I am Thankful

[4est_4est_Gump]

Why is the world getting better? Not because of the work of governments. In fact governments and the unintended consequences their actions wreak around the world are a big reason why it seems like the world's gone wrong. It's important to remember the world is getting better in spite of governments, not because of them. The outbreak of Ebola in West Africa serves as a powerful example of how this works. Since the summer, the virus has spread in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. Only one of these countries has been able to snuff out Ebola so far—Nigeria, hardly a paragon of good government in Africa. But Nigeria receives far less Western aid than any other countries. Liberia, on the other hand, receives a lot of aid, which made its leaders more dependent on foreign aid and less likely to formulate their own solutions the way Nigeria did.

...

Technology has had a similar effect elsewhere: either preventing centralization through tools that make challenging authority easier, or making centralization irrelevant through tools that simplify the task of bypassing authority entirely. Social media networks have helped spark revolutions, the spread of mobile phones in the developing world has spurred a level of economic integration no amount of government initiative could accomplish. The advance of technology and concomitant increase in access and decrease in prices has facilitated all kinds of other improvements in the human condition too, in ways government solutions have not been able to. The libertarian moment isn't just an American thing, and it isn't just a political thing: the same principle that underlies the operation of free markets—voluntary coordination based on distributed information and decentralized decision-making—works for a free society. New technologies make it possible to put the principles into practice by improving access to information and decision-making and challenging the monopolies held by government.

Ed Krayewski, Reason.com

http://reason.com/archives/2014/11/26/worlds-gone-right

I am hopeful too that Libertarianism will triumph over the ghettos and social gulags of tribalism and Western Collectivist-Interventionist Liberalism, the red-headed bastard step-child of true, classic Liberalism.