> Anyway, these measures are treating a symptom. The real problem is that the federal government is vastly too large in size and scope. Reduce the power and programs run by the federal government, and radically simplify the tax code, and you'll dry up the opportunities for corruption.
And that would only treat the problem of government corruption while exacerbating issues of social inequality. I'm all for fiscal responsibility but the empirical evidence seems to suggest that cutting social services and public good projects leads to net harm for society as a whole (see: Texas.)
As a whole, I find the prevalence of libertarianism among tech types curious. As a whole they (we) are often rationalist and evidence-based in orientation but the libertarian position derives more from principle than empirical evidence -- the same charges many libertarians would level against religion-based politics.
You seem to have jumped from the GP's statement that, "[we should] Reduce the power and programs run by the federal government, and radically simplify the tax code, and you'll dry up the opportunities for corruption." to an assumption that social services and public good projects would be cut. If social services and public good projects were cut at the federal level, that doesn't necessarily mean they would not be transitioned to the state or municipal level.
So, I'm curious where it was implied that there would be no social services and/or public good projects unless they were undertaken at the federal level.
That's definitely a possibility, but it's difficult to provide social services without having some sort of control over "immigration", which states and municipalities don't have. With no control over movements, a city offering particularly generous benefits will just get a lot of unemployed people moving there solely to get the benefits (a typical adverse selection problem). Countries mitigate this by having immigration screens that try to filter out people who are only moving there to collect welfare.
A possibility is to phase in benefits based on how long people have lived in a place (e.g. you get 10% of the max Pittsburgh city benefits for each year you've lived in Pittsburgh), but that would put a damper on labor mobility within the US, since people who moved around a lot would always end up with poor benefits (sort of like the old problem with non-portable pensions). And in any case the Supreme Court struck down Alaska's attempt to do that, so it isn't currently an option: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/zobel.h...
If anything, I'd be more interested in going in the other direction in order to enhance intra-US mobility; it'd be nice if I didn't have to change health insurance just because I moved to a different state or got a new job, giving me the freedom to decouple my healthcare choices from other lifestyle choices.
The media's censorship of Ron Paul's campaign is predicated on exactly that idea - that without the federal government there would be no social services.
I can see it from the perspective of a non-empirical rationalism, which attempts to analyze from first principles how markets/societies work (Austrian-school style), and sees it as a sort of rationally understandable clockwork. Although in my case the rationalist approach is actually what makes me skeptical of libertarian positions, because if you analyze from the first principles of dynamical system theory, you get a very different picture of what an economy is, which doesn't have much to do with efficient allocation of anything.
And that would only treat the problem of government corruption while exacerbating issues of social inequality. I'm all for fiscal responsibility but the empirical evidence seems to suggest that cutting social services and public good projects leads to net harm for society as a whole (see: Texas.)
As a whole, I find the prevalence of libertarianism among tech types curious. As a whole they (we) are often rationalist and evidence-based in orientation but the libertarian position derives more from principle than empirical evidence -- the same charges many libertarians would level against religion-based politics.