As a libertarian socialist (a solitarian), I strongly believe that an ethical and just economic model can both encourage conscientious and profitable businesses to flourish while still requiring that those companies and individuals who profit the most in a society pay the lion's share of wealth required to fund services and programs for the public good.
Unlike many of the libertarians in America on television (Bill Maher), radio (Alex Jones), and in government (Ron and Rand Paul), I can take the important and just individual liberties of the philosophical libertarian while completely and forcefully ditching what I see as a disasterous laissez faire "hands-off" anarcho-capitalist economic model that typically accompanies most mainstream libertarian views.
Freedom is great but giving the richest and most powerful members of society complete economic freedom will lead to monopolies, wage-slavery, robber-barony, and all the wealth in a nation or in the world could certainly end up in the hands of a few or even a single individual who then weilds all the politcal and social power.
In fact, this is largely what has happened, historically, when economic safeguards and regulations have been removed. This is not to mention the environmental ills and fascistic symbiotic government-corporate relationships that form when those with all the power are allowed to reign free.
A socialist economic model need not deter free enterprise or incentive to create wealth. Rather, such a system only needs to help society with basic necessities and help that does not disincentivize productivity or create an unbalanced system where large segments of the population are stagnantly living from the input of more productive members of the society.
The problem with capitalism is not the idea that the market is best to decide how, when, and where things should be produced. I admit that this feature of the free market is the most foundational and useful portion of it. Rather, when a particular individual, group, or company takes a huge and monopolistic share of that free market, then there is an inbalance that the free market not only is ill-equipped to remedy but, in fact, it acts to buttress this monopoly which has every ability to usurp more and more of the means and modes of production and distribution.
Who could argue that the turn of the 19th to 20th century moguls and robber-barons were not in complete control of the country, politically and economically, at the time?
The best remedy for the problems of monopolies, also, are not anti-trust laws- though they can sometimes do the trick. Often, monopolies can legislate or argue themselves out of the position, philosophically speaking, though they still remain, in reality, exactly such problems. Wages do not keep up with any quality of life when the hands of the invisible mover remain idle.
The 1950's in America saw the rise of a middle class that led to the prosperity we knew as Americans until the early 21st century when the effects of deregulation in various economic sectors finally came home to roost in the form of an increasing income gap, minimal consumer protections, and little to no savings on the part of the brainwashed credit-driven consumers that make up most of the American population.
Everyone, by the late 20th and early 21st century, from the teenager off to college to the government itself, was borrowing at rates that could neither be sustained nor reasonably be repaid. The U.S. government, as of early 2011 is attempting to raise its debt ceiling, a measure that is a sure sign of economic doom and gloom.
When you can no longer make the minimum payments on your credit cards, for example, the only alternatives are to make money from thin air or to declare bankruptcy. As the U.S. is not going to declare bankruptcy, yet, it is going to continue to do the former option- print money from nothing through the institution set up to do just that: the Federal Reserve.
