I was at our weekly Tuesday Meetup of the Campaign for Liberty. Last week was one of the better ones we’ve had in a while. We watched a couple of pretty good videos. Here’s one…
We all got a good laugh out of it. I would love to see this thing played in every school in the country. We really need to do something to get people to think about this kind of stuff!
Personally, I’ve never understood why so many people think they need someone else to tell them how to live their lives. Or why so many people think that someone else actually has some sort of right to do it.
As a libertarian, I believe every person has the absolute right to live their own lives in the best way they can. The way they choose. They have the right to do anything they want, as long as they don’t hurt anybody else.
So far, no one has ever been able to give me a good reason for not having things that way. A lot of excuses, a lot of fears, a lot of “what-ifs”, but no reasons.
I’d really like to see someplace, even just one place in the world, try to form a society where people could live that way. The US tried. They came very close when they came up with the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. But they never truly followed it. If they had actually treated ALL people the way they said they should, we might actually have a free country today. Too bad they weren’t ready to go that far. 🙁
I do see a few people around the world trying. The Seasteaders, the Libertarian Party, the guy over in Europe who’s trying hard to create a really free country, even the Freedom Ship was originally intended to be a place where people could have real freedom (tho it seems to have mutated).
I’d love to be able to find somewhere like that to move to, so far they are all out of my reach financially at least. In the meantime, I keep on trying to find ways to make things better here, but it sure does get frustrating.
Videos like that help cheer me up, for a little while. 😉
Cap’n, you’ll need a time machine. Polynesia prior to Captain Cook was probably your last shot. They say that power corrupts but I believe that “stuff” corrupts. The more stuff there is available the more stuff we want and then we begin to do whatever is necessary to get more and more stuff. The “whatever is necessary” to get the stuff is not always nice, ethical or moral. The world you want would probably have a very limited amount of stuff, just that which is necessary to sustain life and to provide a reasonable level of comfort, and we would have to depend on each other, on relationships, to enhance and enrich our lives.
Time machine? Maybe. It would be interesting to play around with one of those for sure.
I’m not sure about the whole ‘stuff’ corrupts idea either. I do think it has more to do with power. Yeah, sure people want stuff. They get envious if they see others with a lot of stuff that they don’t have, especially if they see it as unfair, unearned, etc. I see nothing wrong with having all the stuff you want, as long as you acquire it honestly (no cheating, stealing, coercion, etc).
I think there are just certain people in the world (sick people) who just LOVE power! THOSE are the people who will do anything to get more- lie, cheat, steal, kill, etc. WHATEVER they have to! Somehow, they convince other people to help them control others. By using peoples natural desire for ‘stuff’? I think thats a big part of it.
I think MOST people would be perfectly OK with living in a truly free society. One where everyone could live exactly the way they chose (as long as they didn’t hurt anyone else). MOST people are fine with deciding what they like to do and doing it. They work out peaceful trades with others. All the things that REALLY need to get done in the community get done.
I do have to agree with you that most of the societies that I can think of were pretty far back in time and didn’t have much stuff. I think maybe the reason for not having so many free societies today is more because having more stuff makes it easier for others to control that stuff (because of the excess).
Seems to me, we ought to be able to make more free societies today, even with the amount of stuff we have. Mostly because we COULD make it where everybody had ENOUGH, (it’s almost always because of politics-power- that there is any shortage now), and there would be no justification for people trying to take anything from another. We would just have to (everyone) enforce the rules against hurting others. As it is now, way too many people just accept the idea that they MUST be subservient to some other idiot, just because somebody (else) says so. I’ll never understand that mindset.
Can’t find much to argue with here. I guess my only response would be that a utopian society can only succeed if everyone adopts, if not an altruistic attitude, at least one of non aggression and fair play. As soon as one person decides that he or she would be better served by giving into greed and attempts to gain an upper hand the need for enforced rules comes into play. Enforced rules equals governance of some sort.
Exactly! The non-aggression principle is the basis of all truly free societies.
That is the main principle of the libertarians and the international society for individual liberty (I belong to both groups).
I agree with you that when someone aggresses against someone else, that they should be stopped. Why do you say it needs to happen through government. What is wrong with SELF-government? I think the person who has been harmed should be able to gather a group to prove his claim and to get restitution. Just regular people, not ‘leaders’, not any kind of special powers by some people to use force. Only those few at that specific time for that specific harm.
If someone else does something else, then others would fix him. Not necessary to have a government, only responsible people who will step up to do what’s necessary to stop others from harming others.
That can all be done through voluntary actions in community. I don’t see where force (government is always force) is needed.
Not as long as people all have an understanding of the basics of civil society. Meaning, they understand the principles of rights, what they are/aren’t, and the non-aggression principle. Almost nobody understands that in America today, tho our country was the ONLY one, ever in history to be founded on those very same principles.
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