What you said there is literally why I am a Libertarian. The machine will be perverted, and it is my best interest to give it the least power to do damage when it is perverted enough to do so. But like fire can burn and warm you, government can do good things as well. The second part is often forgotten by Libertarians in exclusive pursuit of the first. They too have the Politician's Syllogism in their process, but backwards. Bad things have been done.
The doer has grown in power.
New things will be worse.My concern is that many commentators (and my fellow armchair commenters) advocate measures to correct the inequality problem using the same tool that Mr. Carson shows us is largely responsible for creating the problem. In order to pursue a political solution to the problem, concentrated political power is needed to effect the change. This power has been the source of the greatest harms ever caused by humans. Empowering an agency with resources and authority and a mission entails risk that the resources will be misused and the mission perverted.
I see. Perhaps I can get you to reconsider. It would be stupid to claim that government investment produces no benefits. I have found that the dialog is more constructive when framed as "better or worse" than "good or bad." Is government the only way to get the thing we want? If not, is any alternative better, when we consider both costs and benefits? Sorry for all the self-promotion, but it looks like you took a long nap and missed some of my best work.What you said there is literally why I am a Libertarian.
government can do good things as well
How is government a way to get what we, its subjects, want?Is government the only way to get the thing we want?
The usual answer is that you want to be able to get from point A to point B. For some reason you and your neighbors can't figure out how to lay asphalt, so you sign some invisible contract and people take money out of your paycheck and build roads and nuclear submarines with it, and now you can drive around.
Yeah. So I guess you're a Libertarian of sorts then?
I think we're actually already on the same page. What I said before is that Libertarians want to limit the government so it can do the least harm, but in pursuit of that goal you must temper your zeal with the truth that government can do good. In the same extremist view that would produce that "Libertarian Paradise" we could extend the Rupublican Paradise nightmare to include Abortion Death Penalty and Gay Compassion Camps where the impure are forced into hard labor to think about sin. Then you'd have the Democrat Paradise where we don't spend as much as possible on making all people equal leaving us poor but full of love and hugs. There's no such thing as a Libertarian paradise that doesn't include compromise with everyone else. And though your post is a very cynical view of Libertarianism, we can assume that it would be impossible to actually have that come to fruition in the current system.