Why Libertarian?

I have been a Republican since I turned fourteen. What convinced me? A trip to the DMV for my Learner's Permit, followed by a trip to the insurance office to add my name to the policy. Every time I step in to that dark and depressing DMV office, I am more convinced that it was designed by the Marquis de Sade as a test of stamina. How soul-sucking can you get? Row after row of identical chairs, ponderous manuals filled with the legal minutiae of driving, half of the office's union employees sitting around and eating their lunches as the lines back out of the office and around the block. Your only hope to avoid a slow-descent in to feeble-mindedness and drooling is to manage to nap in line without falling over. When you do get up to the front of the line, your hopes build: Am I done? Could it be?!

No, you are not. You now get to chat with Surly Employee #1. SE1 is a union worker, who knows that she is paid by the hour, not by the speed and efficiency with which she does her work. She knows that you have no other option if you want to renew your license, so she does not care if you are enjoying your visit. When she finally stops chatting with her co-worker, she will bestow upon you the same look that Kings used to bestow upon people asking them for a loan from the Royal Bank. You are a nuisance, a pebble in her shoe. Her only concern is sending you where you need to go so that you will leave her presence, and she can get back to her chat. After forking over to Caesar what is Caesars (the license fee,) you will be given a gift: paperwork.

Those who manage to haul the stack of papers from the counter to their seat in one of those endless rows of identical chairs without a hernia are strong, indeed. They may be strong enough to make it through answering three, even four duplicative sets of questions that they already answered for SE1. If you finish the paperwork, you now face the wait. Re-check your paperwork all you want - you will run through it all in a minute, maybe two. You need to wait for the one person capable of operating the camera to get back from lunch. This person, having just eaten, will probably need a half-hour siesta to decompress and ready themselves for their grueling day of pressing a button. If they have not yet gone to lunch, the wait might be longer - after all, they are weak from the hunger that builds up after a full two or three hours of pressing a button. It make take them twenty, thirty minutes just to review your paperwork and tell you to stand in front of a screen.

Once before the screen, the photographer will wait for the worst possible moment to take your picture. For some people, they have their face scrunched-up as they prepare to sneeze. For me, it is the "shiny moment," where my face is at just the right angle so that the light is glinting off of my nose, and I look as oily as an Alaskan beach after the Exxon Valdeez has passed. Either that, or the "guaranteed felon" picture. This is the sort of picture that makes any police officer who sees it certain that the subject is a homicidal maniac who should be shot on sight (probably with an extra Y chromosome, too...)

After all of this, you are given a piece of plastic with your name on it, that is so easy to fake that any illegal immigrant can obtain one in fifteen minutes at a Home Depot.

This is government at work - employees guaranteed union wages who have no motivation to make your life any easier, and cannot be fired for incompetence or a refusal to actually do their jobs without months of hearings and depositions.

Insurance companies, on the other hand, know that they need to hustle to keep customers. There is rarely, if ever a line when you walk in to the well-lit, comfortable atmosphere in an insurance office. Chances are, there is water or even coffee available. Surly Employee #1 would be fired in a few hours at this office, because she might hurt business. The people who are left recognize that pleasing customers is what keeps their office open and operating, so they go the extra mile to make sure you are happy with your experience. Everything will be made as easy and pleasant as possible for you, because you have the option of going elsewhere.

Hyperbole aside, whom would you rather deal with for renewing your driver's license? The insurance company, or the DMV? Who would you trust to ensure safer roads? The people paid by the hour who cannot be fired for anything short of shooting-up the office, or the people who lose money when you have an accident?

When government steps in, you get all of the problems Liberals love to discuss with monopolies, and one additional problem: The government doesn't ever have to worry about competition, because they have guns that they can legally use against you if you try to compete. Would you want the idiots who designed the DMV to put the same union-mandated breaks and incentive structures in place for health care? If your child had leukemia, would you rather trust them to a private clinic, or to the Surly Employees of the DMV?

Many of the people in the Republican Party seem to have abandoned the idea of personal responsibility in favor of the idea of an "efficient" welfare state. They have forgotten that government can only move at the speed of legislation, that it is only as flexible as the union rules that bind the hands of managers will allow, and that no degree of regulatory oversight can produce the efficiency or the motivation to satisfy customers produced by a person risking their money for a profit.

Government should be the agent of last resort, for any purpose but administering the law, and trouncing our enemies abroad, because it will inevitably lag-behind the private sector, no matter what we ask it to do.

Everybody who has to visit the DMV knows this - why did the Republicans forget? More on this tomorrow.