Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Revolution?

Mr. Epstein writes up some near future revolution speculation.

He seems a bit overly optimistic that despite a lot of other people suffering things will turn out ok (read, the way he wants, with his side prevailing) in the end...

Will members of the military refuse to fire on civilians? Yes. He's right about that. But not all will in any revolution scenario. Some will follow their orders.

Will external forces stay away from the continental US after a debilitating revolution? No. And some will interfere ostensibly to help any side and will be welcome. At first.

Will folks Mark thinks competent be riddled with ineptitude? Will folks he thinks incompetent demonstrate surprisingly clever effectiveness? Yes.

Will the end result be better than the 'horrible' situation the Republic is in now? Almost certainly not.

The unanticipated situations would bite this libertarian 'utopia' in the ass. No one knows the unknowns. 'Uninteded Consequences' would be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The lucky ones would die in the first week.

Never trust predictive utopias.

He might be on to good speculative fiction... but bad policy.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The apocalypse is nigh! Just like all those other times! Good post.