The Probability Broach: Good guys with guns

"The real purpose of these 'good guy with a gun' scenarios isn’t to win over skeptics with the case for gun ownership. It’s to feed the egos of people who already own guns. It tells them that they’re lone heroes in a dangerous world, self-deputized to defend law and order from the scary outsiders all around."

https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/07/11/tpb-good-guys-with-guns/

The Probability Broach: Affordable care

"Health care is the classic case of a market failure, because critically ill people can’t afford to take their time and shop around for the best deal. They have no choice but to go to the first doctor available and agree to whatever price they demand. In turn, the doctor should charge that patient as much as they can possibly pay – up to and including a lifetime of debt slavery.

That doesn’t happen here, but only because libertarian novelists have their characters play nice and cut each other sweetheart deals, rather than taking their beliefs to their logical, ruthless conclusion."

https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/07/04/tpb-affordable-care/

The Probability Broach: Good samaritans

"In an anarcho-capitalist world, what would most people do if they heard gunshots outside and found a stranger bleeding to death on their doorstep? Wouldn’t they be more likely to conclude that this is someone else’s feud and they don’t want to get involved?

Would you be eager to take a dying stranger into your house and treat them at your own expense, knowing that some unknown party wants them dead, and knowing there are no police to call if you become the killer’s next target for helping their intended victim? Isn’t it more likely that the average person would say, 'This is none of my business, I’m staying out of it'?"

https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/06/27/tpb-good-samaritans/

”Their individualism, which they tie to a radical reified freedom vis-à-vis the state, ultimately makes them libertarian authoritarians, for they themselves are the only authorities they recognize.”

This is really important, people! What we’re dealing with is a resurgence of the #authoritarian mind

But it didn’t sprout from classical authoritarianism. Rather, the authoritarian personality came back to the political scene through #libertarianism, people who recognise no authority but themselves

The Probability Broach: Coffin nails

"This is an ideologically motivated omission. If some products were both addictive and inherently harmful, there’d be a legitimate argument to restrict them. Smoking bans couldn’t just be waved off as yet another overreach by a tyrannical, power-hungry government. At the very least, you’d have to admit that there were real tradeoffs involved in regulating tobacco – something that Smith is never willing to do."

https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/06/20/tpb-coffin-nails/

The Probability Broach: Vegas on steroids

"In a laissez-faire society without zoning laws or regulations, every vertical surface should be covered with neon signs and digital billboards jostling each other for space. Everything else should be plastered with strata of posters, fliers and handbills. Every business would have an incentive to make their ads bigger, brighter, gaudier and more obnoxious than all the rest, to stand out from their competitors.

Every beautiful landscape and natural wonder should be despoiled with hideous advertisements (which did indeed happen in a less civilized era)."

https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/06/13/tpb-vegas-on-steroids/

The Probability Broach: Mo' money, mo' problems

"This sort of thing should be a massive problem in an ancap society. There’s no central bank, no treasury, no government with a money-printing monopoly. Anyone who wants to coin their own money, can – and there’s a powerful incentive to do so, namely seigniorage, the power to profit by creating money on demand.

...Trying to do business in this place would be a logistical nightmare. Imagine trying to buy something at a store, but being unable to, because the Venn diagram of currencies the merchant accepts and currencies you use has no overlap. Imagine having to check a hundred wildly fluctuating exchange rates every time you want to buy groceries."

https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/06/06/tpb-mo-money-mo-problems/

The Probability Broach: Kindergarteners packing heat

"Libertarians reflexively assume that humans are perfectly rational beings who carefully weigh the benefits and drawbacks of every decision, even in cases where it’s obvious that assumption is false. This is the most shocking example. Owning a firearm, much less carrying it around, demands a level of care, discipline and vigilance that most adults don’t possess."

https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/05/30/tpb-kindergarteners-packing-heat/

The Probability Broach: Self-hating government scientists

"This history of innovation doesn’t fit with libertarian dogma that only the free market can create anything new or useful, so they train themselves to ignore it. In fact, L. Neil Smith is so well-practiced at ignoring it that he can write a scene like this with a straight face – where a character invents something revolutionary while working for a government institution, all while decrying government science."

https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/05/23/tpb-self-hating-government-scientists/

The Probability Broach: Visit sunny Colorado

"Libertarianism is an ideology of the frontier. It’s premised—whether its advocates realize it or not—on the belief that there’s no need to get along with your neighbors, because you can always pull up stakes, move away and start over somewhere else.

The Rocky Mountains, which are the dramatic backbone of the state, are like a visual metaphor for this idea. They’re a natural boundary, majestic and beautiful yet isolated and forbidding. As opposed to, say, the Great Plains states, which are wide-open and flat and have no obvious place to go where others can’t follow you, the Rockies seem to promise escape to anyone who’s tired of putting up with civilization."

https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/05/16/tpb-visit-sunny-colorado/

The Probability Broach: Education isn't efficient

"An 'efficient' policy would be to only spend our resources on educating those who stand to benefit the most. You could imagine a society that administers a test to children at a young age, sends those who score best to well-funded elite schools, and consigns everyone else to menial labor and serfdom, Brave New World-style. That would be 'efficient' in the sense Smith means. But civilized countries don’t do that, and for good reason."

https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/05/09/tpb-education-isnt-efficient/

The Probability Broach: Smoke gets in your eyes

"In the anarcho-capitalist utopia that Smith fantasizes about, it would obviously be impossible to have environmental protection laws. Anyone could pollute to their heart’s content: spew smoke into the sky, pour raw sewage in rivers, dump trash in the ocean, bury toxic waste where it leaches into the soil.

Obviously, for-profit businesses can and have done all these things. They’ve caused a litany of infamous disasters, from Love Canal to Cancer Alley to the Donora death fog to the Exxon Valdez to Deepwater Horizon. But Smith is so dead-set on blaming government for every evil, he shoves that history under the rug and pretends that the state – not private actors chasing profit in an unregulated market – is solely responsible for pollution."

https://freethoughtblogs.com/daylight/2025/05/02/tpb-smoke-gets-in-your-eyes/

I probably haven't spent as much time as I should have, talking about the Washington Post and billionaire maggot owner Jeff Bezos' low-key capitulation or perhaps more accurately long-awaited embrace of the fascist American right; at least in part because a lot of the people at WaPo are still doing something resembling journalism and fact-based reporting has a well-known bias against the Emperor of Lies and the larger Trump regime. Bezos himself however, has repeatedly signaled to the Kelpto Kaiser that he, his empire, and his newspaper are open for business with the regime; with the two most prominent examples being Amazon's $1M donation to Trump's inauguration, and Jeff's reorganization of the WaPo editorial department to promote pro-capitalist libertarian propaganda in the service of a billionaire oligarch; namely himself.

So how is this re-imagining of the country's "liberal" paper of record going? Well if this short and to the point post by the fedi's own @davidgerard is any indication, the answer is "not great, Bob!"

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/04/washington-post-goes-ai-to-clean-up-amateur-right-wing-op-eds/

Washington Post goes AI to clean up amateur right-wing op-eds

"The first part of the AI-fueled platform plan is called Ripple. The Post wants to fill out the opinion section with “nonprofessional writers.” How will they quality check these? They’ll run them past an AI!

Why does the Post want to do this? Because they can’t find enough good writers to create the owner’s desired libertarian propaganda.

The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. In February this year, Bezos mandated that the Post’s opinion pages would support “personal liberties and free markets” and not print pieces that did not support these. Sounds nice, but those are specific jargon terms that rich libertarians use to mean “liberty for my money” and not any other sort of freedom or liberty for any other person."

Obviously, Dave's focus is the implementation of bunk "AI" programs to filter through trashfire winger substack author submissions, but our interest here is mostly the divide this exposes between the Bezos-loyal editorial board, and the actual news departments at the Washington Post. Please keep in mind that this is the same editorial board that just endorsed RFK Jr's transphobic, pro-conversation therapy "study" of trans care in America; the Post's upper management is desperate to realign the paper much further to the right to align with the billionaire boss's wishes, even if they're still failing in that endeavor for the most part. How desperate? Well I'm pretty sure begging substack libertarians to write editorial pieces in the paper of record for the most politically-connected city in America, under the guise of democratizing the opinions section, is a depth not even Bezos thought he'd ever have to sink to.

In the bigger picture the real lesson we might be learning here is that the pro-fascist, anti-humanist billionaire agenda being forced on Pig Empire society by the amoral oligarch maggots who own everything around us, including our governments, is simply not popular; and even force feeding it to us through every major organ of our discourse, isn't changing that reality anytime soon.