The presidential contest between Clinton and Trump (can we shorten that to “Clump”?) is so depressing that it’s time to distract ourselves with some libertarian humor.
And I’m even willing so share such humor when libertarians are the target of mockery.
- Cartoons on libertarian ice fishing and libertarian lifeguards.
- A mosaic showing 24 types of libertarians.
- A poster showing how the world sees libertarians.
- A 23-photo montage of libertarian problems.
- The answer to the riddle of why the libertarian chicken crossed the road.
- Alleged libertarian views on fire departments can be seen here and here.
- A libertarian ambulance service.
- Dealing with a libertarian child.
- The tyranny of government snowplows.
We have a new addition to that list. Here’s Ron Paul selling Libertarios, a “deregulated cereal.”
I have to confess that I laughed when I first saw this. The “prizes inside” on the lower left is an especially clever touch.
I suppose I should take this opportunity to explain why “Libertarios” wouldn’t actually exist in a genuine free market.
- First (and I can’t believe I actually have to explain this), it’s not profitable to poison/kill/nauseate/irritate customers. Investors are not going to sink a bunch of their money (building factories, buying raw materials, marketing, etc) into a cereal without making sure there is some reasonable expectation that the product will be sufficiently attractive to generate a profit.
- Second, libertarian theory very explicitly embraces the use of the legal system to impose costs and penalties on those who (presumably by accident) do things that cause harm to others. So when mistakes happen (as they will in any system), there is a mechanism for monetary compensation. Perhaps even more important, unfettered markets produce a web of “mutually reinforcing private regulation.”
The bottom line is that people value health and safety, so markets naturally will seek to provide these things. In part because most people are decent human beings. But even if some folks aren’t good, there will be pressure to provide health and safety simply because it’s a way to earn profits and avoid costs.
Some people have a hard time believing this, which is why they embrace command-and-control regulation.
And they periodically cite examples of how mandates and red tape from government are supposedly correlated with good outcomes. One of my favorite examples is the data showing a decline in workplace deaths after the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Fans of OSHA think this is a slam-dunk argument showing the benefits of regulation.
Perhaps, but then they need to explain why workplace deaths were consistently falling way before OSHA was ever created. 
When you look at a chart with long-run historical data, the most obvious conclusion is that the bureaucracy and accompanying red tape hasn’t had any positive impact.
In other words, workplace deaths have been falling for a very long time. Mostly because such tragedies are very bad for the bottom line, and also because societies can afford more health and safety as they get richer.
Went out of business Executives lost jobs Investors lost money Civil penalties imposed
So, yes, laugh at the Libertarios humor, but also keep in mind that in a genuine free market that such a cereal never would exist.
And if it did somehow materialize, the box actually would be accompanied by some additional information (which I have helpfully added since I’m a thoughtful person).
By the way, if you’re still not convinced, take a trip to North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, or some other statist paradise. I’m sure you won’t be able to get honest data on workplace deaths, but you’ll quickly learn about the limits of command-and-control health-and-safety regulation if you buy a bunch of consumer products.
P.S. Needless to say, I also have a collection of explicitly pro-libertarian humor.
Libertarian Jesus scolding modern statists.
This poster about confused statists.
The libertarian version of a sex fantasy.
The theory and reality of occupational licensing.
Libertarian Star Wars.
I also have lots of anti-big government humor (I especially like these cartoons), but the above list are the jokes and images I have that are based on a purely libertarian perspective.
International Liberty 
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Even without considering lawsuits, such a cereal would not stay on the market very long. At the very least, once a person bought one box and found out what was in it, they would never buy another. A cereal company that sells one box per customer won’t last very long. Presumably people who bought it would tell their friends, who would then never buy it. Some number of people would take it back to the store and complain, and the store would quickly stop stocking it.
Actually I think this cartoon highlights the absurdity of statists. They seem to honestly think that if there were no laws against including dead rats in breakfast cereal, that mothers would give such cereal to their children without a second thought. In general, if the government didn’t tell us what was good for us, we’d just never be able to figure it out for ourselves.
I don’t know about the particular OSHA graph. But it is possible to have a graph where some government intervention indeed lowered deaths.
It is almost a cliche that “the value of a life is priceless”. But it is only that, a cliche. It is a cliche we do not really subscribe by, neither as individuals nor as a society. If life were priceless we would never engage in activities that increase our risk of dying even by minute amounts, such as driving, skiing, swimming, recreational trips, not to mention wars whether aggressive or defensive etc. For those more mathematically minded, under the “life is priceless doctrine” the cost (expected value) of an action with a finite probability of risking life would always be infinitely expensive since (Probability of death, however small) * infinity = infinity.
For example cars and airplanes can be made marginally safer — at exponential cost. We don’t accept that cost, we just don’t pay it, neither as individuals, nor as a society. Not the least because the costs involved in the safety improvements would inevitably subtract funds from other life saving areas (such as medicine) resulting in a net loss of life. There are also indirect effects: For example, if regulation prevents a doctor from rewarding himself for his successful career by finding, building, buying the house on the lake he always dreamed of, then you have a somewhat less motivated doctor. Over a lifetime, or over several doctors, this will have some cost on life and health, a cost that is very difficult to pinpoint (the patient that was marginally saved or lost) but is nonetheless real. Someone, somewhere dies when lesser rewards result in even marginally less motivated doctors. It is just impossible to pinpoint exactly who. How do you trace back a doctor who being less motivated, somewhere, sometime in his career cut some corner, decreased a bit one tiny area of your tumor surgery margins and left a few more distant stray cancer cells (cells that most other doctors would have never noticed or bothered about anyway, except this exceptional one who feels just a little less motivated today)?
So, yes, government can double the cost of transportation, construction, recreation and whatever else, and save a few lives. But it’s a cost trade of we would never make ourselves. We only make it when someone else is paying — or, so we think — because we’re voter-lemmings.