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To me, Social Security privatization is a way to _prevent_ people from being screwed. The current system is a pyramid scheme, and would be illegal if a private company tried to do it. It screws the young and it screws minorities (due to their shorter life expectancy and non-inheritability of uncollected benefits). Your retirement savings would be a lot safer if they were in an account with your name on it and a monthly balance you can track. Currently, all you have is the vague generalized promise that you will get the chance to screw your grandchildren's generation the way your grandparents' generation has screwed you.

I totally agree with you on the free market and the environment. So do some prominent Libertarian leaders, and in fact I wrote an article about this which was printed in the July newsletter of the California LP: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/216

Alas, there are four other misguided Libertarian platform planks that I too think make Libertarians almost "borderline nut-jobs". I list them at http://marketliberal.org/FixLP.html#Platform

So no, I don't trust people (or even unregulated markets) to always do what's right. I have a short list of things that I don't trust markets to do, and I used to think my list was ad hoc until I saw a simple table in an economics textbook that made sense of it. The table has only four cells, and I reproduce it at http://marketliberal.org/Lesson.html#Rivalry

Alas again, the LP doesn't have a clear plan for progress. This year we made the war our primary issue, but we'll never be able to out-peace the Greens. Right now there's a debate raging among us 2004 California Libertarian candidates over what our primary issue should be. Our LPC platform chairman just proposed: California secession. (Clunk!) I say: it's the entitlements, stupid. My pleas are at: