Jacobin Magazine managing editor Connor Kilpatrick:
When a Red like me wants to argue for something like universal health care or free college tuition, we can point to dozens of wealthy democratic societies doing just that. The Stalinist left is nothing more than a faint memory. But where are the libertarian Utopias?
General Pinochet’s Chile was a longtime favorite. But seeing as how it relied on a fascist coup””with a big assist from Nixon and Kissinger””Chile’s lost a bit of that Cold War luster. So these days, for the slightly more with-it libertarian, we get Singapore as the model of choice.
Hey, isn’t that where the Facebook guy lives these days? That’s pretty ”œhip”!
Ah, Singapore: a city-state near the very top in the world when it comes to ”œnumber of police” and ”œexecution rate” per capita. It’s a charming little one-party state where soft-core pornography is outlawed, labor rights are almost nonexistent and gay sex is banned. Expect a caning if you break a window. And death for a baggie of cocaine.
But hey: no capital gains tax! (Freedom!)
h/t Jacobin (+1 for excellent mullet action)
Has a state run medical system. Even Libertarian utopia have such as system.
As digby over at Hullabaloo has noted several times before, libertarianism is a wet dream of college-age boys who masturbate too much and like to smoke pot and read Ayn Rand novels. There is no modern example of a functioning society based on libertarian principles. It is a tautological truism that you can’t have a functioning government when you don’t believe in government in the first place.
Somalia.