That’s all well and good, but you’re gonna need roads for last mile delivery of goods, and a transit path for people that service homes and businesses.
Yesterday I saw a person say that they should all be privatized. Which is so insane I walked away and talked to someone else. Like I’m not going to convince a guy at a bar that his extremist ideology sounds like it wants to create just a godsawful way to live or that our country has tried the whole “minarchism” thing and it was a fucking disaster that led to us creating regulations, roads, etc.
Basically a bunch of toll roads where you pay to use them, right? But paying every time you use the road will get expensive quick, so road companies will offer subscriptions so you can save money if you frequently use their roads. Some companies will bundle subscriptions from many road companies together so you’ll only pay for one subscription instead of dozens. They might even offer discount if you use yearly subscription. Viola! Now you have road tax except paid to private companies.
Yeah but to some people that sounds good. It confuses and frustrates me, like yeah I don’t like the government, but I also acknowledge that publicly run companies tend to be screwed over by legislators not by lack of profit motive. Say what you will about Amtrak, but if you’ve ever rode a train in the northeast corridor you understand that it’s a pretty good deal. And it encourages a more pro-social habit.
We’re facing catastrophes both ecological and social due to failure to govern. We could be doing fine, but we keep choosing as a country that instead of regulating and taxing and investing in things we want to make taxes into a dirty word, kneel at the feet of our corporate overlords. If we want our country to be worth living in we need to invest in it for real
My in-laws live on a private road. They’re the fourth lot down from the main road (for the uninitiated, if your property would block access to another property, then there exists an access easement across your property, and you must allow people - principally the owners - to traverse your property so they can get to theirs). Everyone is responsible for (but not obligated to) maintaining the stretch of road in front of their houses. The first couple houses are owned by folks with a good chunk of change and the road is as nice as it gets. The third house down has never done a thing to their stretch of road and it’s a piece of shit for that little bit. You’re cranking the steering wheel from lock to lock to lock again to avoid holes 6 inches deep. Their house is in a sorry state so there’s not a chance in the world they have the money to fix the road up. My in-laws throw some gravel in the holes from time to time to make things a little easier on themselves.
The municipality can’t/won’t do a thing. They don’t own the road and it’s not like the neighbors are blocking people in or out. The road is only nigh (not completely) impassable.
Someone I know is a libertarian and when I asked how stuff like road maintenance would work on his ideal society, and he was like, “well everyone would pitch in to pay a company to do it.” Ok, so what if someone refuses, are there any mechanisms to penalize them? And who chooses the company and signs the contract and schedules the work? You guys gonna vote for people to do those things? Congrats, you just created government. He also had no real response to what happens if one neighborhood is full of good people willing to pitch in, and the next one says fuck it, we’re not doing any of that, so the roads are great for a mile and are undrivable the next mile.
So yeah, sounds a lot like what your parents are dealing with. Paradise!
Libertarianism as an idea can’t exist without gasp collective societal debates and agreements about government, individual freedom, and limitations of enforcement and adjudication… You know, like in a democratically-elected representative federal republic. Kind of like the United States.
Sounds like the NPR model of funding. Even if you can get everything else to work, you still have a couple of weeks every year when you can’t go anywhere without having to stop and listen to Nina Totenberg lecture you 20 minutes about how important it is for everyone to pitch in as much as they can afford.
Not that this has anything to do with Jan 6th since it was just right wingers throwing a hissy fit, but elections in America don’t work. People aren’t given real alternatives to the establishment through all sorts of structural barriers. The government doesn’t represent people’s interests to any statistically significant degree. When you consider the US’s efforts to coup left wing governments around the world, it’s easy to extrapolate that if we ever were to successfully elect someone who could enact real change, the military/intelligence agencies would step in to stop them.
You don’t need to defend our broken system just to call right wingers fascists. If anything their prominence is an indictment of our system. That our government is more open to people who want to subjugate the majority of the country and violate our supposed constitutional rights than people who represent the majority of the country tells you all you need to know about American “democracy.” And before you say it, no, it’s not because a lot of people want fascism, they’re still in the minority by far, but our electoral process is set up to favor them over more majoritarian interests.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”
-The Declaration of Independence
In a 2008 interview, Coulier said he was the ex-boyfriend who inspired Morissette’s song “You Oughta Know”; in the 2021 documentary Jagged, Morissette denied the song is about Coulier.
When the government isn't tolerable, it's time to go and vote your butt off. And that's a lot of voting. Unless you live in Utah like I do, where all voting districts are so over-gerrymandered that no one except a republican candidate can possibly win.
We just had a huge election for congressional reps and there were two candidates, one a popular Democrat with most of the people's support and the other a confirmed trump-supporting book banning conservative hater. She had almost no popular backing. But guess who won.
It sure as hell wasn't the Democrat. And it sure as hell won't be the people of Utah who continue to be embarrassed by our right wing fascist asshole legislatures that have banned ALL healthcare for women and made it illegal to ever take a landlord to court over any issue. I love living in neo-nazi times, it sure makes the Dark Ages look appealing by comparison.
It's a sickness that makes our country one of the worst in the entire world. In Utah, you can register as a democrat, but you can't cast a vote as a democrat, they will not give ballots to registered democrats in Salt Lake or anywhere else in the state.
Yep. That's Utah. They're actually considering putting gay people in jail for "sodomy" without necessity of any jury trial (that is actually bill before our current legislature). You must realize, if it can happen here, it will probably spread to other states also.
You're very lucky to live there. I lived for two years in Santa Cruz and felt like it was really my home. I was in a gay relationship (long term) and we moved to California mostly because he wanted to. But I fell in love with Santa Cruz, got a good job in San Jose and wanted to stay, but he eventually persuaded me into moving back to Utah - then years later, dumped me and left me here. >:( And I'm damn mad about it, but may get the opportunity to move soon. And I'll never come back to Utah under any circumstances.
Pros: You get to see people doing what is right when this news drops, celebrating, instead of a bunch of liberal garbage about “remembering a great statesman.”
Cons: You don’t get to hear if he suffered properly.
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