The bankruptcy of Detroit is a great
victory for the Liberty Movement. This is in spite of the fact that
the Liberty Movement did nothing to achieve this glorious event. It
doesn’t matter. Sometimes the enemy shoots himself in the foot.
Sometimes a football team fumbles the ball directly into your hands.
Look what I found!
With conservatism a muddled, spent
and failed movement, only libertarianism remains a viable obstacle to
progressivism, the nation’s ruling ideology for decades which is
stronger than ever. Progressives have run Detroit for many decades.
Progressives, with considerable assistance from conservative Republicans
on the state and national levels, are responsible for the numerous
policy failures that combined to turn a once great city into ruins.
Those policies include: government schools and busing, welfare, the drug
war, public employee unions, oppressive taxes and regulations on
business and citizens, and the overall concept of government as the
political means of acquiring wealth as opposed to the old-fashioned
approach of productive work. This is a great opportunity for
libertarians to explain, as the media will not, how progressivism
destroyed Detroit. It is a great opportunity to promote libertarian
solutions to Detroit’s problems.
The future of the Liberty Movement is direct action not politics. As I explained in detail inDirect Citizen Action,
politics is a rigged game. Like the Union army at Gettysburg, the
political class loves to be attacked at heavily fortified positions and
where they can see the enemy coming a mile away. We need to respond to
the collapse of Detroit and other large Americans cities not by electing
reform candidates or lobbying or circulating petitions but by direct
action and entrepreneurship. We need to withdraw from failed government
institutions such as government schools and urge others to do
likewise. We need to encourage people to figure out how to solve their
own problems without looking to politicians. We need to figure out how
to start business firms that compete with the failed government
“services” such as the police.
As Karen De Coster has
documented on this site, this movement is already well underway in
Detroit. The State’s collapse is the Liberty Movement’s opportunity.
Let’s not waste a crisis.
The fall of Detroit was itself the
result of direct action. Instead of staying and trying to change the
City through politics, hundreds of thousands of residents fled to the
suburbs or to other states. They voted with their feet to unilaterally
elect a different and less oppressive government. While they did not so
as part of an organized movement, voting with your feet is now an
explicit and important tactic of the Liberty Movement thanks largely to
the Free State Project. In Direct Citizen Action, I discussed and endorsed the Free State Project—which
urges libertarians to move en masse to New Hampshire to reinforce that
state’s already libertarian direction. Voting with your feet is a
tactic the Liberty Movement should be heavily promoting and
facilitating.
Another powerful direct action
tactic is a massive simultaneous withdrawal from the government
schools. As with voting with your feet, this trend existed in modest
form through homeschooling before it became an explicit part of Liberty
Movement strategy and tactics. Now, it needs to be explicitly promoted
and facilitated by the Movement as I proposed in my book, Government Schools Are Bad for Your Kids.
An effort should be made to urge parents in Detroit to pull their
children out of the horrid government schools there and into either
private schools, or home schools or even some combination of the two.
Let’s start a National Homeschool Day in Detroit on the first scheduled
day of school this September.
Progressivism is the fiction that
government coercion can produce better results than voluntary
cooperation among people. A key implied premise of progressivism is
that government action, government expenditure of resources, is
cost-free. Because the proposition is absurd on its face, it is never
stated explicitly. It is nevertheless implied in virtually every
progressive idea or policy. Progressives have no theory of costs.
If they did, progressivism as an idea would disintegrate due to the
progressive’s inability to explain why the benefits of their programs
are worth the costs. This they can never do because cost and benefit
are subjective as Rothbard has explained better than anyone else has.
There is no rational, logical or scientific way to prove that $1000
taken from the taxpayer by force is worth $1000 added to the Mayor’s
Summer Youth Program or any other government program.
Rather, the progressive simply ignores costs and pretends that resources are not scarce but unlimited. Since there is no firm political limit to government growth, the progressive fantasy can appear to be true for a number of years. There is, however, a natural limit to
government growth that has been seen throughout history. Government is
a parasite on its host, society. Too much parasitical activity,
unrestrained by the rigged political system, will over time kill the
host. When the host dies, the government collapses. Such is Detroit
with the additional proviso that in the case of local government, the
host can simply move away from the parasite with the same fatal results.
Thus, the collapse of Detroit
illustrates the lesson of free market economics that all resources are
scarce and ignoring that law of economics will lead to disaster. Every
progressive policy is a Detroit waiting to happen.
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