Hi Steemit and dear followers,

This post stems from my post from yesterday. I recommend reading it for some more context: The most powerful argument for libertarianism and anarchism.

The following line of thought was the result of trying to answer the question: how would caring for the misfortunate work in a fully voluntary society? So here is my attempt to answer this question. Let me know if you have comments or suggestions!

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Any system produces 'victims', so to speak. However, libertarianism isn't a system. It's total freedom. In a libertarian society nothing is forced, so in this case I don't think you can speak of "the system producing victims". But of course you're totally right in that there would be poverty, equality, etc., just like it exists now.

The existence of poverty isn't an excuse for the existance of the state. There is no guarantee there will be no poverty when a state exercises its violent control over a certain territory (because that's the essential task of a state). For example, in places where the state isn't as big, it's possible to see much poverty (e.g. in rural parts of Central America), or very little poverty (e.g. Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Hong Kong).

So, my guess is that one thinks of a state that provides social programs to its citizens. For example, here in the Netherlands we have welfare for the poor, the ill and the old. So the question is: is it possible to replace social welfare programs when people can't be forced to fund them?

My answer to this question comes in two parts:

1. First of all, there is no way to accurately predict what people will do when they aren't forced to do anything, as I point out in my article. Asking whether a society will work without coercion is like asking if plantations will work without slavery. Besides, who will determine what the definition of work is? When are people provided so-called basic necessities? Everybody has a different living standard and different expectations. Here in the Netherlands, people have a relatively high living standard, even when they're on welfare. On the other hand, there are also very poor places in the world where people are much poorer than over here, while also relatively happy (as far as that can be measured). So, over here people might ask for welfare rather than work hard and earn a low wage, while in other countries people could only dream of that job that Dutch people would reject.
2. But we can always try to predict the future by looking to the past. There are many examples that show people voluntarily care for the poor. Think about the Netherlands before we had a welfare state. The poor were cared for by the church and a lot of different charities. Or take the United States in the previous century. Hospitals were entirely privatized, but nobody was turned down because of a lack of funds. Moreover, in 2016 alone, the American people donated $ 390 billion to charity. Now imagine how much that could be when the state didn't take away half of everybody's income.

So, in conclusion, a libertarian society is perfectly capable of caring for the poor, the old and the disabled. People often think that in a voluntary society, nobody would care about each other anymore. That's nonsense. Objecting to something that the government does, doesn't mean that you automatically reject its being done at all (see the first picture of my article). And just the possibility that there might be 'victims', is not an excuse to force a state to let it happen anyway. As I already said, any system has its victims. So, the chance for poverty doesn't rectify a certainty for creating victims.

Oh, and before I finish, it's also strange to think that people are only able to organize for social programs when they do it in name of the government, as if that's some magical seal that makes it possible to care for one another. I always hear people say that in a free society people don't care about each other. What I always wonder is: if virtually everyone thinks that, why can't they organize something themselves? Often the sad truth is that those people are exactly those people that wouldn't care about the poor if they found themselves in that situation. Isn't it funny that the biggest advocates for socialism always contribute the least to it?

Source: me.me

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post, don't forget to upvote, resteem and follow me @rvanstel for more content like this. Have a nice day!