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1.Under libertarianism people have more control over their lives. A libertarian society would be peopled with individuals who value independence.
The assertion here is that capitalism wouldn't lead people to be self-reliant since forcing people to fend for themselves might not give them the skills that they would need to be self reliant. People aren't necessarily self-reliant under libertarianism. People would still have families, and there would be charitable organizations. Granted the charity would likely be much less as a proportion of the economy than the social welfare state, although I would suspect that there would be more charity, a faster growing economy and that charity is likely more efficient than government programs at helping the poor. In addition to this libertarianism has the advantage of being more cosmopolitan. Social welfare states are notorious for helping only poor people who live on a certain side of a line on a map. In contrast under libertarianism people are free to help any poor people they like, regardless of nationality.
2.Welfare programs foster dependence and create poverty.
Here the author advocates that we take an empirical approach. That would be nice. As a first step, I would suggest that we decrease the size of the social welfare state and see what happens. Since the size of the social welfare state has increased from the time when we first had a social welfare state, we need this information in order to make rational decisions in this regard. We already know what happens when we increase the size of the social welfare state. We need to find out what happens when it gets smaller for purposes of comparison if nothing else.
3. Capitalism distributes wealth other systems re-distribute it.
Here the author challenges the notion that capitalism is the default economic system. Okay, but this is not the argument that all of the prominent libertarians make. Take F. A. Hayek, for example. He would deny that capitalism distributes wealth. The statistical distribution of wealth under capitalism is not the result of human intention. There is no person or small group of people who get together and decide who gets what.
The author goes on to assert that allowing people who already have assets to control them is a form of redistribution. I'm not sure quite what he means by this. Perhaps he means that since people don't have absolute control over capital goods, for example, if we were to give them such control then that would constitute a transfer of control and hence redistribution. This point has merit, but it is not relevant to whether or not we should implement capitalism. It is noteworthy that people who advocate other arrangements don't feel the need to compensate the ostensible owners of capital goods when they change the system to one where they have less control, which would also be a form of redistribution. However, the argument for or against capitalism rests on how much control over capital goods should be something which can be bought and sold.
4. Wealth distribution in our society is relatively balanced.
Relative to what is not explained. The author shows examples of disparity in wealth to make his point. Equality and balance are taken to be synonymous. If wealth were completely non-existent then it would be equally distributed, but that would not be a healthy condition. While it seems likely that wealth under a healthy system would be more evenly distributed, it is not clear what this has to do with capitalism.
5. Income disparities in the world at present are for the most part a result of government intervention.
The author asks us to imagine that we had a libertarian society with perfectly equal distribution of wealth and then goes on to show that disparities would result in the future. I'm sure they would. However, this is not the question. We are interested in whether government intervention tends to increase or decrease disparities in income in general and poverty in particular. Here we need to consider the impact of tariffs, trade barriers and immigration controls on income disparities between countries as well as redistribution within countries. I suspect that the result would not make government intervention look very good.
6. A purely libertarian society is possible.
The argument is that the wealthy would lobby political leaders in order to make laws that violate libertarian principles. Perhaps so, but is this really an argument for making our system less libertarian? It seems to me that if libertarianism were seen as being valuable to a large portion of the electorate, that we could set up organizations that would monitor the legislation that congress put out in order to determine whether it conformed with libertarian principles. In fact, since libertarian principles are much simpler than others, it would be easier to do this than to monitor for more complicated principles. There would then be a cost that political leaders would pay for departing from libertarian principles. Granted, this might not produce a purely libertarian society, but since it is not clear that you could produce a "pure" society of any sort, this is not a problem that is unique to libertarianism.
7. Income disparities don't matter; only absolute poverty matters.
Okay, but so do some other things, such as the state of medical technology that exists for the world as a whole. We have to note that absolute poverty does indeed matter, if we are concerned with the length of the human life. People in poor countries tend to live shorter lives. It is also interesting to note that people who live in countries today that are no richer than some of the richer countries in the past, live longer lives than the people in those countries. Further, since government intervention is likely to exacerbate economic disparity between countries this is not an effective argument against libertarianism.
8. A rising tide lifts all boats.
I'm temped to refute the straw man that we should strive for a sinking tide. What the author is arguing is that economic disparity is "ever-increasing" and that this is a problem that economic conservatives are ignoring. In fact estimates for the world-wide gini coefficient have actually been going down recently.
9. Increasing life expectancies, literacy etc. provide evidence that our current form of capitalism is an ideal system.
This is interesting, of course proponents of capitalism don't have to argue that it is an ideal system. They only need argue that There might be other factors at work. For the world as a whole, in the richest countries the size of government was much larger. This would provide much slower improvement in these areas. Also it might be the case that poorer countries benefited more from knowledge that they had obtained from the richer countries. It could be that further improvements in communication didn't contribute quite as much. We also need to note the effect of DDT bans. It could be that we just haven't come up with many new ideas during this period.
On the other hand, there might be something to this argument. I'll have to look into it some more. To be honest I haven't really looked into data from 1960-1980 enough to evaluate this argument.
10. Humans have natural property rights.
Okay, perhaps so. I suppose it depends on what you mean by a natural right. Most human societies have personal property. However, humans also have instincts that would tend to go against capitalism. Many libertarians have said as much.
11. Governments use force; private interests trade freely.
This point is not entirely without merit. Strictly speaking rights do not entail force since they need only be moral claims. It might very well be the case that any society will need to use force in order to back up its moral claims.
12. Economic conservatism is the only political philosophy favoring reason.
True, everyone thinks they have good reasons for supporting their own personal political philosophies. Whether they have merit or not is another matter. Several "ideal" systems of government have turned out to be less than ideal in practice.
13. It's always wrong to take property or wealth from people who have it.
Humans naturally support both property rights and redistribution. It is not natural for humans to reach a consensus on these issues. However, our natural instincts do not have the final say on this matter. If we are able to show that people are likely to improve their own lives, the lives of those they care about and the world in general by applying a certain set of ethical principles, then we have provided a very good case for those principles. All libertarians need to show is that we make the world a better place by considering all involuntary transfers of this sort to be worthy of blame. Granted, even if libertarians do succeed at this, non-libertarians will still be able to argue that some confiscations are necessary evils in order to prevent some greater harm.
14. Under pure capitalism, people must earn their incomes.
This is obviously false. Many libertarians acknowledge as much.
15. People who make bad decisions deserve to suffer.
I'd say that's a judgement call. Capitalism doesn't necessarily cause those who make bad decisions to suffer. Nor does it ensure that making good decisions will make your life perfect.
16. Freedom is simply lack of coercion. Libertarianism requires all trade to be between equals and all human interaction to be voluntary thus substituting persuasion for force.
The author cites an example of someone holding another at gunpoint to steal all of their money and compares this to someone having all of the money and asserts that these two situations cause equal amounts of suffering. Therefore there is no difference between economic coercion and physical coercion. I would point out that the first scenario is somewhat more likely than the second. It is highly unlikely that anyone would ever have all of the wealth in the world. You could probably make a fairly good case that this would be theoretically impossible.
I would argue that the second scenario would actually be much worse, provided that you handed all of your wealth over to the thief and they left without further incident. The person with all of the wealth in the world would be able to enslave everyone for all time. If someone merely took all of your wealth, then you would still be able to go and work for someone else.
However, since this is much less likely to occur in practice we need to examine whether we should treat "economic coercion" the same way that we treat physical coercion. It is clear that economic coercion has something to do with economic inequality. People are obviously not economically equal. Further, there doesn't seem to be any way that we could make people entirely economically equal even if we found this to be desirable. Then we get into a murky area where we have to determine how much inequality there has to be in order for there to be economic coercion.
In contrast to this determining whether there has been physical coercion is quite easy. The gun is a dead giveaway. Therefore it seems quite clear that a society will have to treat economic and physical coercion quite differently.
17. Freedom opposes equality as a value.
The author argues that freedom requires equality. The author fails to address the question of whether absolute economic equality can be maintained in a free society. First in a free society people will be able to exchange the things they have for things that they value more. This means that by many people's values their wealth will change relative to others. So, if they start out economically equal they won't stay that way.
Further people are unequal in talent. In a free society people will be able to use their talent in order to make money. Hence if they start out equal they won't stay that way. In addition different people will have different preferences for saving verses consumption. This will lead to the development of inequality over time.
18. The government that governs best governs least.
Another value judgement. I wouldn't necessarily argue that government should do nothing at all. Not all libertarians are anarchists.
19. Central planning never works.
Corporations are cited as a counterexample. Corporations actually have been known to use markets in their own internal operations, however it is true that for the most part they don't. Many have argued that this is because there are certain costs associated with varios transactions. There is a trade off between these costs and the cost due to loss of the efficiency gains that would come with trade. In a free market these companies can reach the optimal size.
However, this is no argument for centralized, government planning of the sort that would make the purchase and sale of capital goods either impossible or meaningless. Particularly in cases where people are prevented from choosing another country in ways that they wouldn't be prevented from selecting a different employer.
20. Government is necessarily more wasteful than institutions motivated by profit.
You assume that government isn't motivated by profit. This is indeed a myth. However, in most cases the government is much less efficient.
I'll write more on this later.
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