I understand this is your fear, but I don't believe it is the case. As a matter of fact, governments have killed more people than religion, and ours is no exception. I contend that the costs for preventable ailments will fall dramatically were government regulation and prohibition to stop, and there is historical evidence for this. Meanwhile, the only thing that has increased life expectancies and improved the welfare of humanity at large is industrialization and innovation which has resulted in the very treatments you want to make available to everyone at no charge. People working for a profit motive, attempting to create something of value for humanity. Governments do not create anything. Enterprise creates wealth.



Now we're hard against it. You have an extreme anti-capitalist bias, and I believe this is based on a lack of understanding of money and profit and production of wealth in general. Yes, companies exist to make a profit. You consider that an evil motivation because you don't seem to understand where profits come from, which is wealth creation. Wealth is not just out there in the universe, waiting for us to divide it up. Wealth is created by labor, which turns raw materials into usable things. The things are the wealth, not the money. The money is simply the medium of exchange. Same goes for informational or financial products. The companies make profit by creating something of value that people voluntarily pay for. Through this mechanism, the wealth of humanity is increased by production. No creation of usable products, no revenues, and no profits. Profits are the measure of how efficiently people create things that society wants.

In our world of crony capitalism, we don't let the markets operate so well, and the health care bill is a perfect example of this. Rather than competing on the basis of delivering superior products and services at lower prices, companies now compete using special interest groups to get a regulatory advantage that effectively closes the market to competition or choice by consumers. Sometimes this is called regulatory lock, and indeed, the profits that come from this are immoral, because they are not based on the free choice of customers and a fair valuation of the worth of the product. Health insurance companies were behind Obamacare because it requires every citizen (under pain of taxation, which the government will collect at gunpoint if necessary) to purchase health insurance. No matter how expensive or shitty the product, we need to purchase it. Those profits are definitely ill-gotten, but that's not because capitalism is bad, companies are evil, or the market doesn't work, it's precisely because those things are not allowed to operate.





We disagree, of course. The problem is the doomsday scenario you describe is not accurate, because your premises are not sound. You blame free markets and capitalism for problems that are more often than not caused by government.



It is not necessary for the government to issue currency, and gold can be traded electronically in arbitrarily small (or large) amounts. There is absolutely nothing less convenient about a system based by a hard commodity. All of our electronic banking conveniences would still work. In fact, there is nothing special about gold. The ONLY thing that using gold money does is make the total amount of money a relatively fixed quantity -- beyond the reach of politicians to inflate it, thus stealing from savers. Any relatively stable commodity can be used. The point is that it is an objective, non-fluctuating, medium of exchange.



It's not different at all. It's stealing. That's precisely what fractional-reserve banking is, whether a dishonest bank does it or the government. It's also something that could be regulated and managed (a legitimate case of regulation as it serves to protect property).



That's not the traditional libertarian argument at all. The argument is that lending out property placed on deposit in your warehouse is stealing. The banks violated the contract with the depositor when they lent out his money. With a 100% reserve system, which would prevent all of these problems, including the asset bubbles we've seen, a bank is nothing more than a warehouse for your money. The paper deposit certificate is a warehouse receipt. For convenience, and to avoid the impractical nature of using gold coin for everything, you and I can exchange our receipts with each other, rather than the actual commodity. Those receipts could be electronic.

We have warehouse companies today that store extremely valuable things and they do it without stealing them. This is another common scare tactic argument that has no real basis. What actually causes bank runs is when the government allows fractional reserve banking to happen in the first place, to inflate the currency to pay for its unfunded liabilities. Then the scenario you outlined happens. It's not corrupt companies that cause it, it's inflationary government monetary policy.



Almost any modern libertarian, including myself, would support a Hamilton-style central bank, because it was exactly what I'm talking about. He explicitly forbade the bank to buy government debt (a terrible sign for a country, and which just happened in the US the day after our elections), and he required 100% capitalization. In fact, his bank was established explicitly to get rid of fiat currency then in circulation.

Our objection is what inevitably happens afterward. Now in possession of the money supply, there is a relatively low barrier for the government to start using that money on deposit for its special projects. The government is the organization most likely to create the doomsday scenario you describe, and they are doing it. Please put aside your prejudice against capitalism long enough to look at what they're doing!