Libertarian Utopia Meets Reality
via andrewsullivan.theatlantic.comTimothy B Lee tackles seasteading, “a program for political reform based on a proliferation of self-governing ocean colonies”:
If all you care about is avoiding the long arm of the law, that’s actually pretty easy to do. Buy a cabin in the woods in Wyoming and the government will pretty much leave you alone. Pick a job that allows you to deal in cash and you can probably get away without filing a tax return. In reality, hardly anyone does this. To the contrary, people have been leaving rural areas for high-tax, high-regulation cities for decades.
Almost no one’s goal in life is to maximize their liberty in this abstract sense. Rather, liberty is valuable because it enables us to achieve other goals, like raising a family, having a successful career, making friends, and so forth. To achieve those kinds of goals, you pretty much have to live near other people, conform to social norms, and make long-term investments. And people who live close together for long periods of time need a system of mechanisms for resolving disputes, which is to say they need a government.
Conservatives long for a time, an idyllic past, that exists in their monochromatic minds but does not have any bearing regarding current ways of life and the costs involved. Government is seemingly ALWAYS the problem, yet, they want the same Government to protect and maintain the entire country.
So they feign a libertarian platform for appearances, but never really follow through on any of the cuts in size and scope of government they campaign on and just pass all the costs on to the next generations through debt and rising deficits.
Utopia does not come cheap and there’s no free lunch: the Government is not going anywhere and taxes are going to cover the costs of running it. Trying to dismantle or starve the Government is just not reality. Deal with problems like a grown up.
