Caltrops - ELECTION WATCH 2016





	[quote name="Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS)"]There was an episode of <i>Dragnet</i> (the 1960s police procedural television show) in which some kids stole some stuff from a sporting goods store because they wanted to go off and form their own commune. Sgt. Friday explains that kids want everything immediately and because of the advantages of modern society, they are frustrated at the hypocrisies of civilized society. But it takes years to build a functioning society and the main reason things go wrong is we're making it up as we go along and not all solutions are the best ones, and just because things are bad doesn't mean you can't try and improve them - if you want to spend the incredible amounts of time, effort, and resources to get there - or that they can't get worse. So the fact remains that unless you plan to live like The Unabomber, Ted Kazinski, you need a tremendous amount of money or the equivalent in resources (machines, equipment, supplies, etc.) to create a society; plus a lot of skilled people and time to implement a society. You can't build it overnight ("Rome wasn't built in a day") and the existing communities, cities, regions, or nations have dozens or hundreds of years of built-up capital, personal activity, and resources behind them. Like large companies, large countries started as small ones that survived and flourished. In some cases, communities didn't work and they dried up and blew away; the American West is littered with ghost towns from a hundred, hundred fifty years ago where they had some reason to be there but it stopped - like a mine that ran out - and the residents went elsewhere when the money dried up. And for a typical advanced society now, you need a broad range of skills. Ayn Rand gave examples for Galt's Gulch in her book <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> but it's even more critical today; there are so many things that depend upon computerized operations that you not only need doctors, grocers, people to mine and mill steel, engineers and designers, but you also need programmers, skilled analysts, usability experts (otherwise the software will be about as user friendly as a UNIX command-line tool) and other technical persons. We are much more technologically oriented now than we were when her book was published in 1957, sometimes in ways we don't even realize. Plus equipment today is built cheaper and with non-repairable components, it's so much less expensive to build appliances as monolithic devices where if it breaks down you can't really fix it, you have to discard it. I mean, go back to 1970 and if you had a large TV - and it cost about the same then as now - you called a TV repairman if you couldn't simply replace a burned out vacuum tube. (Tube? What's a tube?) Now, say you manage to get the capital and the technical capability to build something. To explain why it won't last long I have to go back to Angola during the 1990s. The government of Angola needed to do something about the warlords roaming the country and causing all sorts of problems, but instead of setting up a huge military operation, they hired a private military company, <i>Executive Outcomes</i>, for the trivial sum of around $5 million a year. Staffed with ex-South African military, they would go into a combat zone, stop the fighting, stabilize the area, and leave. And it worked; a private company, for a fraction of the cost of a regular army, were able to protect the civilians against attacks from factions. What's ironic it was an organization built from what were probably soldiers hired to protect the white Apartheid government who were now protecting black people from brutalization, and doing so at a much lower cost than typical professional armies. The world community was aghast: a private military can't be allowed to do a terrific job, it would make their military organizations look like saps (and might make people consider whether they need the governments they have or maybe something else can be used, which would prevent them from continuing to loot their home countries). So the UN talked Angola into not renewing its contract with Executive Outcomes and they would provide military support. The guy who ran the company was saddened, he said that if he could have kept a force of just 10 people on, he could basically have at least kept the country from falling apart. Which is exactly what happened, after spending over <i>a billion dollars</i>, the UN could not maintain order in Angola. So if you do develop some libertarian paradise, the established governments will be <i>scared shitless</i> and will offer bribes, threats and potential military intervention with alleged atrocities (see the movie <i>Wag the Dog</i> for how a fake crisis can be drummed up quickly for political gain), and your paradise will just become another bloated bureaucratic government-encrusted hellhole like everywhere else. [/quote]