WHO SHOULD PAY FOR THE THINGS WE TAKE FOR GRANTED?

I am puzzled by the number of people who comment on news items on Facebook, Blog sites, and other resources on the web. A considerable number of these comments reflect what I would classify as Libertarian (or Conservative) thinking.  It may be about something like unions and teacher’s salaries and the protections given teachers from being fired. The comments are often dismissive of such organization for collective bargaining.  They argue that people should pay for what they get, follow their bosses’ rules, and not expect government to pay for their needs such as medical insurance, retirement, or unemployment insurance.   Libertarianism and conservatism appeals to those who see themselves as self-made or self-reliant.  They like being rugged individualists and I do not doubt their strong work ethic. But consider this. To have a civilization like the US enjoys requires the activities of thousands of different occupations.  Let us say government paid for nothing but a standing military.  You now take your monthly paycheck and have to pay for the following: health insurance, accident insurance, car insurance, house insurance, lawsuit insurance. You have to pay for fire department protection; you now have to pay for police protection; you have to pay for sanitation to remove trash; you have to pay for clean safe chlorinated water to drink and  bathe; you have to pay for snow removal of the streets; you have to pay for repairs of pot holes in the streets taking you to work; you have to pay for scholarly books (500 dollars each) if the press is to make money when publishing is not subsidized; you have to pay for the research that gives you the modern medicines and drugs you and your family will need; you will pay for the airports, harbors, RR tracks, new highways.  The list will mushroom on all the hidden costs—mail delivery, weather forecasting and reporting, maintaining the internet, providing passports for travel to other countries, seeing to it that the meat and foods you eat are not contaminated, seeing to it that your children do not play in a haze of pollutants, inspecting bridges so they don’t collapse, keeping records of who owns the land your house resides on so that you can eventually sell it.  I don’t individually have to pay for all these hundreds or thousands of errands to keep society working.   Private volunteer work or profit making organizations might not work because not enough people even know about these things that make urban life possible.  And if they defaulted and did not pay up, streets would be filled with abandoned homes, burnt out houses, and impassable streets because no one was paying for the constant upkeep necessary for hundreds of services. 

  Libertarianism downplays the social contract that is necessary for everyone to have hundreds of activities that would bankrupt most of us if we had to write a hundred or more checks a month to pay for them.  At the same time you would be at the mercy of lawsuits for your neglect to do all the repairs and protections that government agencies and services provide. Since ignorance of the law is no excuse, you would have to be aware of hundreds of potential liabilities because you would be responsible for everything that can possibly go wrong. We have to organize to get things done.  Telling those who earn little that they should seek private charity (mostly from churches) is a bad idea because when people are stressed financially they will cut back on their charitable giving especially during depressions or setbacks in the economy.  Democracies with some mixture of private and public funding work better than pure laissez faire capitalism or pure socialism.