A large scale assault on public goods

The book “A Libertarian Walks into a Bear” is the chronicle of an experiment in the creation of a libertarian colony in a small village in New Hamshire, devoted to eliminating taxation and regulation at the local level. The experiment includes cryptocurrencies and bizarre characters. The consequence is utter failure, and an increase in violence –including the violence of bears (suddenly attracted to a dirty place) against humans.

The last edition of the book finishes with an afterword explaining that the leaders of the failed experiment are now promoting the secession of New Hamshire from the United States, apparently copying the experience of Balkan countries, those that resulted from the Yugoslavian wars at the end of the XXth century that killed several tens of thousands of people. Beyond Bosnia and Slovenia, the author claims that the promoters want to imitate the independence of Catalonia as if this one had succeeded. I hasn’t: the only secessionist attempt that has been completed in the European Union is Brexit –another failure in institutional engineering.

But the leaders of that attempt in New Hamshire do not need to promote their secession from the U.S. any longer, as now the US as a whole has been taken over by leaders that are trying to develop a large scale project based on the same principle: the elimination of public goods and services. In economics, public goods are goods that are shared by everybody (non-rival and non-excludable). Many of them are provided by government. Not all of them: for example, the Pythagoras theorem was authored you know by whom. But you can sabotage the use of public goods such as good ideas and theories by reducing the public budget for education and science.

Every day we receive news from the new US administration of an assault on one type of public good or another. I’ve been keeping a non-exhaustive list: Science, Education, Payment systems, International trade, Quality of appointments, Regulators (and where regulators survive, the victim are independent regulators, to be replaced by puppets of the president or Musk), Public health, Climate change mitigation, Weather forecasting agencies, International alliances, Rules, Language and truth, Separation of powers and checks and balances…

Public goods will be replaced by public bads (like bad appointees) or just eliminated. Unless the experiment is somehow stopped, the predictable consequence is indefension in front of pandemics, natural disasters, financial fraud, violence and blatant inequalities.

We have to mobilize in solidarity with the good people of the United States (their scientists, their academics, their civil servants, their citizens including the migrants and refugees) and in defense of democracy in Europe, which means in defense of the European Union, and the idea (hated by Trump) of a federal Europe.