Utopian Misconceptions

This picture is circulating around the internets. I have seen many like it. Most of them are some variation on Somalia. Libertarians look at a picture like this and laugh at so many levels at the sheer ignorance behind the picture. The person who made this is being clever, but they end up sounding like a retard quoting Shakespeare. I merely have to point out that LASIK eye surgery will cost me about $2K while a routine appendectomy without insurance will put me in debt for the next decade. The difference? LASIK is not covered by insurance. Appendectomies are covered by insurance. Additionally, most ambulance services are privately owned. I might add that if you want your property protected, you are better off with private security than your locally tax feeding pig who can't help you except to write you a speeding ticket or lock you in the government rape room for smoking weed.

I can go on and on with the examples. You have private airlines vs. government funded AMTRAK. There is UPS and FedEx versus the US Postal Service. In fact, the only government service the government excels at is stealing as they have filched more of my cash than any burglar or thief I have encountered. Yet, the person who created this picture is under the delusion that something like emergency medical care would not exist if it wasn't for the government. This shows his utter stupidity.

To be a libertarian is not unlike one of those zombie movies where you have a remnant of a few uninfected individuals versus a horde of slow moving undead whose cerebral functions have ceased, but they still move mindlessly with no greater urge than to devour the few remaining normal people. The reason libertarian ideas sound utopian is because people are never going to accept them. They lack the necessary intelligence to grasp that the free market gives them greater prosperity, health, and flourishing than anything the government provides. It's like a person who rejects a fountain of living water because there is a small fee to drink from it in preference for slurping from a busted sewer pipe because shit is free.

Is everything perfect in a free market? Fuck no. I routinely experience dissatisfaction with various products and services. Some of them are complete crap. Others are worth their weight in gold but still affordable. The difference between the free market and government services is that I have a choice in the free market. If I don't like something, I can fire that provider and pick another one. I can buy a competitor's product. I can get my money back. This is not an option with the government. With the government, you can take it or leave it, but you still have to pay for it.

The real utopians are the statists who believe that by ceding control over to the government that everything will be absolutely wonderful. It never is. When you call out the statist on this, he or she will endeavor to point out how we merely need the right people in charge, and everything will be perfect as promised. Once again, this never happens. Every election is one epic fail after another. This is because government is always one-size-fits-all sort of like the bed of Procrustes.

The great mystery to me is why people are such lovers of the government. The best answer I can come up with is that people perceive greater value in things they get for free as opposed to things requiring payment. This is why parents continue to send their kids to public school instead of homeschooling or sending them to private school. This is why people will take a crappy public road as opposed to a private toll road. For a person to switch from the free model to the paid model, the paid model must offer substantially more value.

No government service is ever free. We all pay for it with our taxes. People who receive or expect to receive more than what they paid love government. Those who pay more and end up with less despise government. But because there is a disconnect between the payment and the services rendered, people are under the delusion that these things are free. But they aren't free, and the actual price tag is much higher with less value rendered. The empirical evidence for this is staggering. Yet, people happily keep supporting their government. Then, when the gravy train comes to a screeching halt, they revolt.

The real enemies are not the lying politicians, but the people who elect and support them. No government exists without the consent of the governed. My anarchist friends believe that people are basically good but have been duped and coerced by the state into adhering to the government system. But this isn't the case. Government is a spontaneous creation of the natural order of human relations and actions. From biology, we see that life comes from spontaneous order. But that same spontaneous order also gives us predators and disease. In the political realm, government is the disease. It grows out of people's ultimate desire to get something for nothing. This is the cornerstone of utopianism.

This is why I subscribe to the consequentialist viewpoint and support agorism. When people see things from an empirical basis, they are rapidly convinced. Even the most unpleasant truths will be faced and accepted when people see that they are indeed true. This is why the creator of the picture above has done his damnedest to portray libertarianism as some utopian lie. It is like the person drinking from the busted sewer pipe telling everyone else that someone has pissed in the fountain. We can argue that this isn't true. Or, we can simply drink from that fountain.

The truth is revealed as government fails and the free market succeeds. Unfortunately, it takes government failure for this to happen. People cling to their delusions for as long as they can remain deluded. Why are people like this? I don't know. What I do know is that not all people are like this. Some of us know better and challenge people's delusions. If libertarians have any delusions, it would be the hope that people might wise up. It is the hope that there will be a mass outbreak of common sense among a horde of imbeciles.

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