppose we’ll have to have some nominal level of tax collection in place. That, too, has to be administered and probably paid for. But it’s only a little bit, and we’ll apply it equally by percentage to the whole population, and fairly so that wages still work correctly with libertarian principles.

After all, apart from safety in our homes and on our streets, freedom from oppression and foreign attack, and a centralised nationality system with passports and foreign consulates, what has the Government ever done for us?

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I’ll tell you one thing, they definitely shouldn’t be doing healthcare. Healthcare is primed for some free market love. Free market healthcare couldn’t possibly be worse than Britain’s bureaucratic nightmare of a National Health Service. So it’s fine by me to privatise the healthcare system, in the process undoubtedly raising standards and lowering prices across the board.

Out of interest (and purely hypothetically), how do we deal with a situation such as an anonymous patient who needs urgent medical care? Do we leave them to get worse? do we treat them until they are ‘patched up’ and then enquire politely for a cheque to cover the trouble?

Upon consideration, it would probably be best to have some form of healthcare that is at least free in an emergency.

And, if we’re grudgingly honest, that probably needs at least some administration – if private hospitals are to take A&E patients gratis, they’ll need to be able to look to some form of authoritative body for dispute resolution and such. So I suppose there’s that.

You know, while we’re thinking about accidents and emergencies, it just occurred to me that we all drive around in cars quite a lot, don’t we. And cars are really dangerous – I mean, one car accident, caused by somebody who isn’t properly trained, for instance, can kill a lot of innocent people. It would probably make sense to have some form of compulsory training before being allowed to drive. And preferably some form of compulsory insurance to protect innocent third-parties from suffering from other people’s terrible driving.

So really, we should probably have some form of centrally managed driving licencing authority. To be on the safe side. Come to think of it, it’s lucky we brought those police on board earlier, because they could easily take care of enforcing these road laws, too.

Something’s bugging me about that ‘third-party insurance’, though. You see, how do I prove to the satisfaction of an insurance company that an accident wasn’t my fault? The only way I can think of getting around it is to have some form of civil dispute resolution system which, I hate to admit it, seems like it would be best managed at a national level.

So apart from protection, law & order, citizenship and foreign consulates, the democratic election system, free healthcare at the point of need, road safety and the civil courts, what has the Government ever done for US?!

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They can keep their noses out of education, most definitely. The big government approach to education is appalling – target after target after target set for the teachers without setting proper standards for the kids, pointless inspections looking for the wrong things. With a little bit of free market thinking, we can imagine schools catering to all markets – and it isn’t hard to see the economic sense in their provide bursaries to able kids from poorer backgrounds because their results would reflect well on the school and bring further custom, so we’d actually probably end up far closer to a meritocracy than the current ‘post code lottery’ comprehensive system in place in Britain.

So we’ll agree that the government can stay away from education. And business, too, where naturally the free market reigns supreme.

But then again… There is something bugging me about business, and it’s this: just like it only takes one Hitler to invade a country, it only takes one company able to successfully hide information from the market, or at least muddy the water enough, to throw everything into turmoil.

In fact, there is scope for some unpleasantly monopolistic practices. It’s not the free market that’s the problem, it’s more the reliance on honesty, and I’m a little cynical there. You know, grudgingly, I’ll admit that some regulation will almost definitely be required – to protect workers from exploitation, to protect markets from fraudulent behaviour.

Well, actually, thinking again we will have to go one step further. Since business works entirely with money, and the value of that money is only what we ascribe to it, we have a bit of an impasse here because there’s no system to manage the flow of money. Would it kill us to have a public body which set monetary standards and base interest rates?

You know, those last two paragraphs suddenly made me think about the education thing again. I mean, yes private sector education is almost definitely going to be more efficient and more effective than a fully public-sector alternative, but the cost of fraudulent or otherwise anti-market behaviour is pretty high, considering this is the future population of the country we’re talking about. You know, on reflection I’m thinking it’s probably worthwhile having, at the very least, a codified set of standards for educational establishments, and that’s going to need a centralised regulatory system, and probably some independent inspection. But that’s all – we’ll keep it to a minimum.

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So, *APART* from law and order, protection from foreign enemies, embassies in foreign nations, citizenship and the passport system, emergency healthcare, road safety, civil courts, business oversight, educational standards oversight and the monetary system…

What has the Government ever done for us?