I'm so conflicted in how I feel about Libertarians lately. I've always been sympathetic to many the ideas, especially those that relate to moral values rather than economics.
OTOH "I love the music but I can't stand the scene."
I've always found it rather puerile, for exactly the lack of understanding and subtlety displayed by OP. It's no wonder to me that it's so popular with engineers, it's an expression of the same mindset an engineer has when he sees a problem from afar and is convinced that he has the perfectly modeled solution.
Now if only those pesky humans and their idiosyncrasies would conform to the ideal behavior...
If you want to represent "humans and their idiosyncrasies" in terms that can be understandable to a classical liberal economist...
Government itself is an emergent phenomenon. Rent seeking, regulatory capture or other market distortions are not the only emergent elements of government. Legislation, elections and all the other basic components of democratic government are themselves emergent, changing in response to "market" forces. I don't personally think this is the best framework for thinking about these things, but even within the framework it is possible to consider them.
You're obviously not familiar with the massive economic literature on the many, many various ways governments distort economies, create waste and hamstring growth - all while often utterly failing to achieve stated goals.
This isn't to say that governments aren't providers of certain goods (national and personal security, protection of property, legal systems, systems for pricing and controlling externalities) that are critical for growth.
So to combat my personal opinion that advocates of naked Libertarianism are essentially juvenile, you provide a naked display of naive realism:
The three "tenets" of naive realism are:
That I see entities and events as they are in objective reality, and that my social attitudes, beliefs, preferences, priorities, and the like follow from a relatively dispassionate, unbiased and essentially "unmediated" comprehension of the information or evidence at hand.
That other rational social perceivers generally will share my reactions, behaviors, and opinions—provided they have had access to the same information that gave rise to my views, and provided that they too have processed that information in a reasonably thoughtful and open-minded fashion.
That the failure of a given individual or group to share my views arises from one of three possible sources—
- the individual or group in question may have been exposed to a different sample of information than I was (in which case, provided that the other party is reasonable and open minded, the sharing or pooling of information should lead us to reach an agreement);
- the individual or group in question may be lazy, irrational, or otherwise unable or unwilling to proceed in a normative fashion from objective evidence to reasonable conclusions; or
- the individual or group in question may be biased (either in interpreting the evidence, or in proceeding from evidence to conclusions) by ideology, self-interest, or some other distorting personal influence.
OTOH "I love the music but I can't stand the scene."