David Davis
If Greece could default, then what happens to us (Gordon sold all our Gold, remember, in advance, so he could destroy us later! The Great Helmsman-Planner that he is.)
Perhaps, while his eye was being fixed…libertarians shhould have been awake.
if libertarianism ever gets off the ground as a way of organising polities, then we shall have to be much, much more careful about who gets to be a living adult in such civilisations.
We may have learnt something about the world, from this last 500 years, but I’m not sure that it’s what real libertarians, who are mostly and violently pacifists, want to have think that they have wanted to have learned.
It’s 5th Jan so I thought I would just torment you all with feelings of pacifism, for a laugh. What’s more important: the people or the ideology?
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“if libertarianism ever gets off the ground as a way of organising polities, then we shall have to be much, much more careful about who gets to be a living adult in such civilisations.”
If libertarianism is ever to get off the ground, it has to be self-sustaining. That is, it has to maintain itself. This is true of any non-tyrannic political system- idealised communism (e.g. Winstanley’s christian communism). Without the coercion of a King and the King’s Men, the system has to be one which, once in place, keeps itself in place.
This is something that, on our own side for instance, the Anarcho-Capitalists just do not seem to get their heads around. It’s easy to design some imaginary system and say “people will do this, and people will do that” but, like the Communists who thought that once communism was enplaced, people would act in certain ways, it falls at the hurdle of reality. Will people actually do what the system expects them to do, of their own free will? If not, discard the system. It will only exist like some fleeting elemental particle which immediately decays into something else. (And in the above example, we know from history what any anarchism will decay into; tribalism, gang warfare, chieftains, petty polities and, after a long period of bloodshed, back to somewhere like where we are now).
Since Libertarianism is predicated on the minimisation of coercion, we cannot discuss it as a system in which “we” will impose this, or that, or the other. Either a minarchy will stay a minarchy, or decay into some statism of some kind. If we are fighting for a minarchy, we must ask whether a minarchy can maintain itself without every last soul being Libertarian Man.
Sovietism failed because there is no such thing as Soviet Man. There is probably no such thing as Libertarian Man either. The question then is whether Liberty can arise and sustain itself in his absence.
Reality would indicate that one should remove restrictions and allow natural and free intercourse to occur between people. Remove taxes one can do without; regulation; tariffs; duties; unnecessary laws. All unecessary restrictions. By degrees.
I know you tend to think one must go in and smash all the hard drives, burn the records and sack the employees.
But perhaps it could happen by a process of reduction?
I realise that failed with Thatcher (insofar as it happened!) for all sorts of reasons and the hostiles just bided their time and rose to the top in the Labour Party.
But Labour only got in because Thatcher was destroyed from the inside and she was persuaded to do all sorts of bad stuff.
That was because those who loved freedom took their eyes off the ball and enjoyed the temporary prosperity that freedom brought?
We are heading severely back into the bad times so I guess another Thatcher type event is just around the corner.
In a democracy you have to be able to sell your ideas to the masses. It has to be done by freedom not by control.
Can do?