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Got called on the idea that only the current two major party system counted in a forum where I argue. As a lifelong libertarian I found the argument advanced by my opponent absurd. After checking his posts I decided he was non-idiot, non-lunatic who was operating on out of date postulates. To be specific the following postulates:

The primacy of economics and economic exchange. This postulate is understandable even if it does take extremely complex arguments to hold that it is strictly true. Walk into Target or even Wal-Mart and the staff can and will take you to the gift registries and they are discount stores. Even the relatively poor and/or thrifty demand and get gift-circle services like modern cavemen. For that matter economists such as Friedman and Modgliani tried to come up with lifetime income models that resolved the differences in net worth vs. net income to account for such things as wealth effects.

Good of the species/group or politically the common good vs. individual liberty. E. O. Wilson with his emphasis on kinship selection and later Richard Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene” showed that the problem was not the group vs. the individual but rather differing strategies for optimizing genetic returns that needed to be examined. Nasty group selectionist dictatorships are optimal genetic survival strategies for places like Russia, China, Syria and Iraq because they are easy to invade and military calculations are based on the quantity and quality of disciplined arms. Easier to defend island nations tend to be less group selectionist than their neighbors Japan less so than China and the UK generally has more individual liberty than France.

While this list of postulates could be extended by quite a long way the basic problem of industrial age politics is rough and ready solutions to basic problems is what is available with this worldview. Of course if basic problems that can be solved with rough and ready solutions imposed from the top down is not the priority then the results of industrial age politics are not at all pretty. Take for example universal healthcare.

America does not have a healthcare crisis it does have a problem with a multitude of diseases than have gone from lethal to debilitating but have not yet reached the cure stage. One solution is British or Canadian style healthcare and while there is a big element of exaggeration in both the number of patients “allowed” to die on waiting lists vs. the number of people that can be “cured” by American “free-market” medical care there is more than a kernel of truth to this criticism. The other solution is faith in progress.

Whose progress? If I buy stock in Merck again (I did own stock in them after the price took a big hit from lawsuits and I have since sold.) I want a continuous and growing dividend stream. And guess what? If I think they are going to market a $50.00 one shot preventative/cure for some major cancer instead of a $500/year three year cancer treatment Merck’s management will have my admiration and moral support but not my money. I suspect the managers at Merck and other big Pharma companies kind of think that there are a lot of investors such as myself. That may or may not be true of the average investor. What is definitely true is a prize that offered 2-5 years of the savings from a cure/preventative would make me a happy investor in Merck.

How to finance such prize money is a question that definitely needs to be debated but why isn’t it part of the political debate? That to me is the damning question in regards to the major parties. DARPA prizes and X prizes for various technical solutions to problems have been out there for a while and the claimed investment for all contestants is 40 times the prize money. Even if the prizes are funded out of projected medicare/medicaid/VA disbursements saved that is still a lot of money. Better yet it is the cheapest foreign aid we could provide other nations since it would not cost a penny of US taxpayer money for big Pharma to sell the same treatment overseas at the US price. This may not be a libertarian solution and that is why I picked it but I seriously doubt that even the An-caps and agorists of the libertarian movement would get all that excited about any program that helped decentralize the state. Nor is it likely that Marxists would get all that upset about it.

The Republicans and Democrats are hung up on big government solutions that shows nanny knows best rather than actually solving problems.