| Of course. However, libertarianism has little logical foundation beyond this rhetoric; it has to resort to pragmatics, i.e. showing that government regulation of the market and public spending are bad in the sense that they hurt the economy or reduce quality of life or whatever. On this ground, libertarianism can succeed only in a courtroom-like debate, in which the goal is to produce as many precedents as possible; however, once one realizes that such anecdotes are incomplete because different anecdotes argue for different positions, libertarianism loses even this. Examining not just individual occasions of hurtful regulations but looking at the overall effects of government regulation and public spending, we see that they are generally positive, even though some regulations had better never existed or toned down. In other words, libertarianism loses not just in logic but also in pragmatics. |