Recently I had an argument with a good friend of mine about the role of government in our lives. He is a die hard Libertarian who would like to see the removal of most government within our lives. I on the other hand found myself calling for the providing of all basic human needs including food, water, shelter, and, in my opinion, health care. He also felt these needs should be taken care of but in a private way as oppose to government option.
It was from this that I began to think about what it would really take to change the way we look at government. Why is that when you can provide all the necessities of life for everyone that we don't. Proponents of the private system say that competition is what should drive us that humans are not capable of cooperating in any large scale sense without competition and government only gets in the way of progress. On the public side people talk about how these things are human rights and we can't trust that private entities will provide for one another so therefore it must fall to government.
After thinking on these equally valid arguments for a long time I can to the conclusion that they will both always fail. To think that no one would exploit each other in a private system based on competition and Darwinian ideas seem utterly ridiculous. In a fully privatized economy there would be extreme amounts of corruption or so it would seem to me. Now to think that government could do a better job made up of the same people seems to be an even more ridiculous idea. Both systems no matter how private or public would end up being corrupt. We've seen it time and again throughout history. Governments and private entities are both constantly riddled with corruption.
I then came to the conclusion that no system can work. It's not the system that is at fault, it is the way we think and behave. There needs to be massive educational reform. In order to remedy this we can to move away from this near worship of monetary and material goods and teach people how to understand their own wants and needs and prize people as contributes not as conquerors. If we could prize the whole of humanity as oppose to each individual we could bring about a new world that works together as oppose to against each other. From this government and private entities become irrelevant because everyone is a contributor.
