This is a leaky government pipe next to my house. It’s been leaking a constant stream of water non-stop for several days since I noticed it. I have no way of knowing how long it had been leaking before I found it. Probably a few days. You can hear the water smacking against the concrete from half a block away.
I tried tightening those two valves. No effect. This will require further adjustments. Probably not much. Probably just some tightening of a few of those nuts. But I’m not doing it. I already pay part of the salaries of the government workers who are supposed to be out fixing this stuff. They’re not very busy. All the time I see them parked in their service trucks under shady trees while they listen to the radio.
You don’t have to live by this pipe to see this whole photo is of public property. It looks awful. The road, the pipe, the concrete, the grass - it all looks dilapidated. It looks like it’s from the set of a dystopian sci-fi movie.
Go to just about any random private business and the environment will look much more attractive than this.
The Wal-Mart in my town looks just as new and shiny as it did when they opened it nearly a decade ago. It’s a work of art compared to this. The owners of Wal-Mart have a financial incentive to preserve the capital value of their property. Disney’s Magic Kingdom opened up in Florida over forty years ago and it looks better than ever. Imagine what the anarcho-capitalist “private property order” Hans-Hermann Hoppe theorizes about would look like, a world where every piece of property is justly in the hands of private owners who care about preserving their property and will suffer losses if they don't
No one has any incentive to maintain the condition of public property. You won’t enjoy any personal benefit, other than maybe a small bit of happiness, if you went out and tried to clean up the public property in your town. You only own maybe a ten-thousandth of the property - and you really don’t even own that or else you’d be allowed to sell that share.
I wonder how much this leaky pipe will end up costing the tax-slaves in my town. I wonder how many other pipes are leaking like this around town. I wonder how many government pipes are leaking like this all around America. What would the bill for that be? What would the bill be for all the leaky government pipes all around the world? It must be bigger than the entire GDPs of a lot of countries.
The government has no incentive at all to fix this pipe. They’re not paying for it, the tax payers are. Government has no wealth of its own. Everything it has was stolen from the private productive class at gun point.
I can’t wait to recycle this blog post the next time the Florida government institutes summer water rationing policies and tells us it all our fault because of our swimming pools and lawn watering.
Did you bother to call anyone about the leaky pipe? Didn't think so.... you just wanted to write this screed....
ReplyDeleteLibertarianism, anarchism, etc, is all supposed to be founded around people voluntarily working to help their community. How the hell can you claim to believe in any of these things if you can't even fix a damned pipe outside of your own home. No, you don't HAVE to fix it, if you're that much more comfortable laying on your ass and doing nothing about it,that's fine. But don't bitch and moan about other people not doing anything when you have your own two hands. With anarchism, comes independence, and with independence, comes responsibility. Start small, by fixing a leaky pipe, and build your way up. You can't wait around, expecting the government to fix things, because they won't. This shouldn't be surprising. Take things into your own damn hands if you're that upset about it. If you don't like the way things are, work for change. Bitching and moaning doesn't solve a damned thing, you're not going to see any progress until you take action.
ReplyDeleteOh my! By the looks of it, the leaks from that pipe need immediate repair. You should have called a professional plumber to fix it. Otherwise, it could take long, and water would be wasted.
ReplyDelete~ Gayle Manning ~