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Miscellaneous See other Miscellaneous Articles Title: 10 Reasons to Be Happy (Cheer Up Libertarians) 10 Reasons to Be Happy By Stewart Browne Published: 30 August 2009 Posted in: Intel, Top features Tags: activism, agorism, Big government, civil society, creative destruction, democracy, economics, free state project, libertarian, technology Free Talk Live spent the first hour of a recent show discussing ten ways to maintain a positive attitude. It was a welcome break from political discussion for those of us who follow the show, and the sort of conversation that’s important for libertarian types to have once in awhile. If you understand the value of personal liberty and free exchange, it’s easy to get mired in sadness at how government is rapidly destroying both. Spend enough time reading and talking about the destructive actions of government and you’re bound to get depressed. Get depressed and you’re less likely to have any positive impact within the liberty movement. So, for anyone feeling depressed about the state of the world, I now present ten things you can be positive about. #1. Even as government holds humanity back, technology continues to propel us forward. I’m writing this column on a computer I bought a few months ago for $500. My current computer has processing power and memory that would have cost me 10 grand or more just a few years ago, and wasn’t possible at all a few years before that. Despite government’s best efforts to hold back entrepreneurs, manufacturing processes continue to grow more efficient, scientific breakthroughs continue to happen, leisure time continues to expand, and people throughout the world continue to rise out of poverty. I put this one first because it spreads deep into the next 9. Improved technology has given liberty lovers many reasons for hope. #2. The decentralization of information is here. For most of the twentieth century, ideas and information in America were largely controlled in two institutions closely tied to the state: the media and the Academy. The Internet has blown that wide open. Add in Twitter, Facebook, Digg and the like, and the distribution channels for decentralized information have become decentralized too. We are in a world where any article written on any web site has as much chance of being read en masse as something published in The NY Times. As a result… #3. Libertarian ideas, once confined to the fringe, are getting heard and the movement is growing. Last year’s Ron Paul for president campaign, this spring’s Tea Party protests, this summer’s townhalls, chart-topping success of books like Meltdown by Tom Woods and Paul’s forthcoming End the Fed are phenomena that would have been unheard of ten years ago. And while it may be that some of these activities aren’t terribly productive, the mere fact that they are happening is a big change that gives me hope. This leads us to… #4. More and more libertarians are coming to realize that a free society won’t come about via the voting booth, and we can expect the number of people with that understanding to grow. I, like many of you, am an advocate for the movement to get away from Washington politics and move toward more direct strategies like secession, but that is a relatively new development in my thinking. A few years ago I would have been one of those volunteers canvassing for Dr. Paul. A few years before that I was listening to Rush Limbaugh. The journey from government school drone to free thinker with some understanding of how the world works is, for most people, a gradual one, and we have tens of millions of people who, via the Internet, have just taken their first steps. Over time, we can expect many of them to learn the same lessons we did, and arrive at the same place we are now. Where we are now leads to numbers 5 & 6. #5. There are a lot of Americans speaking openly of nullification and secession. I wrote more on this in A New Strategy For Liberty: Secession In 3 Easy Steps. #6. We have at least 3 well organized efforts at sidestepping the ugly political process and cutting straight to a much more free society. The Free State Project is moving and to my eyes, is growing quite nicely. The Seasteading Institute is well-funded and its first stab at a society on the water is imminent. Renowned economist Paul Romer is now touring the world promoting Charter Cities. If any one of these ideas meets its objectives, the game is permanently changed. #7. The Flat Worlders were correct. Thomas Friedman’s millenium-era bestseller, The World Is Flat predicted that the laying of fiber optics cable around the globe would have a bigger impact than we knew. He was right, of course. Today, you are likely to be chatting with someone in Pakistan about trouble with your software, speaking on the phone with someone from India about your cell phone bill, and competing with a kid from China to win an engineering contract for your firm. This sort of opening up of the marketplace has made the world more productive, and is lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The impact of a flattening world cannot be overstated. In addition to permanently yanking people out of poverty… #8. The Flat World is Decentralizing Work in the West. More than a million people make a living on eBay. Another hundred thousand or more people do freelance work on sites like eLance and Guru. Etsy, Altpick, Proz, Rentacoder, and hundreds more are changing the way people do transactions. If you’re young, you are so accustomed to living on Facebook, to recording a tune with your band and uploading it for sale right away, to buying and selling used college textbooks on the Internet, that you don’t even know how radically different (and better) the world of business is than even just a few years ago. The Internet has made it possible for more people to do what they want to do for a living, and more companies to find and buy exactly the services they need. This has the dual effect of a) making us all more productive b) moving working life away from gigantic, centralized corporations and towards accountable individuals. When you’re done with this article and have posted a poignant comment, go read How Capitalism Saves Ruby From Corporatism. Here’s an excerpt: The reason we see corporations, especially large corporations, making stupid and evil decisions is due to a crisis of identity: the participants in the corporation have begun (or long ago completed) the process of seeing the corporation as an entity unto itself for which they do not have direct responsibility. The decentralization of work is fighting that lack of direct responsibility. People working for themselves, even part-time, are capitalists. They are forced to take responsibility for their actions and their work. They must give the customer what the customer wants or not get paid. The money that is stolen from them in taxes is right in their face, rather than just another deduction on a paycheck. As more and more people leverage the power of the Internet to turn their own talents into money, more and more people are going to see the State for the sham that it is. #9. The Current System is in Collapse. I know that hardly sounds like a reason to be happy, but here we are nearing the end of the list and I’ve written myself into such a sunny place that I’m seeing the darkness out there as reason to be hopeful. Yes, times are tough right now, and there are lots of reasons to believe that the economy will continue to be bad or even get worse. The government’s response to the meltdown it created left all the underlying problems intact and created monumental new problems that will cripple or topple the global economy. $300,000 of national debt is now attached to every American. The FDIC is broke, the entitlements are bankrupt, Washington is completing its 50-year march to take over the health care system, and a flood of Federal Reserve funny money waits in the wings for the right moment to pour into the economy at large and muck up everything. So what is the positive spin on the collapse of the system? Why would I call this something to be happy about? For the past hundred years, the world has been organized in giant nation states, each dominated by a bloated central bureaucracy. But there is a theme in these 10 bullet points, and it isn’t terribly compatible with the current political organization of the world. Technological change, A Flat World, Nullification, Secession, Free Stating, Seasteading, Charter Cities, Libertarian Ideas… Decentralization. There is no doubt in my mind that #9 is true. The nation states of the world cannot stop spending money they don’t have. They know they must stop, but they cannot. It is the nature of democratic republics. All the controls the United States and others have put on their governments have now broken down. It was inevitable. We can expect our government to continue running rampant. It will continue growing in its brazenness, in its sheer stupidity. What’s happening now will only get worse. And worse. We will reach a tipping point. And it will be time for a change. Sound far-fetched? #10. Big social change almost always comes seemingly out of nowhere, a trickle one day, a flood the next. This phenomenon, studied extensively in the social sciences and popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, occurs because information spreads on exponential growth curves. The notion that we’d be better off without Washington is too radical an idea to most people today. But the number of people who hold that idea will grow as the national debt expands. As the idea of abandoning Washington grows, it gains credibility, and begins growing even faster, giving it more credibility, allowing it to grow even faster… In January of 1914, the world was still dominated by monarchical empires. Regional infighting in Austria-Hungary that summer blew up into World War 1, and by 1918, the monarchies that had dominated the world for centuries were toast, and democratic republics rose up to take their place. The world changed severely, rapidly, and permanently because the monarchies of Europe, stable for centuries, had become unstable. To most of us, bloated central governments seem inevitable because they have been the norm for generations. They have been the norm because they have been stable. Are they still that way? Or is this noisy summer of Tea Parties and townhalls the trickle of a flood that will be upon us soon? And when that flood comes, will all hell break loose like it did in 1914? I don’t think so. Look back over numbers 1 – 8. We are ready to move on.
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#8. To: abraxas (#0)
Beautiful piece, I'll pass it around to other sites!
Hey, where's my sauce recipe? : ) I see I'm going to have to hold your feet to the fire.
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