Can you explain what you mean re Artemis? It’s been a while since I read it but I don’t recall something like this?
I was gonna mention Snow Crash but you beat me to it. Great story.
Ref @Little_Nemo: Yes, libertarians are idjits. Although entertaining idjits in small, brief doses. After some beers.
Kinda like True Believer Marxists, their ideas would might work great on some other species, but not humans as they are today no matter how thorough their childhood indoctrination in the Brave New Way.
I haven’t read that one.
I haven’t read it in a few years but as I recall, “law enforcement” in Artemis consisted of essentially two people. There was an administrator Fidelis Ngugi, who apparently had the power to make up any rules she wished, and an enforcer Rudy DuBois, who would beat up anyone who broke the rules. And if Rudy beat somebody up, apparently everybody including the guy who got beat up, agreed that it was okay because he shouldn’t have broken the rules.
The protagonist is Jazz Bashara, who is a smuggler. Smuggling is against the rules but Ngugi doesn’t send Rudy to beat Jazz up because apparently Jazz is only breaking an acceptable amount of rules. This is explicitly said in the book. There’s a rival criminal who wants to eliminate Jazz and set up a larger smuggling operation. Jazz is able to defeat him and after she does so, Ngugi tells her that she was secretly helping Jazz because Jazz is a small time smuggler and Ngugi feels some amount of smuggling is okay. But apparently only if it’s illegal but Ngugi doesn’t choose to legalize the import of the goods that Jazz is smuggling in.
This is true but I don’t think any of that is presented in a particularly positive light, in the sense that it is making the case that society should run this way. The lunar base in the novel is tiny and basically a novelty. A discovery is made that will make it economically viable, and it’s implied the station will grow into a full fledged colony due to this; the story in the novel is a battle for who will reap the rewards, and I don’t think the fact that the heroes won will mean that the station won’t change into a more mature society; it just means the people who live on the moon will be in the driver’s seat rather than the big corporations.
Just my 2 cents, not that your read is invalid!
Both anarcho-capitalism and traditional hippy dippy anarchism are naive unworkable ideologies. Traditional anarchy removes all government and centralized institutions in favor of everyone just gettin’ along, man, Anarcho-capitalist results in a world where large corporations use their private security to enforce whatever principle best improves their bottom line.
I wouldn’t know, I just subscribe to traditional anarchism, which is nothing like this ‘anarchy’ you speak of.
I think there is a lot of truth in your post, and I’m happy you were able to find a school that appropriately supported your daughter. I have talked to a few parents around me that have made similar choices. Missouri allows a credit towards a private school if you can show that your public school is not meeting your child’s demonstrable need w/r/t 504 plans (at least that’s what I was told, I haven’t looked into the full details).
The issue I have with it is that rather than ensure that the public school is meeting the needs of all children, this system can have the perverse effect of making it worse. When many (or even most) of the students with a particular need take the money and spend it (plus their own funds) on private school the school loses resources that could be used to meet the needs of those students whose parents can’t afford to pay the difference between the voucher and the private-school cost. Those students left behind are now worse off (even if the school ends up with higher per-student funding, which is sometimes the case).
Again, you 100% made the right decision for your family and I’m happy you (and the other families I’ve spoken with) were able to make that choice. But I do worry that in effect we are creating a system where families with the means required to make that choice can provide their children with a significant leg up on those that can’t (even beyond the advantages that come from being born into a family of means in the first place).
Some of the posts in this thread are clashing in my head with the Meritocracy thread in this same forum. It seems absurd to argue for a system based on how capable an individual is as the “fairest” way to apportion resources while also arguing that those families that have already received a larger share of the resources (perhaps due to their own merit, perhaps not) can use those resources to ensure that their children will be, on average, more capable than their peers based on what schools they have the option to attend.
If you want a true “merit-based” system (however you define that), then you have to have educational opportunities be equitable for every child. Otherwise you are rigging the game. If instead you think it’s OK to have different educational opportunities available depending on family wealth, then that background has to be considered when determining how resources will be allocated, right?
You can think of it as a “haves” and “have nots” but, private schools compete against public schools. Making the changes to public schools so that the needs of all can be met there takes time, and in my case longer than my daughter has. Sure I could have began pursuing improving the public education system when my child was born so that when she ultimately got there it was sufficient to meet her needs, but that wasn’t my priority at that time.
Yes the public school system should be better, so that all children have those opportunities…better for our society, long term economic security, lower long term poverty levels, etc. etc. But this isn’t a problem that should be laid at the feet of the American elites. That’s the equivalent of saying the homeless problem is because of the people that own their own homes.
ETA: @Jas09 two posts up …
Overall I agree with your whole post.
This is the nub.
Substantially everything difficult about operating a society comes down to a variation of the tragedy of the commons. The individually optimal behavior for any one player results in far less than optimal outcomes for all. Viewed both collectively at one moment in time, and especially when viewed long term over a span of time.
The same point is made in the meritocracy thread as well. As you noted these threads have a lot of overlap in the ground they are plowing albeit from very different POVs.
It’s immoral but I don’t think anarcho-capitalism is unworkable. If anything, I worry that it would work too well and we’re already too far down the path to it.
It can become a problem when as soon as anyone has a little bit of money, they put their kids into private schools or buy up additional properties as investments, reducing the supply for aspiring homeowners. Because not only do you know have a “gated community” effect where wealthy people effectively remove themselves from the rest of society. You have a compounding effect where wealth becomes concentrated and focused on maintaining wealth within a particular class. I assume no one is actively doing it to conspire against the poor. But the unintended consequence is that, at scale, these activities have the effect of reducing the quality of education in poorer communities and reducing opportunities for lower income people to build wealth by forcing them to rent.
However, the flip side in socialist or communist regimes is that the median wage or income of society is significantly lower than the median wage or income of democracies. While in democracies you may find greater weath gaps, the overall income of everyone in it, is significantly better then those in alternative societies.
Is it a strict choice between private schools and totalitarianism?
I’m sure there’s some wiggle room there. I hear they even have private schools in China.
I think the key difference here is between these two viewpoints:
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“Our public education system isn’t working. We need to devote more resources to our public schools. And by resources, I mean money not just thoughts and prayers. And because our public schools aren’t working at this time, I’m sending my own kids to private schools.”
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“Our public education system isn’t working. And because our public schools aren’t working at this time, I’m sending my own kids to private schools. That means the public education system no longer affects me so its problems can be ignored.”
With no disrespect to your excellent distillation, that same rubric utterly describes leftish and rightish thinking everywhere on every topic.
IOW:
Left: It’s broke; let’s all get together and fix it.
Right: It’s not broke. But if it is, abandon it; I got mine already.
That doesn’t seem to stop the left from sending their kids to fancy private colleges.
I think it’s more like “90% of the people are lazy dummies. If I can work a bit harder and make some extra money, I can separate myself from them while hanging out with like-minded people who share my values and work ethic.”
That’s making an unwarranted assumption. A lot of the “elites” in America are themselves lazy dummies. They’re just lucky lazy dummies who are benefitting from the work an ancestor did. They’re not trying to create a meritocracy. They’re trying to maintain a system where people who are born wealthy get to stay wealthy.