None, of course.
But hey, look at how well privatizing prisons has worked out for Louisiana, another stellar example of the "libertarian" neofeudal paradise.
That's the real gold, how people call themselves libertarians when they spend all their time wanking to social structures that benefit oligarchs and tin-pot dictators. Small government only means more freedom for scumbags to build up personal fiefdoms. From the very inception of the Constitution one of the principle purposes of government has been to protect the extraordinarily small wealth gap that existed at the time of the founding. The rise of neofeudal social dynamics in the pre-war South, and the shift away from the open-frontier agrarian society (which was one of the primary factors in that small wealth gap, as "small business owners" could be anyone willing to hop on a wagon heading west) driven by the Industrial Revolution created an opportunity which the oligarchs seized with both hands.
We got the Gilded Age. The late 1800s through the mid 1940s were full of progressive reformers working to counteract that, culminating in the New Deal. Unfortunately, it was derailed by the shift in focus caused by the stresses of WWII to a primarily political/military conflict rather than economic conflict, and the forces of the post-industrial nobility took the chance to roll back the clock, with the Cold War offering additional political capital. The second half of the 20th century was entirely about propagandizing and increasing the wealth gap. The American middle class wasn't created in the 20th century, it was eroded, and we're reaping the outcomes of 50 years of effort to stratify U.S. economic classes with a second Gilded Age.
Every word you've ever heard about the free market, the good of unrestricted capitalism, the evils of "socialism" (i.e. American democracy as it existed circa any point in our history prior to the '50s and outside a brief period from ~1880-1930), &c. was specifically spread to blind people to what was being done. We began as a society where the average working person could own property, work reasonable hours, and support their family on a single income while also spending time socializing, learning, and resting to one in which multiple jobs per household often still can't bring it above the poverty line and the majority of people either don't own property (in the sense of land/homes/&c.) or owe massive debts on the property they "own" (for so long as they can continue paying for it), and have no spare time or energy for pursuing personal interests, education, or politics.
That has been the concerted and primary interest of corporations and the moneyed class throughout American history: breaking the middle class, making us think it was in our best interests, and crippling government sufficiently that there will not be a second sweep of progressive economic reforms.
This is why Reconstruction was forcibly derailed: it was deconstructing the wealth gap created among citizens of the South by diminishing racial divisions between freed blacks and poor whites, providing better education and public services to both, and diminishing the capital and power of the plantation aristocracy. The Civil War was, fundamentally, about economic power, specifically about preserving an economic system (slavery + the cultivation of cash crops for export) which massively enriched a small portion of the population while providing little to no social benefit and preventing the bulk of freedmen from advancing themselves beyond subsistence farming (which was actually a degradation from the average status of an American eighty years prior).
When you hear someone talk about the benefits of small government, deregulation, &c. remember: those benefits are not for you. They're for the people and institutions which possess sufficient power that the only reliable check on their excesses is a strong central government. Moreover, any attempt to return to such a society (for it is, as I have repeatedly implied, little more than a gussied-up and modernized form of feudalism) will result either in the creation of innumerable local tyrannies or in massive popular violence. The notion of distributed and largely independent individuals and settlements is functionally impossible for any society past a purely agrarian stage of development: modern infrastructure cannot be constructed or maintained without high-level coordination of resources and effort, the bulk of human population worldwide cannot be supported with local agriculture even if all other elements of society were miraculously maintained without the systems they require, &c.
The unfortunate truth is that the frontier is closed. There is no settler's paradise, no land to live by your own hand, and there never again will be save for one of two scenarios: space travel and colonization becoming as simple and inexpensive as hopping aboard that wagon train of the idolized past, or the near-total eradication of human life and technology (both material and social). It has been reduced to a lie peddled to too-credulous people to convince them to dismantle the structures which shield them from abuse while convincing them that those structures are abuse.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4431933 times)