Cooperatives are an alternative to both the state and the for profit private sector

So critics on this sub often claim that you can’t do everything for profit, that the market can’t handle everything, that competition isn’t perfect, etc.

Let’s concede for a minute that this is true. This doesn’t inherently mean that then the state should intervene, but for some reason they seem to think it does.

It is possible to have non market solutions that don’t rely on the monopoly of force of the state. You can have cooperatives for example, entities where consumers/users/workers of a service come together and collectively run the service instead of investors.

Roads for example might not be fully suited to competition, ok. But you can have users (households and businesses) of a road in an area come together and finance the construction and maintenance of a road themselves. They can hire contractors who do the work for them, and there can in fact be competition in that regard when choosing contractors. They can use electronic tolls to charge outsiders/visitors if they need to, but at least with cooperative ownership they won’t have to deal with a monopoly road owner. This approach can be extended to infrastructure in general (sewage, electricity, water, etc.)

Something similar can be done with schools. Instead of failing public schools, parents can come together and start their own schools, although education is a more competitive sector than infrastructure. But with coop schools, the incentives might be better as parents want the best education for their children and they are generally involved with their kids’ lives.

Healthcare is a difficult one. The government is currently heavily involved, which is why costs are so high, but even in a pure free market there might be some problems as catastrophic costs can be high, competition is far from perfect, and demand can be inelastic. But cooperatives might not be suited either as people only use healthcare when they’re old or when they don’t expect it, unlike infrastructure and education, so people don’t have an incentive to participate in cooperatives.

I still don’t think government is the answer. The solution for healthcare is first to end all inefficient government involvement (overregulation of drugs, too strict licensing laws for physicians, certificate of need laws, etc.). After that, we should try to establish a robust non profit healthcare sector, functioning as charities, where we try to keep costs down while providing as high quality care to patients as possible, but not completely free as that pushes costs up. The biggest issue with healthcare is the high wages for physicians, that’s what makes healthcare so expensive. In the short run, we should encourage physicians to temper their wage demands, and in the long run, replace them with AI robots .

The point of all this is that, libertarianism doesn’t mean everything has to be for profit. It means that we don’t look at the state for solutions to our problems. Cooperatives and non profits can be possible answers to instances where profit seeking might not be fully optimal.