Over the past few months there has been much discussion in the media about the Queensland government’s plan to "privatise" and sell off the states “assets”. The public assets that are still yet to be sold are the Port of Brisbane lease, Queensland Motorways lease and the Abbot Point Coal Terminal lease. Queensland Rail National has launched its share pre-sale registration, but the share offering has not yet been made.

The largest outcry against the governments proposals comes from the special interest groups that will be directly affected.  Naturally the loudest and most vocally organised are the unions. They're mad as hell but sadly, for all the wrong reasons.

The intuitive concerns voiced by the public are often well placed. They sense something is not right about this whole process but unfortunately guided by a public debate that offers only false choices, who can really fault them for falling into the trap of blaming the market as the mechanism that will fail, as opposed to government and state intervention which already has. As pointed out in this article, the general concern from the public appears to be that “[they] are already deeply suspicious about privatisations after electricity asset sales led to higher retail prices.”

Why be libertarian, anyway? By this we mean, what's the point of the whole thing? Why engage in a deep and lifelong commitment to the principle and the goal of individual liberty? For such a commitment, in our largely unfree world, means inevitably a radical disagreement with, and alienation from, the status quo, an alienation which equally inevitably imposes many sacrifices in money and prestige. When life is short and the moment of victory far in the future, why go through all this?