Look at places like Somalia. It is a Libertarian paradise. No enforced rules in much of the country, government doesn't do squat outside of the capital.
1 Libertarian != anarchist
2 Lack of central government authority does not mean the lack of authority. War lords and terrorist groups imposing their authority are hardly a libertarian dream. (Or an anarchist dream either, at least if your defining anarchist as one who is against coercion of the individual that even a minimal state requires, and not just a supporter of violent chaos)
2 The level of government activity is hardly the only difference between Somalia and wealthy nations. If we are going to play that game I could say that the "Great Leap Forward", the Holodomor, and the Holocaust, where examples of "statist paradises".
4 - Your statement does nothing to reply to "The problem is that you can't easily divorce 'what works', from ideology." What works is a function of what you think "working" is, which is (in large part though maybe not totally) of ideology. We'd both agree that the extreme examples we both gave aren't examples of things working, but that's because we (and most other people) have enough similarity in our ideology (despite the very large and clear differences) to come to that conclusion. Stalin might of thought the Holodomor was a good example of "breaking a few eggs to make an omelet", it worked for him to collectivize agriculture and centralize power. Hitler apparently though the Holocaust was a great idea. Both thoughts are of course monstrous, but my point is not that all opinions and ideologies are equally useful or valid. The point is that to a large extent the differences between ideologies can be framed as difference in opinion about what "working" means.
Its not even something that can be papered over by choosing to consider only "objective measures". That's partially because non-objective issues are important, but mostly because the choice of what objective measures to use, and how much weight to give them, itself relies on opinions related to ideology. Even ignoring the extremes of anarchists and stalinists, you still have differences of opinion about the importance of liberty vs equality vs economic growth (and how to measure all of those things and other concerns).
None of which means that trying to be pragmatic over being ideologically pure is a bad idea. But many ideological opinions are examples of just that, trying to be pragmatic, but having very different ideas about what pragmatic amounts to. Both extreme libertarians and socialists can be pragmatic, but they wouldn't agree on what would be a pragmatic benefit (there would be overlap, but the differences would be large an important), and even given a specific goal they would probably disagree about what policies are useful in achieving that goal. |
