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During the 1950s Americans enjoyed the greatest population growth in the nation's history. Capitalism is based on growth.
Exactly, Libertarianism promotes Capitalism in its full glory, with as little government involvement as possible.
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Your argument that "government involvement almost never has any real benefit in the long run" implies that American history has been one of limited or zero government involvemnent. I think I disagree. It was tax dollars that built the interstates, the backbone of late-twentieth-century national commerce.
I never said America had no government involvment. I don't want to have zero government involvement in things, but having all the excesses that we do now is definately not doing the American economy any good. American manufacturers and innovators are spending too much time complying with all the taxes and laws and whatnot than on innovation and development, all of which would lead to better growth and more jobs, as well as raising America's position in the World market.
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The classical Libertarian viewpoint is that the only purpose of a government is to protect individuals against violence and business from government interference. The government should not, they say, invest even in medical research that is not profitable; it should privatize all government industry (including road mainteneance); and it should allow businesses to mandate the minimum wage and to police their own environmental impact. There should be no public land, since that involves illegal control of wealth, and it should not fund the arts or involve itself in social spending.
A truly libertarian government would therefore privatize all park land, would close the public schools, would eliminate welfare and would privatize all of the hospitals. It would have no foreign trade policies, no foreign policy of any kind, really. It would make no effort to regulate its economy. It would do nothing for its citizens when they lost their jobs to cheaper, out-of-country labour, and it would suffer as much as anyone when suddenly there were no vaccines for anything. If the poor became violent, or if thse who kept their jobs threatened strike action, then the government would protect the businesses from the violent poor, seeing as that is its only role.
That would going too far, try reading
Thispage to see the Libertarian party's positions on the issues you brought up. You don't seem to really know what they want.
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Is the system perfect? Hell, no. Bush is out there right now saying that "history has shown that it is the union of a man and a woman that leads to stable families" in an effort to change the constitution to ban gay marriages. (If that's the case, what he should do is make divorce illegal ... duh!) The system is pretty damn boneheaded. But if you think that the corporations are there to help America, you've got the wrong idea. Libertarianism is about using government to help people who are already rich. It is not about managing a society, and managing a society is the exact function of a government.
The system is not perfect. No system is perfect. There never was, and never will be a perfect system. All we can do is stick to what works, America is becoming more and more socialist every day, and Capitalism is beomcing hounded at by Liberals and Left-wingers, and to be honest, I'm completely fed up with them all.