From The Onion:
Libertarian Reluctantly Calls Fire Department
CHEYENNE, WY - After attempting to contain a living-room blaze started by a cigarette, card-carrying Libertarian Trent Jacobs reluctantly called the Cheyenne Fire Department Monday. "Although the community would do better to rely on an efficient, free-market fire-fighting service, the fact is that expensive, unnecessary public fire departments do exist," Jacobs said. "Also, my house was burning down." Jacobs did not offer to pay firefighters for their service.
OK, you got us. As a card carrying Libertarian myself, I'll concede the humor at our expense. Sometimes some of our people go overboard with taking the abstract intellectual principles of liberty and pushing them to a point of silliness. From time to time, we'll get people going on about privatizing the sidewalks and such. Occasionally some of our people get sidetracked with long considerations of the exact perfect way to handle societal minutiae when we've got bigger fish to fry. Fair criticism.
Let me say just a couple of things in our defense, though. For starters, I would not expect to pay firefighters again out of pocket as this little article implied we should. We already pay taxes, just like anyone else. Even if we think most things the government does should be privatized, they're not, and that's the system we're working in.
More important, this severe aversion to using government services may look a tad silly, but wouldn't the whole society be FAR better off if everyone was similarly reluctant to leech off of taxpayers?
Article comments
1 - Mark Saleski
sure thing al.
now all we've got to do is sit down together and grapple with the definition of "leech".
2 - Mark Saleski
and by the way, where the heck is the review of the new Prince cd?
3 - Shark
I say to hell with the government wasting my tax dollars!
(I'd like to comment more, but I've gotta run -- have to finish that Interstate highway I've been working on.)
~Toodles!
4 - Al Barger
Yes, Mark, that definition gets tricky. However, finding such a definition would be less of an issue if more people took the point of view implied by this Onion parody of not taking stuff THEMSELVES.
5 - don
I agree with the libertarians about the absolute virtue of liberty, but they need to take econ 101 and find out what a natural monopoly is.
6 - mike
Since the Internet was invented by the government, and is fundamentally a quasi-socialist entity, I'm surprised Al can even get himself to suf the Web.
7 - Dodd
When I was a kid, our house caught fire and was spared from more than minimal damage by the fire dept. A few weeks later, my parents got a bill for their service. It wasn't much compared to losing the house, only a few hundred bucks, but they did have to pay it.
8 - Al Barger
That seems fair enough.
9 - Libertarian Parodists Get More Ice Cream
Don @ April 29 2004.
Natural monopolies are rare, are they not? Government granted monopolies are commonplace.
Sorry about the decade delay in replying :-) , but I happened to be searching for parodies of libertarianism and only just now found this.
Am I sending a mixed message? Absolutely!