“Well, if you hate the government so much, why don’t you just move to Somalia?!”
This is one of the most common retorts to libertarian ideas along with “libertarians are just Republicans who want to smoke pot.” I’ll save that one for another time.
Progs like talking about Somalia because they think it proves that libertarian ideas about limited government lead to chaos and misery.
As I have said before, there are 3 kinds of derp:
wrong: 2 + 2 = 5
very wrong: 2 + 2 = -17
not even wrong: hammer + tomato = January
The idea that Somalia is a libertarian paradise is solidly in the not even wrong category.
Let’s examine the claim in detail:
1. Somalia is an awful place.
2. Somalia has no government.
3. A lack of government causes misery.
4. Libertarians want to abolish the government.
5. Since a lack of government causes misery, libertarians are wrong.
All of these statements are wrong or irrelevant.
Yes, compared to most countries, Somalia is a bad place to live. However, in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, per capita income, and other measures, it’s not that much worse off than the countries around it. The main problem with Somalia is not its weak government; it is poverty. This is the same problem that Somalia’s neighbors Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and others have.
Somalia does have a government. True, it is a weak, provisional government with limited control, but it still has a budget, a parliament, a president, a military, international recognition, etc. Most articles about Somalia are careful to note that it has not had a central government since 1991. They don’t say it has no government. In fact, Somalia has at least 2 major governments (the one based in the capital and the other based in the northern region) and many minor governments headed by warlords.
A lack of government does not cause misery. Many countries with parliamentary systems have gone through long periods with no government because no coalition could win a majority and thus elect a prime minister. Countries on this list include Belgium. Did Belgium fall apart during the 589 days between 2010 and 2011 when it had no government? No.
Libertarians do not want to abolish the government. In the last election, the libertarian presidential candidate got about 3% of the vote and he ran on a platform that included saving Social Security. Most libertarians do want much less government, but there is an important difference between less and none even if some people are too dumb or dishonest to notice.
The evils of too much government far exceed too little government. Who would choose to live under the totalitarian government of North Korea over the semi-anarchy of Somalia? At least in Somalia I wouldn’t have to worry about me and my entire family for 3 generations being sent to a prison camp because I forgot to put on my mandatory Dear Leader pin. Unlike North Korea, you can leave Somalia without being shot at by border guards.
If Somalia proves anything, it is that socialism always leads to death and suffering. Somalia was a socialist country from 1969 to 1991. It was a one-party socialist state officially allied with the USSR and modeled on it. The USSR switched sides after socialist Somalia attacked socialist Ethiopia (not the first time one socialist country attacked another) in 1979. The dictator of Somalia became increasingly authoritarian after a failed coup which resulted from the failed war in Ethiopia. The dictator was finally overthrown in 1991 by an alliance of rebel groups which then turned on each other.
In short, saying that Somalia proves libertarians are wrong is like saying that a bank robbery proves that money is worthless. No, the reason Somalia is screwed up is because they did the *opposite* of what libertarians want just like the reason the bank got robbed is *because* the money is worth something.
And that is all that needs to be said to the “why dontcha move to Somalia” morons.
Comments
91 responses to “What Somalia Proves”
Well, not Somali border guards…
Damnit.
You had eight minutes to refresh.
Editing is weakness. Preview is weakness. Refresh is weakness.
Actually that’s only wrong. hammer + Tomato = start of red sauce.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a tomato.
Crushed tomatoes are the secret to a good thick sauce.
I thought it was tomato paste?
Paste is for pizza sauce. But for pasta/lasagna, for my money crushed is what is best!
Sorry – hit reply too quick.
Crushed is already at the proper consistency, like puree’d but with the proper chunkiness and texture.
No worry about messing with the flavor of trying to get the consistency right.
I use crushed in Chili too, in lieu of sauce.
What about diced?
Salsa, Chili, Pico, and Bruschetta?
Maybe in soup/stew?
Most progs think libertarians want warlords, which Somalia has. That’s the inherent misunderstanding. But they think libertarians want corporate warlords vs how they just want charismatic strongmen.
Unlike North Korea, you can leave Somalia without being shot at by border guards.
Not Somalia’s border guards, anyway. Maybe its neighbors’.
something something Bastiat something
Just because I didn’t get to say it this morning and so everyone knows where I stand. Casey Anthony? Brochettaward would.
You are not alone on this one,
Yeah, sad to say, so would I.
Just don’t fall asleep…
At least she wouldn’t be watching your kids.
I would be.
Well, my kids do love candy.
Between the two, I’d probably rather have you watching them than her.
Therapy is cheaper than a funeral
Is that actually true?
Depends on how broad your definition of ‘therapy’ is.
Forego therapy and cross your fingers for a lucrative standup career.
If you define therapy as “rub some dirt on it; you’ll get over it”, then yep, a lot cheaper.
You cannot talk about Somalia without linking to Better off stateless: Somalia before and after government collapse.
Check out the table on the 9th page of the PDF for the collapse of infant mortality (good), the rise of life expectancy (slightly up) and the decrease in poverty (shocking!!!).
In the last election, the libertarian presidential candidate got about 3% of the vote and he ran on a platform that included saving Social Security.
This statement is incorrect, the (L)ibertarian candidate ran on this platform, but he was not a libertarian. Capital letters make a difference 🙂
Labour got crushed in the UK local elections, the general next month is going to be fun. Most of the places where they took heavy losses were areas that largely voted Leave during Brexit. Gee, I wonder why.
Having gone to uni in Scotland in the 90’s, I can’t even with those results. I mean, I knew from Brexit that Tories were resurgent, but holy shit.
“libertarians are just Republicans who want to smoke pot.”
Not true. I have no interest whatsoever in smoking pot. I just have no desire to jail those who do, or anyone who ingests any substance they want.
Neither do I. I never saw the appeal.
You don’t like lording it over people you look down on? what’s wrong with you?
/prog
OT. Im stuck at the Denver airport* for an hour. Anything good to eat here?
*Please not that I hate the Dnver airport and likely 70-80% of the people here.
That last time I used the Denver Airport, it was in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Is that still true? At least they had a BBC America shop!
I was distressed to find out that Denver International is the only place in the area without a dispensary.
Thats mostly why I hate it. My property is in Colorado Springs, its halfway to fucking Kansas and they charge me a $30 toll for the privelege of using the only rosd to get out here.
That and this place reminds me of Logan’s Run.
I was just there last weekend (Golden, actually). The toll road, other than being expensive, was great and damn near empty.
Too early for a couple preboarding cocktails?
I would, but once my non-mexican wife lands I have to drive to Colorado Springs.
Ahh… I figured you were outbound.
That’s one great thing about living in a middling-sized city like Albuquerque, I can drive up to arrivals ten or so minutes after the plane has landed and be reasonably sure my acquaintance is waiting for me. None of this mucking about in the parking structure.
I liked the Lexington, KY airport for that reason. That and there’s whiskey–everywhere.
When I would fly into Louisville, I would call my parents while deplaning, they could be to the pickup by the time I could get there.
Well, DIA at least has Chick-fil-a.
You can always look for secret bunkers and symbols.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Denver_Airport_conspiracy_theories
God damn homophobes.
Root Down if you’re into that kind of thing. For some reason Rock Bottom is popular but I’ve never liked it.
Wow they have a rock bottom at the airport? Same type of thing as the one in downtown Denver?
Mostly same menu. Obviously don’t brew on premises but ship from one of their other locations.
http://www.rockbottom.com/locations/denver-international-airport
There’s a word for “not even wrong,” but I can’t remember what it is. The basic idea is that someone asks you a yes or no question, and [this word] means that’s a stupid fucking question that makes no sense and I’m not even going to answer it.
Now Riven, there are no stupid questions, only stupid people.
Hahahah! It’s so true. And all of them were out driving on my way to work today.
non-sequitur?
….(tries to think of term for ‘false dichotomy’)…..
The Billy Madison bellyflop.
It’s like non-sequitur and false dichotomy combined into one word.
My lunch hour is so screwed now. i’m not going to be able to stop thinking about this.
How close to ‘irrelevant’ might it be? immaterial? inapropos? inapplicable? not germane?
Or is is closer to ‘nonsensical’? fatuous? obtuse?
Spurious?
It’s driving me crazy, as well. I think it’s a Norweigan word…?
The example given was something like, “So, when was the last time you fucked your mom?”
And the answer was that word, and used in that context basically meant, “I’ve never fucked my mom, and your question is stupid (and possibly go fuck yourself).
well that’s a ‘loaded question’ … which i think is sort of different than mere non-sequitur because the latter is the product of stupidity or fuzzy-thinking… (e.g. the ‘irrelevant’/nonsensical group of terms)
….while a loaded-Q would be more ‘knowingly rhetorically-dishonest’ (e.g. closer to the ‘spurious’ line)
the latter is closer to outright ‘mendacious/ misleading / disingenuous / dissimulating / contrived / imposturous
it sounds like the term you describe is sort of a way of flagging “statements masked as questions”, and dismissing them.
The term I could find for “Statement disguised as question,” is declarative question. Can’t find anything for the response to that that you’re thinking of though.
Lurespørsmål
Asinine?
Cretinous?
Casusitry?
Fucking nonsense.
Whoops, you said one word.
Fuckingnonsense.
Isn’t it a false dilemma?
Robby?
Nah, that’s a synonym for fruit sushi and/or fabulous hair.
OT: Big thumbs up to the President for this.
But what about all the addicts we can’t force to undergo treatment? How can we help abusers unless we saddle them with felonies? Who will take the helm and make sure drug policy is as onerous as possible?
The private prison system, obviously! Then private people will be able to arrest them for whatever they want!
Indentured servitude. That’s gonna be his plan for reducing the deficit!
You know who else introduced indentured servitude to help offset their massive deficit spending?
Metacomet?
Every Civ player?
In other news, 1 in 7 inmates are now lifers. The number has nearly quintupled since 1984.
Well they do tend to accumulate, what with the increasing life expectancies.
Well that’s pretty much just a turn of phrase. When they say they “have no government”, that doesn’t mean the bureaucracies go away, the social services stop and military evaporates, it just means there’s no ruling coalition that can easily pass laws. They still have some sort of interim or temporary prime minister and other offices that amount to a sort of “caretaker government” that can still in theory pass laws, declare war or respond to national emergencies et cetera.
It comes down to two different meanings in this context, there is the entity that operates the state and the other meaning is that of a grouping or coalition that holds sway at the moment. There is not always coalition or majority in place, but for those 589 days Belgium still had a government according to the strictest sense of the term.
I think what you mean is that they still had robust civic institutions, even if they had no government directing them.
you can have institutions which keep the ‘body’ of government in place even without the ‘head’ of a ruling party/elected figure; you can also have a head in place, but no actual successful institutions though which that government is able to effect itself (e.g. say, Afghanistan)
Belgium also had a Queen (or a King or something) to take over at last resort.
yes, a monarchy is itself one of those ‘agreed-upon civic institutions’ that grows out of a populace already accepting of some underlying basic order, some legitimate authority.
institutions are fundamentally more-important than government – governments being just ‘the people periodically hired to administer those institutions’.
you can have a functioning civic society without a government; you can’t have one without widely-accepted, functional institutions.
The problem with most ‘failed states’ is that at some point someone (usually a colonial power) tried shoehorning western style institutions onto pre-existing tribal institutions, destroyed the cohesion of the latter, while failing to create any trust or integrity in the former. What is left are corrupt structures which are simply used as vehicles for despots to rob the country and oppress enemies.
Its not that they are plagued with ‘bad governments’ so much as failed-institutions which enable and incentivize endless bad-governments.
The situation in Somalia is basically that they have 2 competing claims for authority – the western style secular government which is weak and horribly corrupt, and the islamic tribal systems which has wider degrees of trust but which basically sanctions vigilante-murder as a ‘law enforcement’ norm.
Yeah I think you’re right. The term “government” has additional meanings that are more commonly used by people living under parliamentary systems. The closest that Americans get to using the word “government” in this way is when we’re talking about “government shutdown”, which doesn’t actually mean that they’re boarding up the windows at the Pentagon or that the FAA stops directing air traffic all of a sudden.
No, Free Society means the police are still in business, and indeed the state continues to have all the powers it did when there was “a government”. In parliamentary systems, by “a government” they mean an agreement by a majority in the parliament to work together legislatively. That’s all it means. It sounds much more severe than it actually is, because the condition of their having “no government” is very much like the USUAL conduct of government in non-parliamentary polities, especially those without strong party systems. The legislators in parliamentary systems don’t like having to continually bargain and compromise with each other; instead they like to see where the power lies and submit to it, bargaining only at intervals between. In truth the bargaining and compromising continues under the surface even in a parliament, but they like the appearance of its not being so.
Thank you for this, and your continuing efforts at providing ammo for those of us living in progland.
Dear trshmnstr, if you’re out there-
Just read your Indycar rant. Having worked in both CART and the IRL in the ’90’s and early 00’s, I agree.
“Managed competition” is the ridiculous farce into which the series has devolved (that, and truly obsessive risk avoidance- the best thing that could happen to the series would be to kill off a few of the guys who have been trundling around while counting their money for the past two decades), and it sucks. Indycar is stagnant. It’s a smelly cesspool of self-dealing and insider trading; shit, there are only three teams in the series, for all intents and purposes. The hideous tugboats currently being used are not even open wheel race cars in any true sense of the term.
I watch the “lesser” series, these days. I’m a big fan of the Series Formerly Known as GP2 (now F2 again) and F3. I’d rather watch the USF2000 cars than the so-called Indycar big boys.
Story time: In ’94, when Penske showed up at the Speedway with the pushrod Mercedes motor, we were pitted up on the north end of the pits, by Pit In. For days, I listened to those cars come off of Four and asked, “Why do those things sound so weird?” Friday rolled around, and it became obvious they had spent the week sandbagging, and had been pretty much coasting around.
I think Somalia proves that No Government Libertopia is worse than Minnesoda Winters.
At least based on our recent immigration patterns.
Isn’t that just where the Feds air-drop them?