But it’ll be privatized. It can look like government all it wants, but the important thing is that it isn’t called government.
It is a heavily armed society that prevents “bad guys” running wild. You know, what was called “magical thinking” earlier.
Moving goalposts, aren’t you?
We’re not talking about a couple of guys with 22s. We’re talking thousand heavily armed citizens.
Wonderful fantasy. Nothing to do with any kind of reality, but great fantasy. Of course, they are also a monopoly, and have no competition, right?
No, not donations. Fees for services, yes.
It will be voluntary association of people, with signed, written contracts, where the obligations and duties are clearly spelled out, and any changes have to be done with consent from both sides. And it will not be a monopoly. Quite a difference from the current setup.
As far as unrestricted access to medication goes, read this:
BBC NEWS | Health | Drug resistant TB 'more severe'. Down here, antibiotics are available without prescription, and widely advertised on TV, not as antibiotics but to “alleviate the symptoms of la gripa”, which in the vernacular means any kind of respiratory unpleasantness. Campesinos and the urban poor are not "poor stupid schmucks " but they aren’t highly educated in medical science, and they are continually lied to by TV advertising. All they know, beyond the pharmaceutical companies’ lying ads, is that Uncle Julio took some of those pills and feels somewhat better, so they buy some. And they often can’t afford a full two week’s , or whatever, dose, or as soon as they feel better they just stop taking the pills. The result of that is that a number of antibiotic resistant diseases have developed. the worst of which is probably Extreme Antibiotic Resistant Tuberculosis, EARTB is completely incurable, invariably (and painfully)
lethal, .and spreading fast in Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe. In Mexico alone there are three hundred thousand known infected, and an unknown number undiagnosed. (One site says that India has three million infected). Unless a medical miracle, about on the level of going to Lourdes and having an amputated leg regrown, occurs, every one of those infected is going to die.
Allow me to repeat that, in Caps, so maybe it’ll get through: AS A DIRECT RESULT OF THE “FREEDOM” YOU LIBERTARIANS ARE PROPOSING, AT LEAST THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE IN MEXICO ALONE ARE GOING TO DIE A PAINFUL, LINGERING DEATH. And the disease is coming to your neighborhood soon: there is no known way of stopping the spread of infection. Is that a reasonable “collateral damage” to your insistence on not having to bother getting a perscription to buy your pills?
Yes, I get it now!! I could get behind that! All I need is the ability to delude myself. Or a frontal lobotomy.
You probably meant XDR-TB (since there are no google hits on EARTB). XDR-TB is not “invariably (and painfully) lethal”, it can be cured and this: Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis - Wikipedia says there are 40,000 cases a year.
Want me to use caps, so it gets through?
freedom!
Betcha he works “chaos theory” in to his answer, somehow.
How many different contracts do you suppose would have to be signed to live in a typical Libertarian community?
A lot. Is that your objection? How many do you think you’re signing today?
Thousands of citizens all of whom opt in using individual contracts, each of which have to be re-negotiated for every change in circumstance or condition. And all of whom somehow magically agree on their mutual goals and the means of achieving them, and spell out identical terms in said contracts. And nobody living in between these happy neighbors disagrees or opts out or otherwise gets in the way. This is totally unrealistic even when we restrict the scenario exclusively to self defense. It becomes ludicrous when we try to apply it to all the disparate elements of a modern society.
We once had a thread here about some poor schmuck whose house burned down in a fire that his own family member set, which became uncontrolled because of his family’s rather casual approach to property maintenance. The guy had “opted out” of the pay for services model of fire department available in his town, and the fire brigade stood by and watched his single wide go up (or down?) in flames.
The libertarians among us were praising this as a model of self determination. Us liberal socialist hippies decried the stupidity of an opt-out option which could and did result in the destruction of this man’s life. (He didn’t have insurance to replace the family home, either, as I recall. I do not know what the family did about living accommodations, nor if they had to move away, possibly giving up jobs or separating family members. However you cut it, though, everybody involved was pretty roundly screwed.)
What exactly is it about this freedom to destroy one’s own life through mistake or mischance that is so desirable, given the personal tragedy involved as well as the societal upheaval such tragedies result in? Yes, this was just one family in one town, but multiply it by thousands or tens of thousands of people and it boggles the mind. (I survived Hurricane Andrew in Miami, so I have some personal knowledge of unexpected devastation.) I have absolutely zero desire to be as privatized as that.
Non-answer. Try again.
Also, how many people in a Libertarian society do you suppose will be well-versed in contract law?
And if you don’t sign those contracts, your life is forfeit. Freedom!
Not in a libertarian society. In a libertarian society most people will be amoral predators, or it wouldn’t stay a libertarian society; decent people would create something that isn’t based on the law of the jungle.
Organization beats numbers. And if those greater numbers organize to protect themselves and keep order - that’s a government.
Hardly; libertarianism is about ensuring that the good are the victims of the bad. It is about taking away all recourse for people who are victimized by the wealthy and powerful.
No, Israel is a society kept in order by a powerful and heavily armed government.
Like the people of Iraq. That didn’t keep Saddam from tyrannizing them, or us from conquering them. Organization trumps numbers and guns.
Well, all the survivors, apparently.
Yeah… Israeli gun control laws are far more draconian than anywhere in the U.S. Believe me, we are in no way, shape or form a libertarian country. We’d all be dead years ago if we were.
I suspect that most Libertarians believe that bad things won’t happen to them, and the ability to refuse all help to others who have had bad things happen is just the icing on the cake.
Evolution! Libertaria will natural select for skill in contract law.