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Wasserschweinchen's avatar

I think the way we can make governments better is the same way we make other organizations that we do business with better: by switching to a better one and letting the invisible hand of the market do its work. Currently 96% stick to the government they were born under, which is an abysmally low level of competition compared to any other market I can think of, and to me this seems likely to be the main reason that people live under such bad governments.

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William H Stoddard's avatar

This has some overlap with your comment on artistic works, but from a different angle, perhaps: For decades now, the Libertarian Futurist Society has been giving annual awards for works in the fantastic genres with a pro-liberty perspective. With the recent death of Vernor Vinge, nearly all of the first generation of libertarian SF writers are no longer with us, but we've been seeing the emergence of a new generation, including Travis Corcoran, Karl Gallagher, Sarah Hoyt, and Dani and Eytan Kollin, and we've heard from many of them that winning the Prometheus Award, or even being nominated for it, has helped them find a larger audience and sell more books. It helps that we've gotten a reputation for emphasizing literary quality, favoring books that nonlibertarians can read; a corollary to your point about not offering bad arguments for libertarianism is that putting forward ideological potboilers that, in Sturgeon's phrase, "sell their birthright for a pot of message," is not a service to libertarianism even as propaganda.

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