When Libertarians are in charge, garbage lines the streets and bears attack.
When Republicans are in charge, gas prices skyrocket and everyone gets explosive diarrhea.
Put that on a t-shirt.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=qZA63ckKxXQ|
I do my own dishes now. I’ll do my own dishes then.
What? I mean why are we out here in this canyon.
Nice to see some philosoraptor.
If y’all have played Bioshock… Rapture was a libertarian fever dream. No taxes, no regulations, everyone free to do whatever they want.
Look how that turned out.
(also I never really understood how that could even work, even a regular city needs constant maintenance, one under the sea, exponentially more so. Building it alone costs a fortune, maintaining it too, and as a closed ecosystem, and you either need to fund the maintenance somehow, or use slaves - admittedly, Big Daddies were indeed slaves but that came later on. Without taxes, nobody cleans the common areas, nobody fixes the ventilation, broken glass, etc., because there’s no money pool to pay the workers from, buy the raw resources and tools from, and so on)
Not that I disagree with your overall stance, but I’ve always found “look how x turned out in this fictional story” to be dubious because fictional stories are written by human writers and only really prove things about what their writers believed. If that logic was sound, it could be defeated by a libertarian writing some dumbass story with a libertarian utopia (actually I kinda want to see that, just to see what kind of evil shit a libertarian would unironically think is part of a utopia, like maybe a new species that loves being slaves, women happy to defer to men, or business men seeing they are being fucked by a deal and laughing about it with the person fucking them rather than walking away or starting a war).
Not saying BioShock is wrong (haven’t actually played any of them yet but they sound pretty based, at least story wise), just that fictional story arcs aren’t exactly convincing to those who think otherwise.
Also, even the stories that show a lot of widespread suffering often have a few people enjoying it all at the top and people who subscribe to rightwing ideology tend to prefer to think about how great it would be being that person or how well they’d be able to manipulate that person into giving them a great life with probably just a little flattery. The person who makes the Torment Nexus from Don’t Make The Torment Nexus isn’t doing it because they think they can run the Torment Nexus in such a way that people won’t suffer in great numbers, they are doing it because they want the power to decide who suffers under the Torment Nexus while they sip on champagne and fuck their supporters’ wives and kids.
Well, in theory the poorest members of society will work hard in exchange for money from the rich, then use that money to become rich themselves.
In practice, you either get slavery or bears.
I mean, have you heard of the bear infestation from a libertarian take-over in Vermont? Yeah, it turns out bears love the trash that libertarians were neglecting on their properties.
They know that the reality is they could never truly defend themselves if the tide turned. I have a theory that the reason they are ramping up so rapidly now is they see the writing on the wall and are behaving like a cornered animal. They’ve already done too much to be forgiven so the only option is to accelerate their end goal even though its clearly undercooked.
The smartest thing they can do is to nationalize their companies into any applicable public utilities. Liquidate the rest and set up some sort of charitable trust or some nonprofit that will help sort funds into various social programs.
Then slink off and live off the wealth they stole. Bar them and their family from starting new business endeavors for 100 years.
I hope you’re right that the writing on the wall is for them and not for us.
But so long as private business endeavors continue to exist, they’ll just invest through a middleman.
There was a theory (disputed and in some cases discredited) that basically said this is why most historical empires started around a river surrounded by desert. Their subjects were more willing to put up with oppression because going somewhere else was hard.
I thought it was because land around the river is more fertile than in the rest of the desert
My first thought is that that kind of location also makes invading harder. For thousands of years, armies had to acquire most of their provisions on the road because logistics are hard when you’re marching thousands of people on foot, and “acquire” usually meant “steal” even on home territory.
Being invaded fucking sucks, so it’s quite possible that a lot of people were willing to trade personal liberty for security.
It’s really easy to think of examples of that, wow. I don’t fully buy it but i can see how it could be a factor in some civs.
Counterexample: Rome, most European countries in fact, plenty of Asian countries which started in fertile lands etc
As long as their separation fantasies turn out like the Führerbunker for everyone inside, I’m all for it.
Might as well call it Epstein Island
That would make it real easy to claim that they are drug traffickers and blow them up without any due process. Apparently it’s perfectly legal.
This is why Musk and co are trying to speedrun robot development.
That’s because of the implication
Exactly. Who’s gonna volunteer to be the servant class for the journey and beyond? Your children would be born into slavery.
The same people who volunteered to move to the Americas.
Outer Worlds
first thing I thought about when bezos did his we’re gonna move workers to space schtick.
They already have a tax exempt colony called Prospera in Honduras don’t they?
You mean the place with 45 weirdos and a bunch of money laundering and tax evasion? They just import workers from real Honduras outside the “agreement of co-existence.” Not gonna have the same option on Mars.
