MiraiRonin

21:34 : "After 9/11, most of us had expected some kind of terrorist attack on Britain. Few expected this kind of violence to come from young men born and brought up in the UK, speaking in the accents of Yorkshire and London. This really wasn't supposed to happen, according to our version of events." This strongly echoes Stef's recent criticism of the leftist belief that people of different races are like undifferentiated water that will assume the shape of whatever cultural container they're poured into.

Massive kudos on moving in the direction of peaceful parenting; it's a ton of work on top of everything else you have to deal with, but you will reap dividends of a thousand percent in your children's relationship with you.

That point did occur to me; with the cost of roads covered by through private transactions the government in question would simply scoop up the same taxes and spend them on something else. The real challenge is getting people to understand that 'efficiency' doesn't only mean a few extra dollars left in some project's budget; it means that the achievements of private business could not and can not be replicated by government. That if the government had control of electronics, we probably wouldn't have smartphones now. That a systemic lack of efficiency means that everything is less than it should be by some unknown percentage, be it the MPG of your car, the speed of your internet, the stability of your buildings, your very life expectancy. That is the difference that, somehow, needs to be communicated. Brainstorming is the right approach; whatever the problems of a free community are, many of them will have wildly creative solutions (the rest will be reassuringly simple. Need sewer? Dig ditch, lay pipe, cover with dirt, flush with confidence). Consider the last video in the first post; the solution to the man-in-the-middle problem was the concept of a 'certificate signing authority', a concept so abstract that the presenters had no idea how to describe it, before jokingly drawing a picture of 'the internet factory'. How could anyone not up to their knees in tech know-how, and even plenty of them that are, predict that the solution would be "change your message so that's it's completely readable after you send it and after your intended recipient gets it, but not in between. Because maths." I'm also a bit buoyed by the fact that the system works on trust. What about the company that betrayed that trust? They went bankrupt, because no-one trusts them anymore

From what I understand, one of the common criticisms of libertarianism is that in a free society there will be no provision of what people see as 'public services', roads being the standard example? Wouldn't it be nice if there was a real-world example you could point to of the free market solving this exact problem without, or even in spite of, the involvement of the state? Well here's one: Not an unprecedented one either: This guy also has an example of the free market solving a problem without the involvement in of the state, that of making sure you're connecting to the website you want to communicate with and not an identity thief; a problem of the internet that governments never interfered with because, possibly, it arose, was discovered, and was fixed before most politicians even knew what an 'internet' was.