I am 100% fine with seat belt laws because other peoples’ fatality collisions affect me financially and in traffic jams.
Society is a complex system and I don’t think “just let everyone do whatever they want” is a great answer when many of those things impact others, directly or indirectly.
Before that, we had mass lockdowns, economies shut down and people under something that wasn't house arrest because it was too industrialised. based mainly on evidence that turned out to be wrong and with solutions that didn't work as advertised.
Prior to that, we were seeing the start of the general economic catastrophe likely because the major economies refuse to let people secure long term access to cheap energy. There has been a big push to lock economies into inflationary currencies that are being used to prop up what appear to be failed, wealth destroying businesses. There is a pretence that companies making regular sustained losses are normal and investable.
I don't want to talk about seatbelts. I don't think they are that important. I don't care. I want people to stop this hyper-collective power accumulation that is doing a remarkable amount of damage. All of the major problems are being caused by huge, centralised moves of organised and (in 2 of 3) frightened people not thinking clearly about where priorities ought to sit. We knew all the way through that people aren't good at predicting outcomes of policy.
If authoritarianism is on par with the 1920s we are in very bad shape. That was part of the incubation period for the people who ended up shovelling Jews into ovens.
> The necessities of commercial growth dictated continued government support for overseas private investment. That, in turn, drove the United States to further engage with both with Latin America and the rebuilding of Europe in the 1920s.
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/foreword
Regardless, all of the policies I mentioned happened in the US, which was nowhere near as affected by the war (albeit disillusioned with it).
I don't know why you expect me to relax when you compare the situation to 1918. 1918 was when the seeds were being planted for one of the greatest episodes of suffering that the world has seen to date. The policies set in motion around then and the philosophies in vogue around then were indefensible disasters. The upside of the 1950s->2020s was that people were so shaken by the failures of 1910->1950 that they changed tack. The ones that didn't, in China and the USSR, who doubled down on authoritarianism then turned into their own disasters but at least they focused inwards. The US can consider itself lucky that it only had to deal with the great depression and an acceptable rate of needless war casualties.
> You have a very odd way of framing historical events. The US govt's own website contradicts the claim that assistance with rebuilding Europe was out of "benevolence":
That is nitpicking. Investing huge amounts of money to rebuild a shattered continent is benevolent no matter what the motivations of the US government's website happens to say. People do things for reasons. Sometimes they do things that are benevolent because it benefits them.
But you can't forget that the US even in mid/late 20th and early 21st centuries underwent a host of authoritarian changes:
* Prosecuting unjustified (and in some cases unpopular) wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq
* Aggressive support of violent coups and regime changes in South America and the Middle East, usually in favour of right-wing authoritarian strongmen
* Illegalising psychoactive substances for medical or recreational use, simultaneous with testing those drugs on unwitting US citizens
* Spying and surveillance against US journalists and activitists
* Political suppression and even persecution of left-wing ideas
* Increasing militarisation of police and use of violent means such as tear gas or rubber bullets to control protests
These are big topics. You're taking a very reductive, binary approach, and it's hard to even engage with.
This is not true of all major problems, most are caused by greed (corporate and individual). Of the ones caused by fear-based centralized power, that's authoritarianism, not collectivism. I can tell because the line I quoted perfectly describes what's happening in my decidedly non-collectivist state government (and many others) to threaten my well-being and potentially my life.
It's not even close. There are many precedents for nuclear powers fighting each other directly without triggering a nuclear war. For instance:
- The Korean War. It wasn't a proxy war, Western troops were directly fighting Chinese soldiers and the Soviet air force.
- The Sino-Soviet border conflict in 1969. Two nuclear powers fighting each other directly on their own soil.
- Indo-Pakistani conflicts. Both have nuclear weapons and they fight each other on their own soil.
- Indo-Chinese conflicts.
I'm not advocating for it, but I'm fairly certain that even a direct NATO intervention in Ukraine wouldn't lead to a nuclear war. Hell, Putin might even welcome it, it would give him a good excuse for the poor performance of his troops.
So why don't you get a bunch of people together with like minds that believe in the same thing to form a voting/power block of your representative views...
Oh, oops.
I'm having an extremely hard time not being snarky to the complete unawareness you have in this post. It really represents the peak ability of libertarians to ride the coattails of an already established power system while being blissfully incognizant of it.