When Will Libertarianism Succeed

A friend of mine, who shares some of my libertarian sympathies, asked me how we could eliminate the minimum wage.  While I believe that it would be good for this to happen, I don't hold any illusions about how likely it is in the near future.  I think there are a few possible events that would convince large numbers of people to change their minds on this subject.

The one I responded with is that we could come into contact with a more advanced extra-terrestrial civilization.  This civilization would no doubt have access to far more data on societies composed of large numbers of rational beings.  If they believed that minimum wage laws were bad and caused unemployment, that would likely make many humans rethink the issue.  I suspect that minimum wage laws and similar measures would lose some popularity.  This might even lead to such laws being repealed.

If I am right about there being a harmony of interests with respect to the selection of a system of moral and ethical values as well as on the utility of minimum wage, then individuals put themselves through unnecessary suffering by adopting a system of moral and ethical values that enables them to support minimum wage laws.  It is only a matter of time before humans evolve to the point where they are no longer subject to the same primitive moral instincts that led them to support these measures in the first place.  However, to say it is only a matter of time is not to say it will happen any time soon.  If it were to take thousands of years, that would still be a matter of time.

Recent research into human evolution has revealed that it is actually speeding up, rather than slowing down or stopping.  While it is the case that a larger proportion of humans are living to the age where they are capable of reproduction, it is also the case that there are more humans than ever before.  This gives us some reason to expect that evolution might not take as long as we think to change our moral instincts.  In any case with something like this, I would expect this sort of change to take generations.

I think that it would be foolish for libertarians to wait for evolution to take its course or for intelligent aliens to guide us to reason.  One suggestion that I have is that we should improve our governmental institutions.  Because we cannot count on people to make wise decisions about what sort of policies are good, we need to have a government that will be held accountable for producing good results, which I believe that people will be in a better position to judge.

What I have suggested in this regard is that we experiment with an alternative system of government on a small scale.  Then if it works out well, we can scale it up.  That system would involve selecting members of the legislature at random from a pool of qualifying applicants.  They would qualify by achieving a minimum score on an examination.  To hold them accountable I would suggest that we allow voters to determine what proportion of the legislators should be dismissed from office.  The appropriate number would then be dismissed at random  and new applicants would be selected in the same manner.