On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 09:03:34PM +1000, Pidgorny, Slav (GEUS) wrote:
I am of belief that we have more than sufficient set of community services, and delivery of content at higher speeds shouldn't become a taxpayer burden.
good for you. feel free to emigrate to your chosen paradise - chronic stage in america or terminal end-stage in somalia. actually, no need. just wait and see how much damage abbott does in the next few years implementing the IPA's policies.
A better example would be the place where I from, the Ukrainian Free Territory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Territory). We have fond memories of the short time it existed; my street was largely built and my university was founded then.
and, as is predictable, your so-called free state was taken over by a more powerful force. a power vacuum will always be filled. it was undermined for the same reason that the anarchists in the spanish civil war were betrayed by the communists - neither the fascists nor the communists could tolerate anything even resembling anarchism or socialism. BTW, given that you're talking about the period 1918-1921, immediately post-WWI, it's unlikely that you any memories of it at all, fond or otherwise. you have fond mythologies of a brief few years of respite in the middle of a sandwich of shit. in any case, they were socialist anarchists, collectivists not individualists, and certainly not american style Libertarians. the americans hadn't even co-opted the term Libertarian then (it still meant pretty much the same thing as socialist everywhere in the world, rather than just everywhere but the US as it does now), and the american propaganda-myth of the Self-Made Man (on which american Libertarian theology is based) hadn't infected the ukraine or even europe by then.
Sometimes smaller government works quite well. Of course the left cannot fathom the idea; the Terrytory was mercilessly taken over.
no, the right are ideologically blind ("the mythical magical free market fixes all") but the left can see that corporations would immediately fill the inevitable power vacuum left if anyone actually implemented the mythical "small government" on anything larger than a tribal scale (100-300 people max) for any longer than a few months or a few years. if the choice is between elected government (at least notionally answerable to the people) and corporate power (answerable in theory to the shareholders, but in recent years the management class rule as they see fit for their own benefit), then the choice is easy. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>