mwdowns
JerameeIf Ayn Rand's own life wasn't enough to show that libertarianism is a failed idea, we now have further evidence.
Tumahab Nogard 🇲🇽@Jeramee Interesting read. I think I read something similar previously, but it failed as well.
Jorge StolfiBut why don't residents buy tickets on a Starship flight that will take them back to the same Arizona desert, but now with the technology to extract water from rocks and build a climatized dome of 3D-prnted sand over their town, complete with closed-cycle rivers and coffee farms?
Just like how those AZ suburbs expected other to provide them with water, they are waiting and expecting someone else to provide them with that starship.
Thank goodness for Elon & Bezos, right?
eribosot@Jeramee I expect no less from the kinds of people who would argue that Scrooge in A Christmas Carol is actually a good guy.
@Jeramee Bookmark this and send it to any libertarian who tells you that communism is a cute idea in theory, but in practice it never works.
Dhavide AruliahActually, the example of Rio Verde Foothills & Scottsdale also constitutes a good counter-narrative to Gareth Hardin's #TragedyOfTheCommons. His straw-man argument hinges on the assumption that commoners are not able to retaliate or expel selfish actors — which is exactly what Scottsdale did in this instance.
Excellent point!
I'm guessing that you know the Tragedy of the Commons was based on a false history, and that, in reality, the commons were used communally and socially regulated.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/
Thanks Dhavide.
Your comment led me to the find the original debunk of the Tragedy of the Commons, link below. It was a fascinating read and further shows how the Libertarian ideology consistently misleads, and their arguments only work within their own fantasy worlds.
(Also, I found another link to the hard line libertarian/pro-capitalist position and outright racism with Hardin.)
Avi Rappoport (avirr)
Nonya Bidniss 🥥🌴@Jeramee This is a great article.
Allyson Williams ✅@Jeramee Excellent real world explanation.
KristFist@Jeramee I mean still #EndtheFed just to disrupt
RevJeber@Jeramee
This is what they get for demonizing the government instead of learning what it is, how it works, and getting involved. We are the government. Through voting and the right to petition we should exercise control over the legislators. When they start with the assumption that the government is “out there” somewhere, they’ll end up with Bear Town, the driest town in the West.
This is what they get for demonizing the government instead of learning what it is, how it works, and getting involved. We are the government. Through voting and the right to petition we should exercise control over the legislators. When they start with the assumption that the government is “out there” somewhere, they’ll end up with Bear Town, the driest town in the West.
Puppethead@Jeramee This is a fantastic article, but I can't help but wonder if what happens to all these communities was foreshadowed by Lord of the Flies.🤔
That's an interesting question. It turns out that, like the Tragedy of the Commons, the Lord of the Flies is also a dystopian fantasy disproved by reality.
I think the story of what really happened when boys were trapped on an island is much more interesting, and also more heart-warming.
KanaMauna@Jeramee Libertarianism leads to run away bearism. 🐻
@KanaMauna
Libertarianism
--be--ar---ism
You're right, and it was right there in the name all along!
Joy Denebeim@Jeramee gotta love the free state project
Steven Bodzin@Jeramee great essay. I would add that Galts Gulch Chile also collapsed over lack of water rights, a subdivision plan that was never approved, and a con man promoter. Lawsuits resulted.
It's likely that water distribution and reliability was the cause of the first governments, which would explain their rise on the Nile, Yellow. Iriwaddy and Tigris rivers.
There is not a creature in the world that survives on its own. We are all interdependent.
The con man point is interesting. The founder of Van Ormy, ref'd in the story, sounds like he's 50% con.
I was in Amway in college to try to make a buck. All Amway leaders are uber-libertarian, and, with hindsight, I see the biz model in practice (as opposed to what they say on paper) is also a con.
Libertarian ideology is so divorced from reality that it leads people to make (and believe) outrageous claims. It's like it unwittingly creates con men.
@Jeramee i think the con man is the low key icon of current American society
Spookybot 
@Jeramee my favorite non-fiction topic: why libertarian projects fail every time.
Kellyann@Jeramee I live right next to Grafton and had to see if the bears were mentioned.
#2RR - 2 Ruote di Resistenza@Jeramee #CoseDiScuola da non perdere "la famosa invasione degli #orsi in #NewHampshire" 😂🐻🙃 e altri apologhi morali ("quegli sporcaccioni dell'#Arizona che non si lavano" e l'imbattibile "la #LibertyCity del #Texas è il centro sociale più scrauso mai visto!") su come i Libertarians cercano la libertà da Washington Ladrona e battono delle sonore musate.
@Jeramee ogni riferimento a #oceangate è francamente inevitabile 🫠
Nathan Simmons
Roy Brander🍁My favourite libertarians are the ones who run large companies as a top-down pyramidal org-chart, as a feudal kingdom where your boss is your master, and HR protects him from you.
A true libertarian would have a company with 3 IT departments and 4 HR departments, so that employees can shop for the best IT support, and most-supportive HR handlers.
But, no, everybody reports up the feudal chain to the King, with the C-suite as Royal Court, all sucking up to the CEO.
Dendan Setia (Nins)@Jeramee
Man...
>The obvious solution would be for Rio Verde Foothills to incorporate, form a water district, and find its own reliable supply… but it turns out that might involve taxes, so the whole proposal collapsed. I’m not making that up:
I wonder if we should just start calling taxes 'subscriptions'. 🤔
I'm pretty sure that has been done with volunteer fire departments. But you have the same problems. A subscription model increases the cost because not everyone wants to subscribe. Then, eventually, the fire department lets an unsubscribed house burn down unnecessarily, so people get angry at the department.
These libertarian models ignore the fact that humans aren't good at predicting long term cost benefits individually. Short term greed will always make bad results.
@Jeramee
Totally agree at the end there. And making it explicitly assumed to be opt-in by calling it subscription will definitely lead to those historical examples. I'm just riffing that these same ppl wouldn't blink at an Apple TV subscription and suchlike 😁 but who knows maybe if that even happens you'll have to do 'prestige water' and 'standard water' levels. And then up sounding like a water board anyway, haha.
Totally agree at the end there. And making it explicitly assumed to be opt-in by calling it subscription will definitely lead to those historical examples. I'm just riffing that these same ppl wouldn't blink at an Apple TV subscription and suchlike 😁 but who knows maybe if that even happens you'll have to do 'prestige water' and 'standard water' levels. And then up sounding like a water board anyway, haha.
On that level, I think you're 1,000% right. And it also says something about how immature the libertarian mindset is that we'd have to play games, like "here's comes the airplane when feeding a child," just to get them to be reasonable.
Your comment reminded me of a story I read from Kentucky several years ago where that happened.
@Jeramee
Would love to read it if you can share 😁
Would love to read it if you can share 😁
@cendawanita
This story really shows the problems. $75 is a more than a day's pay for many people, and how often does one's home catch fire? Humans are bad at assessing this type of catastrophic, long term risk.
@Jeramee
Omg this isn't even an unsolved problem! And with the most classic of examples, the fire service 🫠🫠🫠
Omg this isn't even an unsolved problem! And with the most classic of examples, the fire service 🫠🫠🫠
Alistair YoungOf course, the underlying conclusion here is "Humans are such dogmatic non-cooperators that they are literally incapable of solving even simple coordination problems without someone standing over them with a big stick."
Not really a good solution to that other than "let the stupid bastards die off and give the dogs a chance to run the world".
Winchell Chung ⚛🚀"People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people."
And thus we have libertarian transhumanism: the attempt to develop a people capable of functioning without a bunch of jackbooted jackasses telling them what to do all the time.
Can't be that hard, right?
...right?
I've never seen a libertarian in real life who approaches that. Most that I've seen are simps for rich capitalists who are anti regulation. Are there many of them, or just a small fringe?
It sounds surprisingly like anarchism.
PeterD 🇩🇪 🇨🇦Yeah, because people like the Diggers will destroy a society.
Trevor McLeod@Jeramee Not just libertarian cities but even larger jurisdictions.
Take, for example, #texas whose power grid is the only one in the #unitedstates not interconnected to the rest of the grid.
Currently struggling under a heat dome.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/06/24/texas-heat-wave-power-grid/
Calamity Beast Seydlitz@Jeramee The problem with libertarianism is eventually you run out of other people's water.
vy@Jeramee Economists do a lot to sell the libertarian nonsense. For example, in many economics models, government is treated as a cost only - as if public schools, roads, R&D, etc. were just drags on economic progress.
@vy
Prof Wolff describes western business as having 2 schools in academia. One is the regular business school that focuses on the day-to-day workings of a business. The other is the school of Economics, which is necessary to propagandize & rationalize the otherwise unacceptable decisions of the business community.
Prof Wolff describes western business as having 2 schools in academia. One is the regular business school that focuses on the day-to-day workings of a business. The other is the school of Economics, which is necessary to propagandize & rationalize the otherwise unacceptable decisions of the business community.
@Jeramee It's a nice line, but what business schools teach is ideological too and I think the main focus of academic neoclassical econ is to sell right wing politics and ideology. https://krebscycle99.net/2020/12/12/inventing-the-minimal-state/
BuzzLibertarianism in a nutshell: “Then the town was taken over by bears.”
Michelle Daniels@Jeramee excellent read, thank you.
Barry Schwartz 🫖@Jeramee There’s probably little point in telling the armchair ‘libertarian’ anything, actually. Better to set them up, or let them set themself up, so they will either learn from experience or fail to learn from an experience.
Jamellica@Jeramee Wow, that's crazy. Humans survived and thrived by being smart and working together. That's our skill set. That's how we evolved. They honestly don't know what it means to be human.
spherulitic@Jeramee slightly OT but WTF is this supposed to mean?
“Governing people is like being a parent: sometimes you just have to beat the hell out of of them.” These people are defective.
Gumberculese 86 47A libertarian is one who expects all the benefits of a society but accepts none of the responsibilities. This article illustrates this perfectly.