enkidu wrote:

Obviously not.
But let's forget about Cuba and China, China having serious healthcare problems (but they prefer dedicating 1.5% of their GDP to organize "the competition for national bragging rights", rather than using this money to improve their healthcare), and Cuba being the preferred example of conservative pundits to disqualify public healthcare, since Cuba is indeed a communist country, they are just too happy to assert the link between public healthcare and communism, which is obviously ridiculous.

The western european countries you are talking about are mixed economies. A type of economy that is advocated by most serious economists including the americans (Stiglitz, Krugman, Sen(not american),...), and whose superiority over a laissez-faire system is actually proven by their work. Even USA, to some extent, is a mixed economy, while with regards to healthcare they are not, in this domain they almost are a supply-side dictatorship (which for healthcare, is the logical outcome of laissez-faire).

The ideology of laissez-faire, of libertarianism, that you see advocated here, and in the medias, is a populist one, it appeals to the religious minded by asserting an hidden order in the structure of the market, Gods have left Olympus mount to settle in the market place.
I have tried in the last few weeks to develop some rebuttals to these ideas, but it's really pointless, the supporters of such policies mostly have no wish to debate, and to step outside their usual concepts and dogma, their unwillingness to even consider existing works and data that have not received the approval and doctoring from their advocated teachers (Mises, Hayek,...) is proof of that.

Social ideas are actually not in contradiction with a good, efficient capitalist economy, that promotes open fair competition instead of birth rights and corruption (which is what Laissez-faire amounts to), on the contrary, an economy needs state regulation and effort of redistribution to work efficiently in the capitalist sense.

philthemn wrote:
This topic is one I find interesting and divisive. I feel that, as a libertarian, the individual has no obligation to the state. I am not denying that people often act in a communal way (i.e. no man is an island), but that we must have the freedom to choose when and how we are part of society.

I understand that a lot of pain and suffering could come from the abolition of taxation, but this does not make taxation any more moral in itself, it justs makes it moral in the utilitarian sense.

Unfortunately though, freedom and individual rights are of no inherent value within the philosophy of utilitarianism, since freedom does not necessarily bring happiness. Utilitarianism is a philosophy of consequentialism, and the belief in rights and freedom is one of deontology. For example, the freedom to drink and smoke excessively is one that any liberal would uphold, yet it cannot be denied that it is a freedom that generally causes more grief, due to death and illness, than happiness. As such it is contradictory to uphold the values of freedom and self-government alongside the utilitarian values of taxation and social welfare.

The only solution to this contradiction is to rely on voluntary contributions to uphold a welfare state, and not through compulsory taxation.