I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
Read on:
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department
Found at Something Awful Forums, where one can also see it's possible to break free of Libertarian brainwashing:
OP, I used to be you. Maybe not quite as masochistic, in that I didn't go around inflicting my terrible ideas on strangers, but everything from the content of your ideas (though I was much more hardcore Objectivist and would have sneered at your wishy-washy ancap bullshit) to the way you present them is hilariously familiar to me.
This will probably have no impact on you, but: you are wrong. Objectively wrong. Your understanding of 'society' as an entity is simplistic nonsense.
As a simple example: you are able to have this conversation because someone, at some point, thought it worth the effort to teach you to read and write. This is not a universal value, and not necessarily provided in the absence of a well-maintained society that values literacy. There are plenty of places in the world where literacy is not valued, and thus not universal. You happen to live in one where it is.
The idea that you could, in any way, discharge the debt you owe to the society you're a part of is absurd. You can't. It's not possible. You will go to your grave still deeply in the red to that society. But that's okay; the rest of us have agreed that people should be allowed to run a negative balance for their entire lives, and we include you.
I'm not going to bother expanding on this point (yet, anyway) because I have a strong suspicion that you're going to read it, identify a few key words to fixate on, argue against what those words suggest to you, and fail to think deeply about the actual content of this post.
Because ten years ago, that's what I would have done.
If by some chance I'm wrong about that, let me know and I'll give you the whole dissertation on your relationship to the abstraction we call 'society', and how the libertarian understanding of that relationship is shallow and self-serving.
Well said.
