A question for the Libertarians

[trixare4kids]

I used to consider myself a Libertarian until I realized that you can't get more the two Libertarians to agree on anything, because as soon as a third party gets involved the arguments begin, including the standard accusations of "you aren't a real Libertarian because you'd agree with me if you were."

That's so true.
I remember when I decided to be a libertarian for one presidential voting cycle. I was told by other libertarians that in order to be one I had to be open minded with illegals crossing our borders. Plus, members from both parties condemn you for voting libertarian because you're vote won't count. I was finally convinced voting for one from the major two parties was best.

 

[Ikari]

If you knew what it meant, you would apply it to Gates, Zuckerberg and the rest of the technocrats wh9 control is all to a far greater degree than Trump.

Trump cozies up to the oligarchy the same as everyone else, Musk and Bezos and all those folk.

You're not fighting the oligarchy by supporting Trump, Trump just wants to cement it all into the State and rule it with Party. It's the China model.

 

[Gardener]

Trump cozies up to the oligarchy the same as everyone else, Musk and Bezos and all those folk.

You're not fighting the oligarchy by supporting Trump, Trump just wants to cement it all into the State and rule it with Party. It's the China model.

I remember when both of my boys learned a new vocabulary word and then used it as often as they could.

 

[Ikari]

I remember when both of my boys learned a new vocabulary word and then used it as often as they could.

Well let's hope they got past the fourth grade level, unlike your Dear Leader.

lol

 

[VanceMack]

If you knew what it meant, you would apply it to Gates, Zuckerberg and the rest of the technocrats wh9 control is all to a far greater degree than Trump.

You just dont understand. Leftists only shit themselves about 'oligarchs' when they think they can accuse the 'oligarch' of supporting conservatives. These 'people' embrace the flooding of their puny rat gods coffers by 'oligarchs'...always have.

 

[Econ4every1]

Yes, it's a model used to analyze situations like shortages. Calling it “sterile” doesn’t refute it; it just tells me that you don't like what the model reveals.

You dismiss my critique of your model as "sterile" by saying I simply "don't like what the model reveals."

Let's break down your counterarguments.

1. You've Created a False Dichotomy: Price vs. "State Violence"

This is the most significant flaw in your reasoning. You present the only two options for rationing scarce goods as:

a) Price Gouging: Where the wealthy get the goods.
b) "State Violence": Where a government bureaucrat inefficiently distributes them.

This is a deliberate and misleading oversimplification. You are completely ignoring the most common and effective response in a disaster: community-led rationing and mutual aid.

In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, the functioning unit of survival is not the atomized individual, nor is it the distant federal government. It is the community. Neighbors check on neighbors. People with generators share power. Those who evacuated earlier and have supplies share with those who lost everything. Local churches, civic groups, and ad-hoc volunteer teams become the primary distribution network.

Your price-gouging model is actively hostile to this reality. By monetizing survival and turning neighbors into desperate competitors, it destroys the social trust and cohesion that are the most valuable assets a community has in a crisis. The choice isn't between a gouger and a FEMA agent; it's between a system that fosters collaboration and one that fosters exploitation. You are advocating for the latter.

2. You Misunderstand Hoarding

You claim, "If water’s free, the first guy in line can buy it all. If it’s expensive, he thinks twice."

This is a surface-level analysis and frankly I think it reveals a lot about you that this is what you assume people do in that situation. If you were in the front of the line filled with desperate mothers and children, elderly men and women and people injured from the storm, would you take all the free water? See, most people would realize that's selfish and would exercise control. Good people have empathy and compassion for others. This is why we condemn price gouging because it's not a real solution to the problem, it's an ideological solution that people support because, and allow me to put Libertarians as a group on the "couch" for a sec. I find they fall into two camps. They are either greedy and without compassion or empathy, or have been abused and they lack trust in others. Moving on.

Let's think a step deeper:

Price doesn't solve hoarding; it just changes who gets to do it.

3. You Co-Opted My Point on Infrastructure Collapse

I argued that broken infrastructure renders price signals impotent. Your response was: "FEMA trucks... also depend on roads and fuel... that's even more reason to let people improvise."

You are correct that infrastructure failure is a problem for everyone. But you miss the crucial difference in the motivation for overcoming it.

The Price Gouger's Motivation: Their goal is to get their goods to the point of sale for personal profit. They have no incentive to do anything that would limit their monoploy.

The Community/Rescue Motivation: The goal of rescue teams (whether official like FEMA or informal like the "Cajun Navy") is to restore systemic function and save human lives. Their goal is to open the road for everyone, to get the hospital generator running, and to distribute supplies based on need, not ability to pay.

"Local improvisation" is precisely what I am advocating for—the collaborative kind. Your model champions the "improvisation" of a predator, which actively undermines the cooperative improvisation a society needs to survive.

In short, this demonstrates why Libertarian model fails, because it ignores externalities. When someone can't afford water and drinks from a contaminated source, the resulting cholera outbreak is a massive negative externality that affects the entire community. When social trust collapses because of predatory behavior, the resulting violence and chaos are negative externalities.

Your "efficient" price signal in this context is profoundly inefficient for the system as a whole, because it privatizes the gains ($50 for a case of water) while socializing the catastrophic losses (public health collapse and the breakdown of civil order).

 

[Gardener]

Well let's hope they got past the fourth grade level, unlike your Dear Leader.

lol

You did not learn the meaning of the word oligarch in the fourth grade.

In fact, you still haven't learned it.

 

[Econ4every1]

No, because you don't believe monopolies are bad. You support giving a relatively tiny group of politicians a monopoly on the use of force and violence - the most dangerous and murderous monopoly ever created....

Let's be very clear. I will not accept your repeated attempts to frame this as a binary choice between price gouging and Soviet-style central planning. This is a rhetorical tactic to avoid confronting the failures of your own model. The world is more complex than that, and your refusal to acknowledge a third way is telling.

1. On Monopolies: A Textbook Deflection
When I pointed out the self-evident problem of a temporary monopoly on water, you responded by changing the subject to the state's monopoly on force.

This is a tu quoque fallacy and is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Whether the state is a justifiable monopoly is a separate, vast political philosophy debate. It does not, in any way, refute the fact that a private actor with a monopoly on a life-sustaining resource holds coercive power over a desperate population.

Let's stay focused: The water seller in this scenario has absolute market power. They are not a "price taker" but a "price maker." Your entire model of market efficiency is built on the premise of competition, a premise that is absent in this critical moment. You concede the monopoly exists, but then immediately defend it.

2. The "Incentive to End the Monopoly" is a Deadly Fantasy
You claim: "Allowing higher prices draws in competition and supply faster."

This is the core dogma of your argument, and it is fatally flawed in this context. You are valuing a theoretical, long-term market correction over immediate, real-world survival.

Imagine a house is on fire. My solution is for the community to grab buckets and help put it out. Your solution is to let the house burn to create a high price signal that "incentivizes" a private fire truck company to form, buy equipment, and eventually drive over to put out the embers.

You keep asserting that the market response will be "faster." Faster than what? It will not be faster than the 1-3 days it takes for a human to die of dehydration. In a situation of total infrastructure collapse—which you have still not properly addressed—the price signal may as well be a message in a bottle. No one is coming. The incentive is meaningless if the ability to respond is zero, or naturally, the best responses will be where people have money.

Your "solution" prioritizes the health of a theoretical market over the lives of the actual people who comprise it.

3. "High Prices are the Symptom, Not the Disease"
You state: "People get sick and desperate when they don’t get water - not when prices go up... This is about scarcity, not pricing."

This is a dangerous half-truth. Let's use your own analogy. Scarcity is the disease. Unfettered price is your prescribed treatment. I am arguing that your treatment is toxic.

The method of allocation is what directly causes the negative externality.

If water is scarce and is allocated by a community-based system of rationing (e.g., one case per family), people get a small but life-sustaining amount.
If water is scarce and allocated by your price system, the wealthy get all they want and the poor get none. It is the pricing mechanism itself that creates the subgroup of people who are forced to drink contaminated water.
Therefore, the public health crisis is not an inevitable symptom of scarcity; it is a direct consequence of your chosen solution to scarcity. You cannot separate the outcome from the mechanism.

The Final Rejection of Your False Dichotomy
You conclude by framing my position as: "I don’t like the consequences of scarcity, so I blame the system that acknowledges it." You then equate any other solution with "beloved price ceilings" and "central planners."

This is a strawman. I have never once advocated for a government price ceiling. I have never advocated for a central planner to allocate every resource.

You champion a system where a man with a truck of water is incentivized to see his desperate, dying neighbor as a profit opportunity. I champion a system where he sees him as a human being to be helped.

Your view isn't "honest"; it's a selective and brittle ideology that willfully ignores any human motivation other than pure financial self-interest (likely fueled by what I pointed out in my last post). It ignores the existence of social capital. It is a philosophy so focused on the freedom of the individual from the state that it justifies the freedom of that same individual to exploit his fellow citizen in their moment of greatest need.

The Libertarian view fails here not because only because it's heartless, but because it is fragile. It breaks down under the slightest real-world pressure.

 

[Ikari]

You did not learn the meaning of the word oligarch in the fourth grade.

In fact, you still haven't learned it.

Yes, I'm sure your education eclipses mine and are well versed in the propaganda you smear but then demand no one else use.

lol

What cha got? Probably a Bachelor's at best, likely business.

lol

 

[Econ4every1]

And on it's 2nd, 4th and 5th tries, too! .... if anybody was asking.

Yeah, My point about the moon landings was, that Starship has 9 launches only 4 could reasonably be called successes, and it's not like getting to orbit is breaking new ground. Apollo had 13 test missions of which 11 were successes.

in 1969 Saturn 5 could carry 140t to orbit. Musk claimed <cough-lied-cough> Starship would reach 250t, today that's been scaled back to a max of 150t, or only 10t greater than Saturn 5 if it every leaves the testing phase.. Apollo V were created with compass and protractors on drawing tables without the aid of CAD an in-computer-testing. So Musk and Starship have over 50 years of acquired knowledge and can't hit a 50% success rate? It would make sense if there was something truly groundbreaking here, but there isn't.

Starship is a dismal failure, whose only notable "feat" (Besides it's largest payload of 1 banana) was a graceful landing back on a launch tower, but that's a feat that I'd argue was a case of - the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

 

[Gardener]

Yes, I'm sure your education eclipses mine and are well versed in the propaganda you smear but then demand no one else use.

lol

What cha got? Probably a Bachelor's at best, likely business.

lol

Yes, you subscribe to authoritarian leftist politics on service to global oligarchs.

It's nice to have that one settled.

 

[Ikari]

Yes, you subscribe to authoritarian leftist politics on service to global oligarchs.

It's nice to have that one settled.

Yes, you subscribe to the authoritarian rightist politics on service to global oligarchs.

It's nice to have that one settled.

 

[Gardener]

Yes, you subscribe to the authoritarian rightist politics on service to global oligarchs.

It's nice to have that one settled.

My goodness, that one is ALMOST as clever as " I know what you are, but what am I?"



Almost

 

[Ikari]

My goodness, that one is ALMOST as clever as " I know what you are, but what am I?"



Almost

Your posts don't really deserve clever. You want to pretend your side isn't doing the same shit, that's all. You live in a delusional political sphere of MAGA propaganda and bullshit. There's not much to do about that, and it's not worth any grand efforts.

 

[Gardener]

Your posts don't really deserve clever. You want to pretend your side isn't doing the same shit, that's all. You live in a delusional political sphere of MAGA propaganda and bullshit. There's not much to do about that, and it's not worth any grand efforts.

I did not vote for Trump.

You have a need to reduce the complexity of politics down to a child's game of Cowboys and Indians is all.


Oops. My bad. Make that colonial oppressors and brave natives.

 

[VanceMack]

I used to consider myself a Libertarian until I realized that you can't get more the two Libertarians to agree on anything, because as soon as a third party gets involved the arguments begin, including the standard accusations of "you aren't a real Libertarian because you'd agree with me if you were."

I was asked to leave the Libertarian caucus because I was 1-too much of a republican and then 2-too much of a democrat and really, all I was saying was that the continued insistence on the party platform as constituted has prevented them from EVER being viable. I'm still a registered Libertarian and I still usually vote Libertarian (I couldnt bring myself to vote for Johnson the 2nd time around).

Ive sent correspondence to the party and the unofficial party leader (Jo Jorgensen) recommending they stop this once every 4 years pretense of relevancy and start promoting real and legitimate candidates at state levels....but...I am nobody and I get that. Then again...the party is politically 'nobody'.

 

[Gardener]

I was asked to leave the Libertarian caucus because I was 1-too much of a republican and then 2-too much of a democrat and really, all I was saying was that the continued insistence on the party platform as constituted has prevented them from EVER being viable. I'm still a registered Libertarian and I still usually vote Libertarian (I couldnt bring myself to vote for Johnson the 2nd time around).

Ive sent correspondence to the party and the unofficial party leader (Jo Jorgensen) recommending they stop this once every 4 years pretense of relevancy and start promoting real and legitimate candidates at state levels....but...I am nobody and I get that. Then again...the party is politically 'nobody'.

All Ikari knows is that it means something along the lines of "poopoohead". His understanding goes no deeper than that.

 

[aociswundumho]

Let's be very clear. I will not accept your repeated attempts to frame this as a binary choice between price gouging and Soviet-style central planning. This is a rhetorical tactic to avoid confronting the failures of your own model. The world is more complex than that, and your refusal to acknowledge a third way is telling.

The "third way" is fascism. That's where ownership is nominally private, but the state still has full control over the economy. It's really just another form of socialism.

1. On Monopolies: A Textbook Deflection
When I pointed out the self-evident problem of a temporary monopoly on water, you responded by changing the subject to the state's monopoly on force.

No, you asked a general question:

Can we agree monopolies are bad?

I then pointed out that you do not believe monopolies are bad and I provided an example as evidence (the state's monopoly on violence and force which has resulted in hundreds of millions of innocent people being worked to death, starved death, or simply executed by various governments in the past).

Note that you probably support all kinds of other government monopolies as well, e.g. the post office, dmv, fire departments, etc.

The truth is you do not believe monopolies are bad, as long as the monopoly is held by a group of politicians. I suppose that's because you believe politicians are morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us.

This is a tu quoque fallacy and is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Whether the state is a justifiable monopoly is a separate, vast political philosophy debate. It does not, in any way, refute the fact that a private actor with a monopoly on a life-sustaining resource holds coercive power over a desperate population.

You're simply wrong, again. If you have water, and I want some of that water, you are not coercing me.

Let's stay focused: The water seller in this scenario has absolute market power. They are not a "price taker" but a "price maker." Your entire model of market efficiency is built on the premise of competition, a premise that is absent in this critical moment. You concede the monopoly exists, but then immediately defend it.

Yes, the water seller has temporary market power. But market power doesn’t automatically equal abuse or coercion. High prices serve to ration supply and incentivize outside suppliers to bring more in - even in a monopoly. That’s not ideal, but it beats pretending that one of your beloved politicians can just outlaw scarcity.

You claim: "Allowing higher prices draws in competition and supply faster."

This is the core dogma of your argument, and it is fatally flawed in this context. You are valuing a theoretical, long-term market correction over immediate, real-world survival.

Imagine a house is on fire. My solution is for the community to grab buckets and help put it out. Your solution is to let the house burn to create a high price signal that "incentivizes" a private fire truck company to form, buy equipment, and eventually drive over to put out the embers.

You keep asserting that the market response will be "faster." Faster than what? It will not be faster than the 1-3 days it takes for a human to die of dehydration. In a situation of total infrastructure collapse—which you have still not properly addressed—the price signal may as well be a message in a bottle. No one is coming. The incentive is meaningless if the ability to respond is zero, or naturally, the best responses will be where people have money.

Your "solution" prioritizes the health of a theoretical market over the lives of the actual people who comprise it.

I have no problem with the community stepping in voluntarily - bucket brigades, charity, mutual aid, all of it. But you're arguing that voluntary help isn't enough, so we need to ban prices and hand all power to the state instead. That’s where it falls apart. Suppressing prices doesn't create more water, it just guarantees hoarding and black markets.

Once again, prices aren't the enemy - scarcity is. And price is one of the few tools that actually helps ration supply and incentivize delivery while the community does what it can. You don’t fight a fire by banning hoses.

 

[Deuce]

ALL libertarians (including influential ones) oppose ANY forms of Direct Taxation. There are no exceptions. If someone thinks that Direct Taxes are acceptable, then they cannot possibly be a libertarian.

No True Scotsman fallacies are rarely posted so explicitly, kudos.

 

[Deuce]

The textbook Straw-Man fallacy.

Thanks for making it.

You got nothing.

You posted an extremely literal No True Scotsman.

And you don't know what a straw man is.

 

[SkyChief]

No True Scotsman fallacies are rarely posted so explicitly, kudos.

You don't even understand the cornerstone principle of libertarianism, so your argument is based entirely on a false premise.

You posted an extremely literal No True Scotsman.

You don't even understand the cornerstone principle of libertarianism, so your argument is based entirely on a false premise.

No libertarian believes that government should force someone to do something against their will. Your "No True Scotsman" argument has no merit.

Your only (sensible) argument would be to provide the name of a libertarian who feels that government should have the power to take a percentage of our earnings (in the form of Income Tax). But know that I will easily prove that the person whom you named is NOT a libertarian.

A circle cannot have corners. A sphere cannot have corners.

That is NOT a No True Scotsman fallacy - it is a fact. By the same token, if someone believes that government should have the power to take a percentage of our earnings, then he or she is definitely NOT a libertarian.

And you don't know what a straw man is.

Of course I do. The argument was a perfect example of a straw-man.

 

[Yes_Minister]

I agree. This is not the best solution. It is still better than the damaging trade imbalance we have had for decades.

Do you think Trump attempting to drive Canada into a recession with tariffs so Canada ''will become the 51st state" is helping America?

I hope you like it when the US tourism industry takes a massive hit over this:

Canadian Boycott Of U.S. Travel Is Going Stronger Than Ever, New Data Says

Last month, 38% fewer Canadians visited the U.S. by car compared to May 2024—cementing a trajectory of international tourism declines and a potential economic loss of $12.5 billion this year.

www.forbes.com

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/28/travel-spending-us-from-overseas-tourists-to-fall-in-2025.html

I guess people in the tourism industry who lose these jobs are necessary sacrifices eh?

 

[MamboDervish]

Let's be very clear. I will not accept your repeated attempts to frame this as a binary choice between price gouging and Soviet-style central planning. This is a rhetorical tactic to avoid confronting the failures of your own model. The world is more complex than that, and your refusal to acknowledge a third way is telling.

1. On Monopolies: A Textbook Deflection
When I pointed out the self-evident problem of a temporary monopoly on water, you responded by changing the subject to the state's monopoly on force.

This is a tu quoque fallacy and is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Whether the state is a justifiable monopoly is a separate, vast political philosophy debate. It does not, in any way, refute the fact that a private actor with a monopoly on a life-sustaining resource holds coercive power over a desperate population.

Let's stay focused: The water seller in this scenario has absolute market power. They are not a "price taker" but a "price maker." Your entire model of market efficiency is built on the premise of competition, a premise that is absent in this critical moment. You concede the monopoly exists, but then immediately defend it.

2. The "Incentive to End the Monopoly" is a Deadly Fantasy
You claim: "Allowing higher prices draws in competition and supply faster."

This is the core dogma of your argument, and it is fatally flawed in this context. You are valuing a theoretical, long-term market correction over immediate, real-world survival.

Imagine a house is on fire. My solution is for the community to grab buckets and help put it out. Your solution is to let the house burn to create a high price signal that "incentivizes" a private fire truck company to form, buy equipment, and eventually drive over to put out the embers.

You keep asserting that the market response will be "faster." Faster than what? It will not be faster than the 1-3 days it takes for a human to die of dehydration. In a situation of total infrastructure collapse—which you have still not properly addressed—the price signal may as well be a message in a bottle. No one is coming. The incentive is meaningless if the ability to respond is zero, or naturally, the best responses will be where people have money.

Your "solution" prioritizes the health of a theoretical market over the lives of the actual people who comprise it.

3. "High Prices are the Symptom, Not the Disease"
You state: "People get sick and desperate when they don’t get water - not when prices go up... This is about scarcity, not pricing."

This is a dangerous half-truth. Let's use your own analogy. Scarcity is the disease. Unfettered price is your prescribed treatment. I am arguing that your treatment is toxic.

The method of allocation is what directly causes the negative externality.

If water is scarce and is allocated by a community-based system of rationing (e.g., one case per family), people get a small but life-sustaining amount.
If water is scarce and allocated by your price system, the wealthy get all they want and the poor get none. It is the pricing mechanism itself that creates the subgroup of people who are forced to drink contaminated water.
Therefore, the public health crisis is not an inevitable symptom of scarcity; it is a direct consequence of your chosen solution to scarcity. You cannot separate the outcome from the mechanism.

The Final Rejection of Your False Dichotomy
You conclude by framing my position as: "I don’t like the consequences of scarcity, so I blame the system that acknowledges it." You then equate any other solution with "beloved price ceilings" and "central planners."

This is a strawman. I have never once advocated for a government price ceiling. I have never advocated for a central planner to allocate every resource.

You champion a system where a man with a truck of water is incentivized to see his desperate, dying neighbor as a profit opportunity. I champion a system where he sees him as a human being to be helped.

Your view isn't "honest"; it's a selective and brittle ideology that willfully ignores any human motivation other than pure financial self-interest (likely fueled by what I pointed out in my last post). It ignores the existence of social capital. It is a philosophy so focused on the freedom of the individual from the state that it justifies the freedom of that same individual to exploit his fellow citizen in their moment of greatest need.

The Libertarian view fails here not because only because it's heartless, but because it is fragile. It breaks down under the slightest real-world pressure.

+1

 

[MamboDervish]

Yeah, My point about the moon landings was, that Starship has 9 launches only 4 could reasonably be called successes, and it's not like getting to orbit is breaking new ground. Apollo had 13 test missions of which 11 were successes.

in 1969 Saturn 5 could carry 140t to orbit. Musk claimed <cough-lied-cough> Starship would reach 250t, today that's been scaled back to a max of 150t, or only 10t greater than Saturn 5 if it every leaves the testing phase.. Apollo V were created with compass and protractors on drawing tables without the aid of CAD an in-computer-testing. So Musk and Starship have over 50 years of acquired knowledge and can't hit a 50% success rate? It would make sense if there was something truly groundbreaking here, but there isn't.

Starship is a dismal failure, whose only notable "feat" (Besides it's largest payload of 1 banana) was a graceful landing back on a launch tower, but that's a feat that I'd argue was a case of - the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

After his start with Lockheed Martin, my brother spent about a dozen years with ULA on the Atlas V project. The anti-science, anti-government parade of know-nothing politicians never stopped bitching about the price. They hate to be reminded that the high cost of success is often still much cheaper than the cost of failure. In 161 launches, the joint venture ULA Atlas V still has a 100% success rate!

What may seem like over-engineering, and excessive system redundancy leading to time and cost overruns, doesn't come cheap, it does lead to success. As my brother is so fond of pointing out, "Space is hard."

 

[Econ4every1]

The "third way" is fascism. That's where ownership is nominally private, but the state still has full control over the economy. It's really just another form of socialism.

Your attempt to label my "third way" of mutual aid and community action as "fascism" is not only a stunning display of historical and political ignorance, but it is also a desperate rhetorical grenade thrown to distract from the collapse of your own argument.

Let's be intellectually honest.

Fascism is a system of state power and ultranationalism where the government exerts absolute authoritarian control over private industry and society. It is the definition of coercion.

Mutual aid, charity, and community-led relief efforts are the epitome of voluntary civil society. They are, by definition, the absence of state coercion.

To conflate voluntary community action with fascism is an unforgivable distortion. It proves you have no coherent response to the existence of a successful, non-state, non-market solution, so you must smear it with the most offensive label you can imagine.

You have spent this entire debate championing voluntary action. I have now presented you with the most powerful form of voluntary action that exists in a crisis, and you call it fascism. It's a breathtaking contradiction.

On Coercion
You claim that holding the sole supply of a life-sustaining resource over a desperate person is not coercion. This relies on a definition of coercion so childishly narrow it's useless.

If a mugger points a gun at me and says, "Your money or your life," is that a voluntary transaction? Am I not being coerced? I have a choice, after all.

The choice you present to the dehydrated family—"Pay me $100 or watch your child get sick"—is not materially different. When one party holds the power of life and death over the other, the resulting transaction is not free. It is an ultimatum delivered under duress. To pretend otherwise is to engage in a semantic game that insults the intelligence of anyone who has ever faced a true crisis.

This brings us to the fatal contradiction you are now trapped in. You state:

"I have no problem with the community stepping in voluntarily - bucket brigades, charity, mutual aid, all of it. BUT..."

That "but" is where your entire argument disintegrates. You cannot simultaneously support a system of mutual aid and a system of price gouging. They are fundamentally, philosophically, and practically incompatible.

Mutual aid operates on the logic of solidarity. It asks, "Who is in need? How can we help?" Its currency is trust and social cohesion. Price gouging operates on the logic of extraction. It asks, "Who is desperate? How much can I get from them?" Its currency is cash.

When the man with the pallet of water arrives in a neighborhood, he makes a choice. He can be a member of the bucket brigade you claim to support, distributing water based on need. Or, he can become the monopolist you defend, selling it to the highest bidder. He cannot be both. Capitalism only thrives when there is actual competition not the conceptual "free market" capitalism that you romanticize, where "free market" is little more than a euphemism for "lawless market".

You are the one arguing against freedom
This entire time, you have hidden behind a caricature of my position, claiming I want to "ban prices" and "hand all power to the state."

Let me state this one last time so there is no confusion. I am not arguing for a centralized state planner to allocate every bottle of water. I am arguing that in a declared state of emergency, we must legally prevent predatory exploitation precisely so that true voluntary action can flourish.

We must protect the bucket brigade from the monopolist. We must protect the community from the predator. We must protect the vast majority who are willing to act in solidarity from the few who would profit from their misery.

You say, "You don't fight a fire by banning hoses." You are correct. But when a man is hoarding the only hoses around and charging dying people a fortune for a trickle of water, you sure as hell stop him. You don't celebrate his entrepreneurial spirit; you liberate the hoses for the good of the community so everyone can fight the fire together.

Your position isn't "honest" or "realistic." It is a rigid, antisocial dogma that, when followed to its logical conclusion, creates a world where the most basic human impulse—to help one another in a crisis—is replaced by a cash transaction. It is a philosophy that is so terrified of the state that it embraces a form of private coercion that is, in a crisis, even more immediate and cruel. It is a blueprint for how to fail as a society.