JOHN GALT NEVER DID THIS
Sep. 30th, 2014 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogOne of the more amusing angles of the Tea Party Libertarian OMG narrative has always been the threat of “going Galt” – that Ayn Randian fantasy in Atlas Shrugged where Libertarians are all genius capitalist engineers who form their own govt-free Utopia, leaving socialist America to collapse into a chaotic socialist cesspool of socialist tyranny, which serves them right.
To which the rest of us usually respond, “You want to go Galt, you go right ahead. We’ll be here when you decide you want to come back.”
Of course, most Libertarian Ayn Rand fans don’t want to collapse society – they just want to live someplace where there is no govt to tell them what to do (especially pay taxes) and everything is run by private enterprise.
As it turns out, that “someplace” is in South America, where a few Libertarian groups have actually started Galt’s Gulch-type enterprises. There’s La Estancia de Cafayate in Argentina, for example.
There’s also Galt’s Gulch Chile (GGC).
However, the latter is getting some bad press, as it turns out the place is … well, a disaster.
According to co-founder Jeff Berwick, it didn’t start that way, but the whole enterprise apparently went south (literally and figuratively) after his business partner Ken Johnson took over GGC and basically botched the whole project and fleeced a lot of investors in the process by selling them land he had no legal rights to sell.
You can read Berwick’s TL;DR account of the saga here. And you can also read the experience of Wendy McElroy, one of GGC’s customers, here.
Or you could just read this snotty writeup from Gawker.
Some on the left may be tempted to point and laugh and use this to prove Libertarians are insane morons. I wouldn’t go that far. It’s at least theoretically possible that a Galt’s Gulch could be established somewhere, and it might even be able to function as though the rest of the world doesn't exist. Berwick remains hopeful that GGC can be rebooted under better leadership. Maybe.
But I do think there’s two useful takeaways from all this:
1. True libertarianism is a lot harder than Ayn Rand makes it sound – and that’s just for a gated community, let alone an entire nation.
2. Govt may be corrupt and incompetent, but that doesn’t mean private enterprise is the polar opposite. Which probably means that the problem isn’t govt or corporations, but the people in them.
Or, as Gawker put it:
Freedom isn’t free,
This is dF
To which the rest of us usually respond, “You want to go Galt, you go right ahead. We’ll be here when you decide you want to come back.”
Of course, most Libertarian Ayn Rand fans don’t want to collapse society – they just want to live someplace where there is no govt to tell them what to do (especially pay taxes) and everything is run by private enterprise.
As it turns out, that “someplace” is in South America, where a few Libertarian groups have actually started Galt’s Gulch-type enterprises. There’s La Estancia de Cafayate in Argentina, for example.
There’s also Galt’s Gulch Chile (GGC).
However, the latter is getting some bad press, as it turns out the place is … well, a disaster.
According to co-founder Jeff Berwick, it didn’t start that way, but the whole enterprise apparently went south (literally and figuratively) after his business partner Ken Johnson took over GGC and basically botched the whole project and fleeced a lot of investors in the process by selling them land he had no legal rights to sell.
You can read Berwick’s TL;DR account of the saga here. And you can also read the experience of Wendy McElroy, one of GGC’s customers, here.
Or you could just read this snotty writeup from Gawker.
Some on the left may be tempted to point and laugh and use this to prove Libertarians are insane morons. I wouldn’t go that far. It’s at least theoretically possible that a Galt’s Gulch could be established somewhere, and it might even be able to function as though the rest of the world doesn't exist. Berwick remains hopeful that GGC can be rebooted under better leadership. Maybe.
But I do think there’s two useful takeaways from all this:
1. True libertarianism is a lot harder than Ayn Rand makes it sound – and that’s just for a gated community, let alone an entire nation.
2. Govt may be corrupt and incompetent, but that doesn’t mean private enterprise is the polar opposite. Which probably means that the problem isn’t govt or corporations, but the people in them.
Or, as Gawker put it:
In other words, Galt's Gulch Chile sounds exactly like the sort of plan you would expect from a bunch of fans of a crotchety old millionairess who wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness.
Freedom isn’t free,
This is dF
