Utter bullshit.
Libertarianism is a set of formulas that work great in the minds of (sheltered) geeks, but when it comes to reality... there's this easily observable gradient... and it's easy to see that the societies that do best (by far) are socialist democracies and the ones that do worst are the ones with the most "Libertarian" approach to managing society.
Not sure about that. Scandinavia is doing pretty well, but so are Australia and Hong Kong, which are more on the libertarian end of the scale.
The reason the democracy you're living in is corrupted is because corporate money has gotten into campaign financing. These same corporations have spent fucking billions on a 30 year propaganda war... and created this mini-army of warped ideologues convinced (in their minds) that the path to freedom is by getting rid of all corporate regulation and letting corporations run society. The reason that the US now has as many people in prison as the soviets did in the Gulag era is not because you have democracy, it's because you are losing it.
And what has allowed corporate money to corrupt democracy? The fact that it
lacks accountability. That is exactly the point I was trying to make in my first post. If there was a price to breaking election promises or misrepresenting voters this would never have happened in the first place.
Just because it works in your mind, doesn't mean it works.
Ever noticed that The Austrian school is willfully, by definition, empirical-evidence-agnostic? Think that there might be a reason for that? It's because it only works in theory.
Perfect anarchy is an ideal that can never be attained in the messy real world, just like perfect democracy has never been attained.
But that does not mean we can't achieve a practical approximation to perfect anarchy.
To me, the bitcoin economy
is empirical evidence of anarchy working. That was also the point I was trying to make in my first post.
Democracy is not "Cheap", people died for it... and are still dying for it (all over the middle-east) now. In the 20th Century, non-democratic governments rounded up and murdered 160 million of their own people. And you sit there in the comfort of the freedom that has been provided to you by the blood of of those that went before, and theorise that some system where people with the most money have the most power might be best.
And I applaud those people. However, they were fundamentally fighting
against tyrrany, not
for democracy. Democracy is of course vastly superior to the systems it replaced, and that was good enough for those people. But that doesn't mean we can't do better.
The purpose of democracy is to provide a democratically accountable means of controlling a monopoly on violence.
Except it isn't accountable. Nothing stops a government from becoming corrupt once it is elected. It's an extremely fragile system.
Anything else is a type of protection-racket. Anyone who thinks that they can dispense with this just isn't thinking. We've seen what happens when societies fall apart - local protection rackets spring up. What are you going to do when a local gang moves into your house? Ostracise them?
Shoot at them? Organise a rival gang?
As I said, perfect anarchy might not be attainable.
I can't believe the stupidity... the ignorance, of people who look at the plutocracy that they've found themselves in and decide "democracy isn't working. What we need is a system where there are no constraints on capital".
In democracy, sociopaths and populists end up in power because most voters put very little effort into researching who they are voting for. This is no surprise, because voters have no incentive for this, financial or otherwise.
Plutocracy has its flaws too, but in a free market, people who make a lot of money
tend to be people who create value for society. There are exceptions of course.
I would rather have those people in power, with a few bad apples mixed in, than sociopaths in power, with a few well-intentioned idealists mixed in.
Also, I would argue that in plutocracy, the common man has more democratic power over the elites than in democracy itself. "Dollar voting" is felt instantly by a service provider being a jerk. Ballot voters, on the other hand, are powerless once their vote is cast. When a politician becomes corrupt after that, they have to wait 4 years to express their dismay.
