Some argue that it is intellectually dishonest to be against the state and at the same time allow oneself to make use of any sort of publicly provided services. Roads are the most straightforward example, but public schools, healthcare etc all raise the same question: does it devalue our opposition to the state if we make use of it?
In our opinion, there are two reasons why the view that libertarians should avoid using government services is taking ideological purity a step too far.
First, the idea that libertarians need to sacrifice their ability to lead ordinary lives in reverence to their political beliefs seems downright silly. Without using public roads, people would literally not be able to move around, go to work, visit relatives, go shopping. Does anyone really think this is reasonable? How do you send a letter if the state monopolises post delivery, as the US Postal Service does in America? By this standard, Marxists would have to starve to death or become subsistence farmers, in defiance against having to buy food in a capitalist economy. Nonsense.
There is more weight behind the argument that anarchists should not take jobs with the government. After all, you have choices here: you could work in the private sector. But again, further scrutiny is unkind to this thinking. Why should we limit ourselves in our private lives? A university professor, for example, would have very limited option if he could not work for any institution which accepts government grants. And in our complex economy, where the state exerts influence in every sphere, a wide range of companies fail the test of being truly private in the sense that they have no benefit from any government scheme or regulation.
The second reason why libertarians should feel free to sweep down government funded roads is that, as tax payers, they already helped fund them. Yes, they did so under coercion, rather than voluntarily, but still; they pitched in to fund government services and should not be ashamed to reap benefits. A prominent example is that of Ayn Rand, the great libertarian philosopher and novelist, who is often criticised for having received public health care when she became ill in her later years. Rand had spent her life railing against government; she wrote in The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) that accepting any government controls is “delivering oneself into gradual enslavement”, so it seems a case of blatant hypocrisy. But of course, Rand had paid into the system her entire life. When she died, her estate was valued at around £500,000, so she could have funded private care – the question is, why should she? Spending her savings on her own care after having paid for others’ throughout her life would certainly have been a very principled stance to take, but hardly one which we should expect as the default position of a libertarian.
There are of course limits: spending your life on benefits while criticising the welfare state, for example, would indeed be inconsistent and hypocritical. But in general, our task is to seek to minimise (ideally abolish) the state, and we do that through argument and political action (or in-action: some libertarians think voting is a sin, too), seeking to bring people on to our side. But it does not fall to us to sacrifice our lives to the cause.