36 thoughts on “My Bags Are Packed”

  2. I will take Simbergville where you can talk like a Republican while claiming not to be one and claim to be a libertarian without acting like one.

  3. “These communities are not for the faint at heard (sic) they will start as undeveloped land in non city locals (sic)”

    “The first Paulville based community purchace (sic) of land has happened.”

    If the Paulistas want to make English the official language of the United States, shouldn’t they learn to read and write English? 🙂

  4. It’s easy to claim not to be a Republican when I don’t vote for Republicans, don’t contribute money to the Republican Party, and have never been registered as a member of that party. I don’t know what causes this fantasy in the minds of some that I’m a Republican, or even that I “talk like” a Republican. What does a Republican “talk like”?

    And in what way do I not “act like” a libertarian? Because I don’t think that the Constitution is a suicide pact? There are a number of issues on which libertarians can disagree, and still be libertarians.

  5. If the Paulistas want to make English the official language of the United States, shouldn’t they learn to read and write English?

    Seems like it would be a good start.

  6. I would move to Simbergville, but I would remain anonymous. Simberg would mutter “moron” whenever he drove past my house, but that’s ok, because he’d be paying for my bandwidth.

    The taxes would be low, it would always be WWII in one way or another, and we would always shop at Amazon via Transterrestrial.com to support the town.

  7. Just a little humor Rand.

    Actually, I grew up in El Paso not too far from the proposed site. It looks like the set from the film “From Dusk til Dawn”. It’s a bunch of trailer parks, a gravel pit, some strip clubs and a pornographic drive-in: the Fiesta Drive-in; I kid you not. It’s the perfect place for an anarchist to settle down and raise a family.

  8. Simberg would mutter “moron” whenever he drove past my house, but that’s ok, because he’d be paying for my bandwidth.

    There would be no muttering involved. There’d be a big neon sign on your lawn, like this: MORON.

  9. Ooops, I meant the tax rate would be low. Very low.

    The taxes themselves would be quite high, and while people would periodically call for reversing Mayor Simberg’s cancellation the town’s municipal space program, the Mayor would just keep offering prizes for better space clothing.

  10. So what happens to a resident of Paulville who has children that, as they grow up, don’t believe the Paulista way?

  11. No child in Paulville would dare think differently because, of course, everyone would be armed and there would be no police and no courts.

  12. I want in on the action. Bidding for homesites in Manifoldville is open. Everything will be legal except outdoor lighting, which will be punishable by expropriation and deportation.

    I’ll say this for Paulville – it’s in a county with a population of about 3,300, making it orders of magnitude more feasible than the Free State Project.

  13. Hooterville is fine as-is. A nice place full of bitter, bible-thumpin’, hog-schoolin’ , shotgun-totin’ hicks and hayseeds.

    You know, It is funny how the elites are always whinning about getting in tough with themselves and with the land when it is the ones that Obambi scorns as bitter that actually are in touch with themselves and have an inherent understanding of the land that the so-called brie-eating friends of the Earth can only dream of.

  14. What is “hog-schooling”? Google has nothing, other than to ask “did you mean home schooling?”, which sounds like it might fit, but I bet that’s not what you meant.

  16. Hamacian-American Arnold Ziffle went to school on Green Acres, where the fictious town of Hooterville was set.

    You have lived a deprived life if you did not get that one. I’ll bet that children in outer Bavaria could have figured that one out.

  20. A long time ago, more years than I care to admit, I was attending a meeting in the rec room of a prominent conservative supporter of Congressman Phil Crane near Chicago, where a rather earnest young man by the name of David Friedman, son of Milton Friedman, was laying out his vision of a completely privatized society.

    Dr. Friedman (I believe he is a physics PhD) was answering questions about the Libertarian vision of society to a skeptical group of young Conservatives, and he was explaining about contracting for police and courts and everything.

    I live here in the People’s Republic of Madison, and my brother lives in a gated community north of Miami, and it finally dawned on me what David Friedman was talking about — gated communities. But it also dawned on me regarding the falacy of this Libertarian vision as advancing liberty. I coined the term “Libertarian Fascism.”

    Here in the People’s Republic of Madison, I pay a property tax rate that at one time was the same as the sales tax rate, and there are some City rules — I have to keep the grass under a foot in length, and if I fail to shovel the sidewalk, my neighbors could turn me in and I would pay a fine. But apart from all of that, I can plant trees, cut down trees, pretty much do what I want.

    As far as my brother living under the boot of Libertarian Fascism, his gated community has some kkind of association, and if he wants to as much as plant a rosebush in the back yard, he needs some kind of OK from those busybodies. The gated community, the association, etc, etc, is all entered in contractually through purchase of property, so it is liberty as David Friedman saw it, but not as the Conservative leader of our meeting group saw it — you essentially bargained away your liberty by signing a contract.

  25. As far as my brother living under the boot of Libertarian Fascism, his gated community has some kkind of association, and if he wants to as much as plant a rosebush in the back yard, he needs some kind of OK from those busybodies. The gated community, the association, etc, etc, is all entered in contractually through purchase of property, so it is liberty as David Friedman saw it, but not as the Conservative leader of our meeting group saw it — you essentially bargained away your liberty by signing a contract.

    So what’s the problem? Your brother signed. He doesn’t like it, he can leave.

  26. But it won’t be sending any troops to Iraq.

    Sure, that part is voluntary. But they will still have to pay for the war. Economically speaking, the troops are an afterthought. The Iraq war is a vast system of federal contracts, and also some soldiers who fight.

  28. “So what’s the problem? Your brother signed. He doesn’t like it, he can leave.”

    All very true, he can move out of his gated community. Those people in that polygamy cult in Texas can separate themselves from that community as well.

    Those Conservative guest speaker sessions were admittedly indoctrination sessions for young minds, and one of the leaders of the group took us aside to explain that he as much as brought David Friedman in as a lesson in contrasts between Conservative and Libertarian doctrine. Milton Friedman was and remains a hero of the Conservative movement, and what he was talking about — sound money, flat taxes, school vouchers, replace the raft of anti-poverty programs with something akin to the modern earned income credit — all of these are programs that most conservatives embrace. David Friedman was a somewhat of the ultra-earnest if not quite angry young man, making a name for himself apart from his famous pappa, advocating a much purer Libertarian vision.

    The same leader of our study group once challenged us about Libertarian doctrine, conducting a kind of Socratic learning experience of whether we would approve of treating liberty itself as a trade good — whether we would buy or sell varying amounts of restrictions on our liberty in exchange for money. When he got us agreeing with the concept, he sprung on us “that system is called slavery.”

    Well, not quite. Race-based slavery of persons who are in effect prisoners of war on another continent is not the same kind of thing as the intra-racial systems of indentured servitude and some of the apprenticeship practices of times past, which are more along the lines of these “freedom trading” systems.

    Yes, these gated communities, community associations, and deed restrictions are all matters entered into voluntarily and contractually according to the vision of a Libertarian substitute for local government. But these voluntary and contractual arrangements regulate people’s lives at a level that even the Socialist Republic of Madison would not dream of. A lot of this Florida deed-restriction culture came to be with all of those Yankees moving South and in fear of acquiring “red neck” neighbors who would leave their lot in weeds with a rusted out pickup truck on blocks in the front yard. But this deed-restriction culture is enabling of the latent control freaks in any neighborhood.

    No, deed restrictions are not the same as indentured servitude which is not the same as race-based slavery. No, it probably isn’t even on the slippery slope. But I still have moral problems with otherwise self-respecting persons turning decisions about yard shrubs over to the control freaks — it may fit Libertarian ideals, but it rubs wrong against my Traditionalist/Conservative sentiments that a man’s house is his castle, and a man should be afforded the personal dignity regarding decisions of how to decorate and landscape the place. It rubs my Traditionalist/Conservative sentiments that the bounds of taste in deooration and landscaping not be set by Custom and a sense of Honor and shared cultural values but by some committee of busybodies, even if the enabling of that committee is entered contractually.

    Yes, my brother could move — he could join me in Madison, and yes, I could move, I could move to Florida. But the irony is that I feel more free, apart from having to look at tons of stupid left-wing bumper stickers, here in Wisconsin than in Florida, hence my term “Libertarian Fascism.” Yes, it is fascism freely entered and freely separated from, but it remains fascism while you are in it.

  29. Nice posts Paul Milenkovic, illustrating the core problem of libertarianism:
    libertarianism is based on liberty but liberty includes the choice of not being/living as a libertarian or under libertarianism.

    I think there might be a solution (meta-democracy) but it won’t be libertarianism itself.

  30. Paul’s posts illustrate why space colonies will be particularly poor places for libertarians to live. In a gated community north of Miami, you can reasonably complain about “busybodies” and “control freaks”. In a space colony, where more decisions really will have a life or death effect on the whole community, busybodies and control freaks will be justified in dictating what others can and cannot do. One might hope that eventually space colonies will become large, robust, and resistant to tampering, but for the near to mid-term, liberals (call them fascists if you must) will be happier on space colonies than people with a libertarian mindset.

  31. Again, I don’t see the point of your post, Paul. There’s no inherent contradiction. Your brother chose “fascism”. You did not. In a Libertarian world, there’s nothing keeping you from making those choices. You can enter into a contract with someone who plays the role that governments currently occupy.

  32. Liberals are going to go nuts when the idea of space colonies is revived (I find that few people are aware of it these days), since they will see it (incorrectly) as the ultimate form of “white flight” and (correctly) as the ultimate threat to their litany about how there’s Only One Earth. They will do everything they can to keep large-scale space settlement from being undertaken.

  33. I’m not so sure that they’re incorrect here. The idea of “shared destiny” (or “Only One Earth” as you put it) is one of their key evangelizing beliefs (that is, beliefs that convert others to their way of thinking). If you’re living elsewhere, then that link is weakened. I think it is a threat to the belief system as it currently stands.

  34. Karl and Jay, you guys might enjoy watching bits of Cosmos again (key segments are available on youtube). Carl Sagan knew how to evangelize liberalism and be for space colonization at the same time.

  35. Manifold wrote:

    > Liberals are going to go nuts when the idea of
    > space colonies is revived (I find that few
    > people are aware of it these days), since they
    > will see it (incorrectly) as the ultimate form
    > of “white flight”

    Here’s somebody else who agrees with you that such a concern is ill-founded:

    http://space.mike-combs.com/wannabe.htm

  36. One argument that hasn’t been used enough, although either Clarke or Asimov (I can’t remember which) used it in a story:

    Space colonisation is one possible way of helping Earth’s environment. The “One Earth” believers are actually right; there is only one Earth, and it is worth protecting on aesthetic grounds if no others.

    Nor can we protect even a small fraction of Earth’s species from extinction by lofting them into space, and we probably won’t want to; I find it difficult to believe that we’ll want to take hornets, houseflies and mosquitos with us, for example, and it’s going to be a long while before we can take blue whales and elephants.

    Move industry into space, and pollution goes away – the first thing that happens is that power production from our local fusion reactor stops power production from fossil plants being viable, and thus AGW will stop if it ever started. Later on, it becomes possible for the space population to outstrip that of Earth; and later still, if we so decide, we can evacuate Earth altogether and leave the planet to nonsentient animals and to plants. And in any case, it is quite possible that the stay-at-homes will die out.

    To quote the story, “Earth will be free at last.”

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