It's not, it's what eventually emerges after civilization collapses, and it's what rebuilds civilization. When there is no government, people work together voluntarily to make civilization work.Coito ergo sum wrote:
Since when is Libertarianism about what to do when civilization collapses?
.Look - the bottom line is, we're on a knife edge, and if, say, the electrical grid collapses, the United States will cease to be a nation in, say, 90 days to 6 months on the outside. Period. It won't matter who is Republican, Democrat, Royalist or Libertarian, or Communist, Socialist or Buddhist
Probably. But then again new nations will emerge from the ashes of the old, and I'll be heading for the Libertarian Nation, or seeking to build one where I live.
Yup.The change would be so dramatic that what came out the other side would look nothing like what is here now.
Hundreds of millions in the US. Billions worldwide, given the fact that if the US collapses, so does everything else.Minimum, tens of millions of people would die in the span of months that could be counted on fingers and toes.
Well, you would. I wouldn't because I have a plan and know how to obtain and grow food, find and purify water, and how to transport myself under primitive conditions.We'd lose water, food, and transportation, and the system that allows 300 odd million to survive would be gone.
True enough. Much more is required, which is why I have a circle of like-minded individuals and we all have a plan to build new communities...and defend them.Seth is right that having guns and training would give him an advantage over the unarmed and stupid, but even that wouldn't be enough.
Maybe. Might look like "The Postman" by David Brin. Or like "One Second After." But whatever it looks like I'm prepared to improvise, adapt and overcome and be part of the reformation of civil society along Libertarian lines. Most people, like MrJonno, are unprepared to do anything but become corpses.What would really happen is that the country would break up int hundreds of different fiefdoms and people would rally around charismatic and powerful leaders. Nobody could predict what it would be like in 1, 2 or 5 years, because it would descend into chaos.
It presupposes that very little government is actually necessary, and that society functions best when liberty is maximized and individual rights are respected. Governments form in communities according to the need for them. Some communities have little government, some have more. Libertarianism is about keeping the central government small and relatively powerless by empowering and protecting the individual's right to act in a voluntary manner and cooperate in making a community operate. This is how the US worked for hundreds of years, more or less, until about 1912, when the Progressives came to power and they've been trying to institute large, powerful central government and the Executive State ever since then.But, Libertarianism is not survivalism. It's a political philosophy which presupposes that there is a government. It doesn't presuppose that there isn't one.
In the past, before the transcontinental railroads and telegraphs were built, governance was close to the people it governed, and it was responsive to their needs. In mining communities that couldn't be classified as cities or towns, miner's courts dealt with antisocial behavior very effectively. There is no need for a large central government because people are perfectly capable of governing themselves, by mutual consent, on a much smaller and even community-based scale.
Large central government is the dream of tyrants and control freaks who believe that they know what's best for the lumpen proletariat, and who are willing to impose their power and control structure on others, even when it's utterly unnecessary for them to do so.
The National Forests are a prime example. The federal government was never supposed to hang onto large tracts of land. It was supposed to turn them over to the states, and the states were to manage their own lands, and sell them as the occupants of the state saw fit, to help fund the operations of government. Washington should be compelled to do precisely that; divest itself of all unimproved federal lands except for certain military reservations, forts, magazines, docks and wharves, and lands that have federal government buildings on them. Those lands, which WERE disposed of to the states and left the public domain east of the Mississippi, were illegally and unconstitutionally retained by the federal government in the West, leaving the newer, western states on an unequal footing with the original Colonies. That needs to be rectified and the federal power dispersed to the states, which are closer to and thus more responsive to those whom they serve.
