Chat Challenges

Posted on December 23, 2003 in IRC/Chat Irony & Sarcasm Social Justice

There are a couple of questions that I like to spring on folks in chat rooms when their eyes grow blurry and they say things like “Oh, the slaves were so well treated. So much better than the working people”. Or “We need a free market, absolutely devoid of governmental inference.”

To the first I make a standing offer: If slavery is so great, will you be my chattel slave under the conditions that existed prior to 1861? I am still waiting for one of these antebellum romanticists to take me up on my offer.

To the second, I suggest a test: Let’s put you in a country that has not been “burdened” by government subsidies. In fairness, we will remove the people who are living there now and let them fill your place. The countries that I offer are places like Mali, Chad, and Somalia. If your system is so great, you should be able to make a go of it and have all the comforts you want. Furthermore, what makes you think that I and others are going to let you walk off with everything that we have paid for with our tax dollars like roads, fire departments, police protections, etc.? If your free market can do a better job of supplying these things than a shared community can, then you already have what you need to make your utopia work. You don’t need the step up which Nasty Evil Big Government provides you. Again, no one wants to take me up when I set these conditions.

There’s a third chant I often hear from “law and order” champions: our prisons coddle prisoners. They live a good life there. So I propose this: break the law. Go to prison. Enjoy that good life. Again, no takers.

And so many talk about their support of the war in Iraq, but so few volunteer to go there.

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When I mentioned my proposal for libertarians to another chat member, he affirmed that it was in sub-Saharan Africa that the truest free markets existed. None of the libertarians want to go there: it’s too poor.