[ExI] "When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in."

[Adrian Tymes]

Calls for unlimited "freedom" are all too often about the "freedom" to not
pay for solutions to collective problems - be it utilities, law
enforcement, or in this case, bears.  The promoters, when they think about
it at all, think that someone else will continue to pay for these
solutions, not thinking through that when everyone is "free", nobody pays -
and the solutions go away.

Perhaps a better solution would be collective income - some
revenue-generating operation which is not, and can never be, owned
exclusively by any small subset of the community.  (If it can be acquired
by a small subset, then small subsets will try to seize it for themselves.
This needs to be an impossibility, not merely something that is not true
right after it is set up.)  This revenue can then pay for the collective
necessities of whatever community it serves.  I'm not sure how to safeguard
any revenue source against private acquisition, though.

On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 4:42 AM John Grigg via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> And some of those Libertarian micro-nation discussions happened on this
> list! Lol
>
> "Hongoltz-Hetling is an accomplished journalist based in Vermont, a
> Pulitzer nominee and George Polk Award winner. *A Libertarian Walks Into
> a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears)
> <https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9781541788510>* sees him traversing rural
> New England as he reconstructs a remarkable, and remarkably strange,
> episode in recent history. This is the so-called Free Town Project, a
> venture wherein a group of libertarian activists attempted to take over a
> tiny New Hampshire town, Grafton, and transform it into a haven for
> libertarian ideals—part social experiment, part beacon to the faithful,
> Galt’s Gulch meets the New Jerusalem. These people had found one another
> largely over the internet, posting manifestos and engaging in utopian
> daydreaming on online message boards. While their various platforms and
> bugbears were inevitably idiosyncratic, certain beliefs united them: that
> the radical freedom of markets and the marketplace of ideas was an
> unalloyed good; that “statism” in the form of government interference
> (above all, taxes) was irredeemably bad. Left alone, they believed, free
> individuals would thrive and self-regulate, thanks to the sheer force of
> “logic,” “reason,” and efficiency. For inspirations, they drew upon
> precedents from fiction (Ayn Rand loomed large) as well as from real life,
> most notably a series of micro-nation projects ventured in the Pacific and
> Caribbean during the 1970s and 1980s.
>
> None of those micro-nations, it should be observed, panned out, and things
> in New Hampshire don’t bode well either—especially when the humans collide
> with a newly brazen population of bears, themselves just “working to create
> their own utopia,” property lines and market logic be damned. The resulting
> narrative is simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and deeply unsettling.
> Sigmund Freud once described the value of civilization, with all its
> “discontents,” as a compromise product, the best that can be expected from
> mitigating human vulnerability to “indifferent nature” on one hand and our
> vulnerability to one another on the other. Hongoltz-Hetling presents, in
> microcosm, a case study in how a politics that fetishizes the pursuit of
> “freedom,” both individual and economic, is in fact a recipe for
> impoverishment and supercharged vulnerability on both fronts at once. In a
> United States wracked by virus, mounting climate change, and ruthless
> corporate pillaging and governmental deregulation, the lessons from one
> tiny New Hampshire town are stark indeed."
>
> https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project
> _______________________________________________
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> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
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