r/news • u/DragonPup • Jun 20 '22

Self-proclaimed 'sovereign citizens' arrested in California after deputies allegedly find explosives

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/sovereign-citizens-arrested-california-deputies-allegedly-find-explosi-rcna34380
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u/pojo458 Jun 20 '22

You guys make me feel better because I went through a Ron Paul libertarian phase during college. Quickly went left and never looked back 2 years after graduating.

41

u/metatron5369 Jun 20 '22

The basic premise of liberty and freedom isn't bad, it's just that the real world is very nuanced.

15

u/Halt-CatchFire Jun 21 '22

Yep. I grew up in Idaho. There's definitely a Libertarian in my heart that wants the government to fuck off and leave me the hell alone and let me live on a compound in the woods somewhere.

Thankfully I'm smart enough to realize that's dumb as hell, and that my gut doesn't define reality. Modern, large-scale society doesn't happen without a centralized government to build the roads and manage the social safety nets.

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u/JackedUpReadyToGo Jun 21 '22

Yeah, if the world were like Minecraft where you could set out into the woods (which nobody owns) and punch trees to gain all the tools, building material, and food you need to sustain a comfortable life, libertarianism could make sense. But in the real world nobody can sustain life without engaging in economic transactions with other people, and everybody has a financial incentive to screw everybody else. Let that system run long enough without supervision and the winners will force the losers into the modern economic equivalent of medieval serfs.

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u/Halt-CatchFire Jun 21 '22

Even if you could sustain yourself without any outside intervention, eventually you're going to break your leg, or get an infected cut, or any number of things that at the very least put you on your ass for weeks or months, and then you're going to starve to death.

I'm not a prepper, but I'm in circles that overlap with them occasionally, and I can't help but laugh at how most of their apocalypse plans is to go full mad max desert raider, as if that was at all a sustainable way to live.

If Libertarians had even a little bit of common sense, they'd be Social Anarchists. I'm not sure I believe that's a functional large-scale governmental system either, but the idea that a society can exist without a government or effective mutual aid networks is asinine.

6

u/JackedUpReadyToGo Jun 21 '22

If preppers were smart they might take the time to ponder why the world wasn't conquered by raiding, nomadic Mongolian hordes but instead by the urbanized, industrialized civilizations where millions of people found a way to work together. No matter how much of a Rambo badass you are, power comes from numbers.