Zero Libertarian Countries on Earth. Why?

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Here are some thoughts on why the libertarian state will never happen.

One development that people both on the Left and the Right are unaware of is almost an inexorable force that leads affluent societies to devote increasing amounts of their wealth to social spending, to redistribution to children, to education, to healthcare, to supporting the poor, to supporting the aged." Until the 20th century, most societies devoted about 1.5% of their GDP to social spending, and generally much less than that. In the last 100 years, that's changed: today the current global median of social spending is 22% of GDP. One group will groan most audibly at that data: Libertarians. However, Pinker says it's no coincidence that there are zero libertarian countries on Earth; social spending is a shared value, even if the truest libertarians protest it, as the free market has no way to provide for poor children, the elderly, and other members of society who cannot contribute to the marketplace. As countries develop, they naturally initiate social spending programs. That's why libertarianism is a marginal idea, rather than a universal value—and it's likely to stay that way. 

The source.

 

Welfare Has Always Been Part of Human Society and Always Will Be

Both the motives and the actual administration of social spending are of a multi-layered nature, containing much that is questionable and bad. However, welfare has always been part of human society. Offering social services is part of the human condition. If anything, this feature becomes more prominent and effective as societies advance. A rich state — and the state has been growing richer and richer since man has learned to overcome the Malthusian trap (population outgrowing productivity of land) —, has ample means to afford good things to the population (or activist and powerful sections of it). This being so, it is natural that there will be a tendency to enhance all kinds of forms of  social support by the state (which can also crucially contribute to making the state stronger and more stable), but there is also a tendency to curtail (rightly or wrongly) or misapply it. Working simultaneously in opposite directions, these trends are always present.

Social welfare (part of the state's enormous wealth) will always be fought over because of its formidable effects — to help people, to cater to helping instincts, to make life safer and more comfortable, to make a political force popular, to assuage popular discontent, to make people dependent, to enrich bureaucrats, to strengthen the state (in legitimate and illegitimate ways) and so on.
 

A community will always be a political event, as there are no automatic mechanisms to settle disagreements or make negotiations and cooperation based on human discretion superfluous. The larger the part of a community's wealth that is available for welfare/discretionary/politically determined spending the larger the incentives to take part in the decisions that regulate the appropriation of so much wealth and power.
 

In short, there being too many (good as well as bad) reasons to argue in favour of the welfare state in this or another way, we are unlikely to ever come to a stage where people no longer call for it.

Wishing the welfare state away is a bit like prohibiting drawing and painting. People can not help doing it.

A Paradox of Libertarianism
 

Incidentally, this represents one of the paradoxes of libertarianism. For freedom requires that individuals are entitled to express their will politically (as they are seen to be equal and free to associate as they see fit), but in doing so they inevitably create social structures that are rooted in collective determinations and communal (government or state) rather than individual power. If political competition is part of a free society — and it is hard to imagine how a society where political participation of the individual is prohibited could be called free — then it is inevitable and often legitimate that the personal freedom of certain (in some regards even of all) participants of society will be curtailed by laws and regulations that have been collectively arrived at. A free society does not eliminate the juxtaposition of the individual and the collective. It opens the processes by which this juxtaposition is determined to all individuals.

Libertarians keep a vigilant eye on the dodgy side of the welfare state. Which is good. But they do it standing on a questionable base. By insinuating that the state is somehow naturally evil they become crypto-anarchists, taking an anarchist stance in this regard without calling themselves anarchists.
 

In truth, the state is not a fundamental evil and an immutable problem. It is actually capable of tremendous benignity that we would be fools to discard. However, nothing is perfect. We must live with inadequate solutions and always make strong efforts to filter out the bad and maintain the good. Like the quality of our political system and democracy, there is no guarantee that the benignity of government will remain at a high level without fluctuations and setbacks. In short, inadequate institutions to control the state are the problem. Add to this ideological fads, like the neoliberal belief that an impersonal mechanism is available that brings about optimal outcomes automatically. So, in assessing the welfare state, its growth and contraction, we ought to monitor what services are actually provided, including their likely effects, and evaluate them in the wider context of their institutional framework in a free society. 
 

Conclusion

Freedom allows a community and its governing bodies to become wealthier and more powerful, thereby creating a new collective challenge: to dispense this historically unprecedented abundance. So, really, the demands and conflicts that give rise to and keep alive the welfare state are just a special case of the need in a free society to allow and organise competition for collective resolutions.

There is nothing anti-freedom about the welfare state viewed from this perspective (of course, with provisos in order, depending on the concrete case). Only a despot (in a country of rudimentary development) can afford to ignore the potential for widespread collective (as opposed to elite) betterment. Libertarians will never achieve anything remotely close to total success, because they decline to take advantage of the power of the modern state, while free people will inexorably make use of this source of personal and collective advancement.