What to say to Libertarians
re:
Greens advocate neither big government nor libertarian laissez-faire, but rather a return to decentralized regional polities and economies. Scale is important. If production and decision-making were more local, then we’d likely see a whole variety of ways of handling economic relations. Some regional economies might be based on pure private enterprise, some might be mostly socialized, many would be a mixture (the mixture that the local population was most comfortable with).
What we have now is a monolith. And as long as there are huge and remotely-governed nation-states the economy will be subject to socialism for the dominant corporations.
So . . . Greens are in agreement with Libertarians re: big government is anathema. But the idea of moving the entirety of the monolithic economy in the direction of a pure libertarianism is a pipedream. What’s possible is a dawning sense that the modern huge economies and governments are inherently plutocratic, thus disappointing for the vast majority — thus not worthy of being relied upon and not worth the commitment of our human and financial resources. The solution is a gradual return to humanly-scaled regionalism and localism.
