If North Korea isn't sufficiently tyrannical to win the WOD, i don't know what would work.
You didn't read what I've said. This isn't a black-and-white issue.
I'm not arguing for prohibitionist tyranny, obviously, just acknowledging a basic fact - with enough tyranny people use less drugs.
You claim that liberty should be forced on everyone [...]
That's the very opposite of what I've said, and have been saying for years!
I'm not trying to force anything on anyone. I don't even vote! I advocate things like seasteading and
private land secession.
Reading is fundamental.
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Alex, I think this post exposes the fatal flaw in the Libertarian position as it is usually propounded. Government is horrible, except little tinpot dictatorships like charter cities, neighborhood associations, etc.
If you think that something is "tinpot", don't move there. It's not "government" or a "dictatorship" if it's voluntary.
Where exactly would that stop? At the county level? State?
What we have today is massive
collusion between all layers of government all over the world, with no real competition between them, and great artificial barriers that prevent people from switching from one government to another. The way a free market breaks out of collusion (among other mechanisms) is through any individual's ability to enter the marketplace and offer a choice, which would immediately be successful since it does something better than the colluding companies, and they'll have to change their ways in order to compete.
Movements for more state / local power and opposition to stronger federal / regional / world governments are a good thing. National secession (especially if it creates "tax havens") is better still. More immigration freedom is definitely good. But the best way to get out of collusion by socialist governments is through things like seasteading and
private land secession. If you have a sufficiently large enclave of property where EVERYONE wants to secede from the state / federal government, and everyone in that region stops voting, using government services, and paying taxes, it would be very difficult for them to roll in the tanks. It would also be very difficult to bust seasteads, with their warships being streamed live on the Internet.
There can be a gradual transition through ever-higher forms of democracy, with ever-more control being taken away from the dictators in Washington and given to local town halls, toward a higher state called capitalism, where there are no laws except Natural Law and Contract Law. Every act of aggression must have a justification, and laws that are not based on pure reason or explicit consent are nothing more than crimes carried out by a gang that calls itself "government".
Sooner or later, the dams that prevent real intergovernmental competition will start to show cracks, and then bust wide open, with people being free to move their capital and themselves as they please. Once that happens, socialist governments will need to use something other than violence to keep their people from leaving. When governments compete, free market capitalism ultimately wins, and you get the transition from involuntary govern
ment to competing systems of voluntary govern
ance.
A legitimate system of governance would be based on legitimate Property Rights, which are held by individuals who brought that property into the civilized economy, or can document legitimate transfer of ownership from someone that has. This is not a simple thing to have accomplished historically, but it can be done moving forward. Most governments already recognize individual Property Rights that have a high degree of rational legitimacy, but the governments' "superior" claim to it does not.
On a longer timeline, with ever-more people living on seasteads or space stations, it will all seem a lot more natural. You buy the materials and build a space station, and you own it - you decide who comes on board and on what terms.
It's not a perfect system. Parents (and the systems of governance they subscribe to) could brainwash a young person into signing a contract as soon as he reaches adulthood that he later cannot escape. There is a very complicated set of ways this can be dealt with, with an evolving standard of what constitutes valid contractual consent, time limits, etc. But ultimately people are influenced by what they are born into - nothing can be done about that...
I don't remember if you think that there should be enough government to run a military, but that idea is common among Libertarians. If so, we'd be keeping about half the federal government, if it's properly accounted for and we continue to use the military as we traditionally have. If we only maintained enough force to protect the "Homeland" and not to make the world safe for favored multinational corporations, then we would spend a lot less, and could have less taxation. But there would still be taxation at the federal level as well as at the level of the various small governance units.
Military exists to protect from
specific threats. In absence of threats, a military is a liability that needs to be paid for and can shoot you in the foot at any time. This is why the
list of countries that don't have a military will continue to grow.
The era where one country can invade another is coming to an end - there's simply no profit in it. If Mexico was to invade the USA, everyone in the world would be against Mexico (lest they be invaded next) - boycotting its products, calling in debts, donating funds to help restore peace, etc. And what would be Mexico's goal anyway? it would have no way of extracting a profit from millions of disobedient, well-educated, well-armed persons who don't want to be Mexico's slaves. It would have to go home and pay lots and lots of restitution for the trouble.
To be conquered, a nation needs to have a government and tax system that can be taken over. You can't rule a people that refuse to be ruled! And, in order to conquer, a nation must be backward enough to have a brainwashed population willing to pay taxes and risk death in the name of pointless conquest, but that level of mass stupidity won't help it when it comes to manufacturing high-tech weapons. You cannot win wars and keep your people ignorant at the same time, and a free press has a way of making fighting even a justified war very difficult. Wikileaks is only the beginning!
And now you're proposing to deny a livelihood to someone who, in the privacy of their own home, lets their kids get drunk? In your world, wouldn't this be tantamount to the death penalty? There wouldn't be welfare or food stamps, right? So I guess you'd kill the whole family, unless they could figure out a way to fend for themselves without jobs. Wow, what a creepy, fascistic, big brother world.
What the hell are you talking about?! I'm not "proposing to deny a livelihood" to anyone!
I also don't owe anyone an obligation to provide them with a livelihood, and neither does everybody else. All human relations should be voluntary. Some people would rather not do business (ex. employ) people who they believe act irresponsibly (ex. let their young children drink themselves half-way into a coma). Other people may choose to look the other way, although this would limit the transgressor's options, punishing them proportionally to what public opinion thinks of their actions much more justly than the dysfunctional system of "democratic" morality legislation we have today. This is a flexible system of people making the value judgement they are allowed to make, on the basis of their own Right to choose who they deal with. Not giving someone a job at YOUR company does not equate to the death penalty!
And there would be plenty of charitable institutions willing to help people who've made a mistake and are being widely ostracized for it, in exchange for their willingness to improve their ways. Most people are willing to give someone who's reformed (ex. passed a parenting class with flying colors) a second chance.
I think you are overestimating the ease with which a person can just pick up and move. What if there's not a 'wet' or 'dry' town close enough to your job or school?
Moving was a lot more of a hassle in the horse-n-buggy days than it is in the era of Craigslist,
hire-a-helper, navigation systems,
PODS, SUV's, jumbo jets, etc. More and more people work and study from home. Also, in the era of super-cheap manufacturing and everything being digital - people on average simply have less "stuff" to pack than they once did. And most people don't change their mind about what kind of policies they want to live under all that often, probably not more often than they move for all sorts of other reasons.
As technology will continue to progress at an exponential rate, all of this will become ever-easier. Video walls and holograms will make telecommuting and staying in touch with distant relatives a snap. You can access a lot more local businesses within an hour of your home if your flying car goes 400 MPH! Traveling and buying property across borders and continents will continue to become faster, easier, and less bureaucratic. Etc.
Considering how many people like to drink, I think you might have a hard time finding a dry town that had enough people to make a go of it.
I was just saying that I'd "be more inclined to live in a place that had strict anti-alcohol rules". All things being equal, making sure you don't live in a building / neighborhood with a lot of partying college kids is a benefit on my decision matrix, but it is by no means crucial.
Life is a series of
choices where you have to weigh the positives and negatives of various alternatives. Hopefully, as people become better educated (or less mis-educated into helplessness by governments) and better able to utilize information technology, they will be capable of handling such choices a lot better. A real estate database / search engine can sift through billions of records to find and rank choices that most closely match hundreds of different criteria preferences you've put into it.
And what happens if you catch someone sneaking a beer in a dry town? Do the dry townsfolk grab their pitchforks and torches and drag the guy to the nearest tree?
That would depend on the contract, but clauses about pitchforks will probably be filtered out rather quickly. Fines and evictions are a lot more probable.
I can see this Libertarian deal is gonna work out great.
Try to understand that libertarians don't want you or anything from you.
We want our own freedom - far away from you.
