Baronjutter posted:

If I recall from the last seasteading thread one of the major selling points once you really dig into what they want is basically slavery. There were comments made about how they'd be in international waters but close to sources of cheap desperate labour, and once that labour was within their sovereign seastead you could do anything you want with them since their libertopia would have no labour laws or BS "human rights" stuff, because of the implications.

Goon Danton posted:

Yeah. The Republic of Minerva was founded on an unused reef and would be funded by charging fees to the people who'd been using the reef. It's fine, because "territory" derives from the Latin for "land," and the land wasn't there until we dumped the sand on it, and the fishermen weren't white, so it's all very standard homesteading.

Goon Danton posted:

Yeah. The Republic of Minerva was founded on an unused reef and would be funded by charging fees to the people who'd been using the reef. It's fine, because "territory" derives from the Latin for "land," and the land wasn't there until we dumped the sand on it, and the fishermen weren't white, so it's all very standard homesteading.

Halloween Jack posted:

You're talking about a nation where like 1 out of every 6 people is on a rugby team, of course their marching band is harder than a bunch of wheezing libertarians.

Prester Jane posted:

Eripsa makes a bit more sense when you consider his ideas in the context of his experiences. Eripsa was one of the goons involved with the backend of Enturbulation.org and did a ton of genuinely good work back during Project Chanology.

divabot posted:

Imagine, if you will, four thetans on the edge of a cliff.

JustJeff88 posted:

I am totally in favour of getting as many Scientologists, as well as libertarians, on the edge of a cliff because then we could easily push them off and watch them complain about how Newton's First Law is aggressing against them right before impact.

Eripsa posted:

Just saw this. Noting for the record that it isn't true. A lot of goons were involved in chanology back in the day, and I was here when it happened, but I had no role in it whatsoever. I didn't start talking about (or defending the actions of) Anonymous until WIkileaks/Manning in 2010 a few years later. Even then, while I poked around a bit in IRC channels and 4chan I didn't contribute to much beyond ranting online. You may be confusing me with another goon whose name had the word "cat" in it. I can't remember his full handle, but I'm friends with a lot of that generation of goon on FB now.

But yeah, that 2010-2011 era dream of internet governance was powerful, yo. It pushed me into the Occupy movement, which I was much much more active in, and I'm still pounding the same drums today. I think they still need pounding.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

My favorite part of that story was how they were shortly-thereafter conquered by the Royal Tongan Army Marching Band.

Hunt11 posted:

Any good links to this story?

quote:

On 21 June 1972, the world’s heaviest monarch, King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV of Tonga, accompanied by members of the Tonga Defense Force, a convict work detail and a four-piece brass band, set sail from his archipelago kingdom aboard the royal yacht Olovaba. On the king’s stately mind was one thought—the invasion of the Republic of Minerva, located 270 miles to the west of his country’s capital, Nuku’alofa.


The Republic of Minerva had done little to warrant the four-hundred-pound sovereign’s considerable wrath. It lay outside of Tongan territorial waters; it had been in existence for less than six months and, other than crustaceans and limpets, it had no inhabitants. Indeed, seeing as the Republic was situated upon the hazardous Minerva reefs, whose surface was completely submerged at high tide, it hardly seemed conducive to sustaining any human population whatsoever.


Yet the Republic was not entirely lacking the impress of humanity. Some of the reefs had been piled high with sand, and a small stone platform jutted through the waves. From this edifice flew the flag of the Republic of Minerva—a white torch on a blue background—clearly signaling dominion over the amphibious territory. But while this lone construction had survived the attentions of the tides, it could not hold out against the attentions of its new visitors. As the brass band played the Tongan national anthem (rough translation: “Hear our prayer, for though unseen / We know that Thou hast blessed our land. / Grant our earnest supplication, / and save Tupou our King”), King Tupou himself tore the scurrilous flag down and read a proclamation of sovereignty over the reefs. Within a few hours the platform had been dismantled, and the Republic of Minerva had been annexed without so much as a whimper.


quote:

the Tonga Defense Force, a convict work detail and a four-piece brass band,

GunnerJ posted:

Man, the Tongan military is in sad shape.

GunnerJ posted:

Man, the Tongan military is in sad shape.

White Coke posted:

I think the convicts and band are separate from the Defense Force.

GunnerJ posted:

White Coke posted:

There's just something about the Libertarian thread that makes me feel more pedantic than usual.

" NYT posted:

''In October 1981 a Federal Government advisory committee recommended against the use of aspirin for chicken pox or flu because of the increased risk of Reye's syndrome,'' Dr. Wolfe said, ''but, as a result of pressure of the aspirin industry . . . a proposal by the F.D.A. for mandatory warning labels was withdrawn in the fall of 1982. As a result, 150 American children are dead and dozens have brain damage. Most, if not all, would have been avoidable if action had been taken. Now warning labels are mandatory and the problem has practically disappeared, but it is too late for the dead and injured.''

Golbez posted:

well you see, a Libertarian system wouldn't have allowed it, the company would have been sued by the victims and estates thereof for harming them! ... What do you mean that's entirely reactive and not proactive like a government can be? Huh. And of course, caveat emptor, don't want to get sick, don't take "medicine" that could be bad for you. Duh.

My family doctor as I was growing up had a kid who died to Reye Syndrome, so we were always well educated and rightly paranoid about using aspirin until I was an adult.

quote:

Free-market roads is the theory that a society should have entirely private and/or community owned roads.
Free-market roads and infrastructure are generally advocated by anarcho-capitalist works, including Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty, Morris and Linda Tannehill's The Market for Liberty, David D. Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom, and David T. Beito's The Voluntary City.


Arguments for free market roads[edit]

Private roads can have no free riders, reducing congestion[edit]

The free rider problem has been cited by some proponents[who?] as a reason for privatizing roads: since traffic congestion is the result of excess demand for transportation infrastructure, it may be treated as any other economic shortage - in this case, a shortage of roads, lanes, exits, or other infrastructure. Seeing the pricing mechanism of a free market as a more efficient means of meeting demand than government planning (see Economic calculation problem), Peter Samuel, in his book Highway Aggravation: The Case For Privatizing The Highways, compares American traffic jams and Soviet grocery store lines:[1]


"In Russia communism's failure was epitomized by constant shortages in stores. Empty shelves in supermarkets and department stores and customers in line, wasting hours each week, became the face of the system's failure, as well as a source of huge personal frustration, even rage. Communism failed because prices were not flexible to match supply and demand; because stores were bureaucracies, not businesses; and because revenues went into a central treasury and did not fuel increased capacity and improved service. We in supposedly capitalistic America suffer communism--an unpriced service provided by an unresponsive monopolistic bureaucracy--on most of our highways. Our manifestation of shortage, our equivalent of Russian lines at stores, is daily highway backups. There is no price on rush-hour travel to clear the market. There is no revenue stream directly from road users to road managers to provide incentives either to manage existing capacity to maximum consumer advantage or to adjust capacity to demand."
Privatization will encourage infrastructure construction[edit]

B. H. Meyer stated, "It is evident that the turnpike movement resulted in a very general betterment of roads."[2] The book Street Smart claims that Brazil has saved 20 percent and Columbia 50 percent through efforts to outsource road maintenance to the private sector.[3]
Free market roads will have less crime[edit]


Bruce L. Benson argues that when roads are privately owned, local residents will be better able to prevent crime by exercising their right to ask miscreants to leave.[4] He observes that avenues in the private places of St. Louis have been shown to have lower crime rates than adjacent public streets.[5] The Market for Liberty further argues that private roads will be better policed as the owners focus on serious crime rather than on victimless offenses:[6]

“ A private corporation which owned streets would make a point of keeping its streets free of drunks, hoodlums, and any other such annoying menaces, hiring private guards to do so if necessary. It might even advertise, "Thru-Way Corporation's streets are guaranteed safe at any hour of the day or night. Women may walk alone with perfect confidence on our thoroughfares." A criminal, forbidden to use any city street because all the street corporations knew of his bad reputation, would have a hard time even getting anywhere to commit a crime.
On the other hand, the private street companies would have no interest in regulating the dress, "morals," habits, or lifestyle of the people who used their streets. For instance, they wouldn't want to drive away customers by arresting or badgering hippies, girls in see-through blouses or topless bathing suits or any other non-aggressive deviation from the value standards of the majority. All they would ask is that each customer pay his dime-a-day and refrain from initiating force, obstructing traffic, and driving away other customers. Other than this, his life-style and moral code would be of no interest to them; they would treat him courteously and solicit his business.
”

Free market roads will encourage small business[edit]

Mutualist Kevin Carson argues that transportation is a natural diseconomy of scale.[7] The cost of transportation increases disproportionately with the size of a firm; in a free market, there would be strict upper limits to the size and power of corporations, and small businesses would have natural advantages. Government subsidies to transportation, however, make large, centralized corporations artificially profitable, contributing to corporate dominance of the economy.[8] Carson points out that in many cases, centralized industry did not develop until after the advent of taxpayer-funded roads and other transportation projects.[9]


Arguments against free market roads[edit]

In many parts of the world land use patterns mean that building two or more highways in parallel isn't practicable, thus making highways a natural monopoly. Kroeger claims, "This would result in an incredibly inefficient use of land resources."[citation needed] When there is only one highway connecting points A and B, the main advantage of privatization, competition, disappears. In the absence of regulation, a private highway operator is likely to charge an exorbitant monopoly price, resulting in huge profit margins and few benefits for drivers. An initial franchise fee (in the case of franchised publicly owned roads) and/or savings of public capital costs, can offset the resulting monopoly profits in terms of societal costs, but there are distributional issues in that the income is spread over an entire region while the burden falls on a small subset of that region's population who actually need to use the road. Also, it is difficult to predict the long term present value of a road. For example, the 407 ETR (an express toll highway near Toronto originally built with public funds) was leased for three billion CDN and was subsequently valued at nearly ten billion CDN. [10] While alternate local roads and other forms of transportation may provide some competition, it is often impractical, especially for goods.
A counter-argument is that while a lone highway connecting A to B may not have any other competition from other highways, it would still have to compete with trains, planes, and other roads.[11]

VideoTapir posted:

Thanks for the liver damage, mom!

(She was giving you children's doses, I hope.)

quote:

“ A private corporation which owned streets would make a point of keeping its streets free of drunks, hoodlums, and any other such annoying menaces, hiring private guards to do so if necessary. It might even advertise, "Thru-Way Corporation's streets are guaranteed safe at any hour of the day or night. Women may walk alone with perfect confidence on our thoroughfares." A criminal, forbidden to use any city street because all the street corporations knew of his bad reputation, would have a hard time even getting anywhere to commit a crime.
On the other hand, the private street companies would have no interest in regulating the dress, "morals," habits, or lifestyle of the people who used their streets. For instance, they wouldn't want to drive away customers by arresting or badgering hippies, girls in see-through blouses or topless bathing suits or any other non-aggressive deviation from the value standards of the majority. All they would ask is that each customer pay his dime-a-day and refrain from initiating force, obstructing traffic, and driving away other customers. Other than this, his life-style and moral code would be of no interest to them; they would treat him courteously and solicit his business.

Polygynous posted:

There's the purestrain insanity I've been missing. Of course charging to use every road directly leads to a crime free topless utopia.

Polygynous posted:

There's the purestrain insanity I've been missing. Of course charging to use every road directly leads to a crime free topless utopia.

GreyjoyBastard posted:

A crime free topless utopia with no drunks!

OwlFancier posted:

I seem to remember private roads being a thing in Snow Crash.

Actually to be honest Snow Crash would probably be a pretty textbook libertarian paradise.

Where you too won't have the government telling you you can't graft yourself into a truck and play second life while you drive.

quote:

Vista Road used to belong to the State of California and now is called Fairlanes, Inc. Rte. CSV-5. Its main competition used to be a U.S. highway and is now called Cruise- ways, Inc Rte. Cal-12. Farther up the Valley, the two competing highways actually cross. Once there had been bitter disputes, the intersection closed by sporadic sniper fire. Finally, a big developer bought the entire intersection and turned it into a drive~through mall. Now the roads just feed into a parking system-not a lot, not a ramp, but a system-and lose their identity. Getting through the intersection involves tracing paths through the parking system, many braided filaments of direction like the Ho Chi Minh trail. CSV-5 has better throughput, but Cal.12 has better pavement. That is typical-Fairlanes roads emphasize getting you there, for Type A drivers, and Cruiseways emphasize the enjoyment of the ride, for Type B drivers.

Bogatyr posted:

This is probably somewhere in the thread, interesting read anyway about Reason and the Koch's history.


"As Reason's editor defends its racist history, here's a copy of its holocaust denial "special issue"
https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-racist-history-heres-a-copy-of-its-holocaust-denial-special-issue/

Casimir Radon posted:

Snow Crash is really obvious satire. One of the ideas Stephenson likes to play with is that the real difference between smart and stupid people is the ability to understand subtlety. Libertarians all seem to think the world presented is a paradise where any rational person can see it's a hellscape parody of 80s excess.