Bon Appetit!

What you eat can kill you!

Sure, that is pretty common knowledge, and scary- but it's also natural and normal. It certainly is no one's business but your own.

You could eat the healthiest diet possible- and choke to death. And few people agree to any great degree what the "healthiest diet possible" really is, anyway. Even now.

Some foods contain bacteria that could make some people sick under the right (wrong?) circumstances. Some foods can contain prions that can cause trouble. Some foods will cause you to get really fat or die of heart disease if you eat too much of them. Some foods probably even contribute to cancer!

Of course, all those things were more of a concern back when The State kept medical care expensive, rationed, and "behind the times", but even now some people eat themselves to death in one way or another.

And that is their choice. Friends and loved ones will sometimes mention the obvious. But if they get too pushy they could find themselves facing arbitration. A person who wants help can find it. If not- that is between them and anyone whom they might hire to insure their life and health, or have other contractual obligations with.

If someone wants to eat something, someone else will be willing to provide it for a price. As long as it initiates no force, obviously. Consensual trade between self-responsible individuals. Let the customer know what they are getting, and finding out the consequences of their food choice is up to them. That's pretty easy, though, with modern technology.

If any vendor of "raw milk products" found herself the victim of a raid by armed thugs, she would shoot back, using equally-effective weaponry, confident that (if she survived the fight with her home-turf advantage) any surviving thugs would find themselves crushed under a mountain of debt and obligation that they would be unlikely to ever fully repay. I've read that this wasn't always the case.

In the case of contaminated foods, liability for any harm caused is good incentive to take pains to prevent it. Therefore several inspection services are available for hire by food providers or their insurers. Competition, and a desire for a powerful reputation, keeps inspectors innovating and pushing the cleanliness envelope- in ways that make the food provider's life and job easier at the same time. It's a good system. And it provides for some spectacularly wonderful things to eat out there! Enjoy!

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Now for something different- "The Shoe Fallacy"

"If everyone had always gotten their shoes from the government, the proponent of shoe privatization would be greeted as a kind of lunatic. 'How could you?' defenders of the status quo would squeal. 'You are opposed to the public, and to poor people, wearing shoes! And who would supply shoes … if the government got out of the business? Tell us that! Be constructive! It's easy to be negative and smart-alecky about government; but tell us who would supply shoes? Which people? How many shoe stores would be available in each city and town? … What material would they use? … Suppose a poor person didn't have the money to buy a pair?'" ~ Murray Rothbard

I suppose you could say Libertopia happened when people realized how silly this kind of delusional thinking always had been, and got over it.

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Learning to be functional

Education. Humans evolved to be learning machines. Unless you work really hard to prevent learning, people will learn what they need to know in order to live; starting at birth and not ending until death. Most people will even choose to learn more than the minimum just because there is a natural drive to learn. And there isn't any one method that works for everyone.

Here in Libertopia, some people send their kids to a neighborhood school. This is a good method for people who think they don't have the time or competency to be responsible for their kids' education. (In most cases, this is not really the case, but people are free to choose.) These "neighborhood schools" range from something that looks like an old-style "public school" (without the coercive funding and mandatory attendance) to just hanging out in a group with a local curious character. And everything in between.

I suspect that most people, however, self educate. A lot of people choose to home school, with a major fraction of those "unschooling". Unschooling is just living a normal life while learning what you are interested in right at this moment. In most cases this results in the best education possible.

How many people are living each particular method? I don't know. It is nobody's business, so no one has made any study of it, as far as I know. What I do know is that there aren't too many ignorant, illiterate doofuses wandering the streets of Libertopia. And that's in spite of the damage from "public (government) schools" in generations past that can still be seen in some families, even now.

Of all the echoes of the State that are still affecting Libertopians today. only environmental degradation rivals government schooling in magnitude of damage still being felt. The learned stupidity and helplessness that came from the government indoctrination camps called "public schools" will be reverberating for generations. At least the cancer is now gone and the body can get on with the business of healing.

Most people have already moved so far beyond the old ways that there is no stopping them now. It's exciting to see what people with unchained minds have come up with, and will come up with next. These are exciting times- and not in a bad way.

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Immigration in Libertopia

A little fact about Libertopia that you may not be aware of: it does not encompass the entire planet. Yet. There are still struggling pockets of State here and there.

Most of them have serious immigration and emigration "laws".

The Rulers of these dying States don't want any Libertopians moving in and giving their new neighbors dangerous ideas. Thus the immigration "controls". I doubt it's necessary- who would move to a State? But it was a good justification for putting the infrastructure in place to control the "borders".

Because, even more, they want to keep the residents (the States would call them "citizens") they have from escaping- it's hard to tax people who leave if they go somewhere without a government to help you track and control them. It is also hard to rule when you are alone.

Most of the residents of these States were in favor of the immigration controls. At least at first. What the residents of these States failed to realize was that any policy or agency that can keep "them" out, can be turned around and be used to keep "us" in. Cages and "borders" work both ways.

Libertopians living near these unilaterally-declared "borders" are usually more than willing to help people escape an oppressive State (Yeah, I'm repeating myself there). The more people who are free, the better it is for everyone. It is the new "Underground Railroad", and it is killing the last few States.

It is funny, though. No one in Libertopia worries about immigrants moving in and using up all the welfare. There is no welfare. No one worries about immigrants taking all the jobs- they are just as likely to create jobs. No one worries about what language anyone else speaks. There can be no "official language"- you communicate however you can. No one worries about their culture being destroyed by exposure to another culture. That would be an admission that your culture isn't worth saving. Yet all these excuses, as unbelievable as they sound to me, are actually used in those dying States!

Without a government to co-opt or take over- either by voting or by having more offspring than someone else- people don't seem to worry too much about who is moving where. At least as long as the new neighbors don't initiate force or steal. And if they do, where they came from is the least important piece of information you could possibly worry about.

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Formerly "public"- Currently thriving

Those of you reading these dispatches from your perspective in the era of government wouldn't believe how some of the traditionally "public" services have thrived since they lost their coercively-stolen funds.

Libraries, some even with actual paper and glue BOOKS, abound. They have innovated in ways you probably can't imagine. I'll bet more people use libraries now than at any other time in history.

The same obviously goes for space travel. It never took off (pun intended) until freed from the burden of being "too big for anyone but government" to do. You'd almost think governments were desperate to keep the tax cows earthbound and within milking distance.

I've talked about roads already. And museums.

Of course, some things did die out. No more police, "public schools", or terrorist recruiting programs (what you called "The War on Terror"). No more EPA, BATFE, DEA, or Department of XYZ. No more jackbooted thugs raiding dairies, houses, businesses or whatever, for doing something perfectly consensual and honest that the government had decided to regulate. No more State.

It seems that "taxation" enslaves the one who is being stolen from and also the one who receives the stolen property. It is obvious once you take off the statist blinders.

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Terrorism- a historical curiosity

I was looking back over some history today and saw a word I haven't thought about in a very long time: "terrorism".

Like smallpox, terrorism is something Libertopians never worry about. Most people have probably forgotten either problem once existed. Both are diseases which were eliminated when the causes were eradicated. States caused terrorism just as surely as viruses caused smallpox.

Sure, there are sometimes violent attacks here or there. What difference does it make why the attacker does what he does? The results, and consequences, are the same. However, now there is no State whipping up violent extremism and hunger for revenge. So, even without Homeland Security [sic], the attacks are very, very rare- almost nonexistent.

Of course, without a State to make enemies around the globe, and to influence politically, it isn't worth the effort to attack random innocent people. Libertopians are pretty much universally armed. You'll die and no one will fear "your cause".

I admit it is hard for me to even hard for me to think about what terrorism might have been or how it might have been thought about. How unsettling it must have been to watch a State continuing to take actions which put your loved-ones at risk, while it simultaneously violated your liberty, using the terrorism its own actions caused as justification. It's no wonder some people .... Ah, I almost fell into the trap of revealing too much about your future. Don't worry. You'll soon see what I was referring to.

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