For sure, a lack of a military would be much less effective than an organized national force. With simply an armed society, you don’t have intelligence agencies, a force that can be deployed to other locations, or even specialized training or organization. A community defending their town with guns would at best could just resist an occupier through guerrilla warfare, but won’t stop an invasion, especially with today’s military technologies.
And if you did seek to have some of these abilities through an organized community effort, then you’d have to account for the time wasted, productivity wasted, and so on. You’ll still have bureaucracy, even if it cost “nothing” in terms of taxes paid. It still costs the same amount of time and effort, and probably more due to those who don’t comply voluntarily to contribute or participate. Just because it’s not priced in dollars, it’s still a cost. A bureaucracy is not just waste or you could just eliminate it. Instead, it is a service.
The same applies for health care. In fact, the government seems more efficient in terms of heath insurance bureaucracy, as insurance companies spend a lot in seeking to avoid paying claims and weeding out high risk applicants to maximize profits, while the government seeks to just maximize the value of the service provided for the minimum cost.
I wasn’t aware that education had much overhead cost at all. I think the issue there is that privatization may be able to provide a better education through innovation. But I’m not sure that the matter of whether the government should help pay or not would make much difference.
Actually, I am. I suppose you are thinking “oh wow, look how the free market screwed up health care in the United States.” That would be valid, if we had a free market in health care. The health care industry is actually extremely heavily regulated.
The free market did not drive up health costs, the government did (by dumping billions upon billions in federal reserve “funny money” into it via various programs). The free market did not create the HMO nightmare, the government did (by allowing only employers to deduct health care costs from taxes, and by mandating provision of HMO coverage). The free market did not create the ridiculous prices for pharmaceuticals, the government did (by outlawing cheap, naturally produced alternatives, by burdening the industry with a largely unnecessary research bureaucracy… to the benefit of the largest pharmeaceutical corporations). The free market did not create the shortage of health care practitioners, the government did (by making the AMA into a cartel that deliberately restricts entry into the field to keep supplies low and prices high, by burdening doctors and nurses with ridiculous bureaucratic paperwork burdens, by creating a hostile judicial environment that penalizes them for performing procedures that, while inherently dangerous, are often better than the alternative).
At least in Europe and Canada, if I understand correctly, the government largely stays out of health care decision making, and just cuts the checks. It isn’t perfect, since that encourages bad decision making (I recall a Canadian I was acquainted with who bragged about how he could, if he wanted, deliberately break his arm just to have them fix it up), but it is far better than what we currently have here in the States. Believe me, any “single payer” system created here would probably have a very large regulatory burden, and be heavily slanted in favor of the big health care corporations. I do not trust Washington with that, though I am willing to trust Sacramento, as part of an alliance to bring single-payer to California while keeping it (and other things) out of Washington.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with the prime argument I was trying to make earlier in this thread: that the absence of government provided services is, at the very least, less detrimental in a society that has a greater degree of socio-economic eqality (for whatever reason) than in a society with a larger wealth gap.
If you want to create a PRO-LIBERTARIAN UTOPIA, keep in mind that the Democracy 2 voting system is far more complex than it need be.
Voters belong to three groups at minimum, so even if you please the Capitalist faction greatly (the stand-in for Libertarianism), the average Capitalist voter will likely still whine about why the government isn’t religious, why the government isn’t conservative, why the government isn’t patriotic, why the government is taxing smokers and drinkers, why the government isn’t subsidizing poor farmers and parents, etc. You can also have voters like the Poor Capitalist…which is going to be pretty tough to appease.
Quite frankly, pure libertarianism isn’t going to cut it if you want to make it in Democracy 2. You have to create a broad and complex coalition of Voter Groups, to match up with the fact that your electorate also belong to broad and complex coalitions.