For reasons the merits of which are not altogether clear to me, a great many people have been habituated into the thought that a social-welfare safety net has to be administered, coercively (at the point of a gun), by the state. We're not even talking here about emergency measures that perhaps only a state-scale entity could take during a deep recession or depression, or during a deadly virus outbreak (there's one I have readily in mind at this very moment), but rather an ongoing, cradle-to-grave, offensive-to-liberty, welfare state.
Consider: the United States had, by today's standards, a very small federal government, outside of wartime, for the first century-plus of its existence. Somehow the people managed to get by without all of today's largesse; somehow it managed to develop into a world power with a per-capita GDP growth rate not unlike what came after. As for what has come since, non-military spending at all levels of government (federal, state, local) has steadily increased to over 30 percent of GDP today, even as GDP has expanded many-fold during that time.
On its face, this indicates that it's not some pressing, life-or-death need that feeds the welfare-state mentality, but rather a mentality reflecting a contempt for principles of liberty (to adopt a phrase used in the title of a Walter Williams book).
(As for pressing, life-or-death needs, there will be, for the foreseeable future given foreseeable technological and production frontiers, such pressing needs at the margins. Even the "successful" (using a specifically statism-inflected moral standard) Nordic-style welfare states still have nonzero poverty rates, e.g., around 5% in "Denmawk!" And the economically-advanced nations continue to hoard wealth out of the reach of the desperately needy peoples of Africa and elsewhere; part of the prevailing welfare-state mentality is that "universal healthcare as a matter of human rights" doesn't extend to such geographically less lucky peoples. That is, the pressing-needs-at-the-margins argument that is the wedge in the door welfare-statists use to get us to the 30-percent-of-GDP level we have today, is selectively not expanded to cover the entire world. The expenses would then supposedly be too unreasonably demanding of the wealth-producers' talents, energies, time, and lives, see - that is, the global top x% selfishly lives high while letting others die. As for a sustainable, i.e., capital-intensive route to economic development for the geographically unlucky people, transfers of already-produced wealth from altruistic first-worlders, to thereby be consumed by the unlucky ones, won't cut it, however warm and fuzzy it makes the altruistic ones feel. Only in the era of globalized capitalism has the global poverty rate been declining (dramatically).)
Human beings flourish as members of communities. That's a point well-recognized by sages like Aristotle. But it's a category error to lump "community" in with "state" or government. A sine qua non of state institutions is physical force, i.e., compulsion or threat at the point of a gun. Under the classic libertarian analysis, physical force must not be initiated or introduced into human affairs; its only proper use is to repel or redress initiated force. ("But what about x, y, z, this that and the other thing, be it public goods, public health emergencies, depressions, etc.?" Is it really that such pressing needs and concerns can't be addressed by non-state means, or is there a failure of imagination involved? And is even a hardcore libertarian analysis not amenable in any way to libertarian interpretations of the invasiveness to human autonomy that is a public health threat? Are we even really sure that economic depressions come from the operations of a fully free market under fair legal constraints? Are the likes of David Friedman just out to lunch?)
Now, my vision for an ideal social order is something like this: Aristotelian-eudaimonist-perfectionist ethical norms, under some wide or universal recognition of the idea of better living through philosophy (including philosophy for children), combined with libertarian social-political norms. (Are there such things as incorporated cities even in an 'anarcho-capitalist' framework envisioned by Friedman et al? There are incorporated other things, so I don't see why not. So there may be cities, but perhaps not city-states - presumably the form of polity of primary focus for an ancient Greek philosopher - cities being localized and more under direct control of the territorial participants. So, would such cities have the (delegated) rights to regulate the size of soft drink you can purchase within the city limits? More on that in just a moment.) Under such a social framework, based on eudaimonist or flourishing norms alone, there would be a large private-sector-based social safety net, probably operating under the virtue-based norm of aid that Rand/Galt promulgated in Atlas Shrugged (and which Rand-bashers refuse to acknowledge, having lazily/recklessly caricatured her egoism in base, non-virtue-based terms).
So let's say I am posed the question, "If you could eliminate the ongoing cradle-to-grave welfare state right now, given all its offenses to human liberty, would you advocate for that?" But under scrutiny, the terms of the question are a moot point. Hypotheticals or counterfactuals should be treated with all the seriousness they deserve, which is to say, they need to consider not merely the consequent but the preconditions for the antecedent. (That is to say, hypotheticals or counterfactuals are open to abuse in the absence of proper context-keeping.) That is to say, there is no conceivable scenario, under proper constraints for conceiving things, in which the welfare state is going to be eliminated right now. (Properly constrained conceiving - as distinct from, say, imagining - doesn't permit conceiving of pigs who can fly unaided, hence the saying. No proper concept of "pig" allows for it; it would drop the context of how we came to form and maintain the concept.) The prevailing norms of American society won't allow for it. The people would have to be converted to the Aristotelian-etc. principles I note and link to above, or be moved considerably in such a direction, or some such widespread values-alteration.
Would cities or other territorial communities make laws or regulations about soft drink sizes, or sexual practices, or other matters of virtue? Or is there something about the libertarian norm that reflects and informs how people ought to treat one another generally speaking? Or more exactly, is it something about what explains, grounds, or informs the libertarian norm (linking again) that involves a perhaps-judgmental yet laissez-faire attitude toward how people conduct their lives? I mean, let's say that rather than paternistically regulating soft drink purchases, people apply Rand/Galt's virtue-based approach and condition social aid on either past virtuous behavior or on education for future virtuous behavior? I think that this eudaimonist-libertarian way of thinking, actually present but largely implicit or inchoate in a great number of American people, helps explain what they find so offensive about Mayor Bloomberg's paternalism (which flows over into the mentality behind his highly intrusive "stop-and-frisk" policies, a mentality I don't see being extricated from his worldview all that soon, the same as with the elitist hubris behind his comments about farming skills). Anyway, eudaimonist-libertarian social norms would emphasize education toward people exercising their best judgment, and then leaving it up to them to exercise their judgment given their own context of knowledge and hierarchy of values. Like, duh?
To sum up: Like perhaps quite a lot of libertarians, I'm all for a robust social-welfare safety net and other virtues of sociality and community, just not at the point of a gun. And with enough imagination (fueled by an intellectual perfectionism and/or the kind or quality of thinking behind Nozick's appallingly neglected framework for utopia) as well as ample benevolence, wouldn't it be a better safety net than the one currently existing?
[Addendum: Under a broadly prevailing culture of Aristotelian intellectual perfectionism, would there be even nearly as much need for social safety net institutions, or would people be a lot more self-sufficient in that regard? I urge much properly-constrained imaginative conceiving in this regard. Much like Rand, and contrary to the usual lazy caricatures of her, I have a very high view of human potentialities even as regards the less talented; while I don't envision a repeal of the bell curve, I envision a marked 'rightward' shifting of it under culturally Aristotelian conditions.]
