Let Them Burn:

There are both positive and negative macro-trends in the world today.  On the positive side are things like greater world peace, longer length of life, improving per capita GDPs, artistic excellence and technological innovation.  On the negative side is increased pollution, dysgenics, higher debt burdens, rising unemployment rates and increased moral degeneracy.  Depending on one's mood, you can easily assert the positive or the negative trends have the ascendancy.  The future is so murky and so deep that it's simply impossible to know what will become of it all.

However, on the individual level, almost all of these negative tendencies can be avoided.  For instance, I just read an article on Moroccans seducing young dutch girls into sex slavery:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2237170/Why-Amsterdams-legal-brothels-lesson-Britain-telling-truth-sex-gangs-race.html

These girls were so ridiculously clueless that I couldn't spare them an inch of sympathy.  Aside from the naive 12 year old girl who got into a stranger's car, even though we tell young girls every day 'never get into a stranger's car,' all of these girls had their fates coming and actively participated in making sure it happened.  The same is true of so many cases of crime.  The question always comes up, "What were you doing there in the first place?"  "What were you thinking when you confronted that armed gang of thugs?"  Etc.  Almost all crime can be avoided by the remotest applications of common sense.  Decent women with a modicum of common sense and sexual modesty will never get into a position where they can be raped in the first place.  They will not put themselves alone in a room with a man of dubious morals.  They will not get drunk or stoned and thus too mentally impaired to defend themselves from developing dangerous situations, and so on.  This extends even further into the realm of adultery, divorce, and so on.  First off, there's a clear difference between a girl who loves you and a girl who is just using you for some other end.  Second off, there's a clear difference between a dependable, moral woman and an unreliable, fickle woman.  If men can't perceive this difference ahead of time, it's on their own heads.  The same for women who can't tell an abusive man from a gentle one, or a slacker from a hard worker, or a faithful man from a cheater.  They all give off obvious clues every day of the week.  If you're completely incapable of reading the subtle signs people give off in personal communications or body language, go by a more basic rule of thumb.  If the girl has had more than one sex partner, strike her off your list.  If the guy has had more than one sex partner, strike him off your list.  It's possible for people who were deeply in love and had every intention of marrying to somehow make a mistake and find out they weren't compatible after all.  I could even see this happening twice between well meaning but foolish youths.  But it's impossible for people with three or more trysts to make such an excuse.  It's obvious they treat relationships as disposable and partners as interchangeable, and there is a 99% chance that they will treat you the same way they treated everyone who came before you.

You can use other rules of thumb to stay out of trouble -- don't date people who are unemployed.  Don't date people who are in debt or can't pay their bills.  Don't date people who have had any history of mental problems or any criminal background.  Don't date fat people.  Don't date people who can't have a lucid conversation with you.  Don't date people who constantly curse or talk about sex.  Don't date anyone who smokes, drinks, does drugs, gambles, or has any vice of any sort.  All of these are obvious signs that these people are not mature, they do not have their acts together, they are not in control of themselves or their passions, they cannot reliably achieve anything even when they feel that they want to, and so on.  These people are failures and if you associate with them or rely on them, they'll fail you too.  They will cheat on you, they will dump you, they will divorce you.

If you really don't want to be burned by a bad relationship, only date someone who goes to the same church as you every week, that you've known since childhood, is a virgin, has an intact and positive home environment, and marry them in the second year of college once it's clear that they will succeed in graduating and their personality hasn't suddenly changed given their new free and liberal environment.  I guarantee you it will be a good match that will last forever.

We don't need to reform the law to save ourselves from moral hardship.  With a strong will, we can safely avoid all possible pitfalls, from substance abuses to relationship failures.  If people concentrate on getting ahead in life, getting a high paying job and a prestigious college degree, they'll be just fine at the end of the road.  Using the law code as a tool to enhance morality was always meant to help others.  Weak people who couldn't be trusted to take care of themselves or run their own lives correctly.  But when you read articles about these 'others,' it becomes painfully clear that they were never worth saving in the first place.  These people are helplessly stupid moral midgets.  They're unsalvageable.  If these people want to drink two liters of vodka a day, just let them burn.  If they want to take cocaine, let them burn.  If they want to have ten kids with ten different fathers, just let them starve and all ten of their kids too.  If they want to date 'bad boys' then let them be raped by bad boys.  If they want to have a thousand butt buddies they meet at gay bars and die at age 30 from various STD's, more power to them.  Who cares?  These are the dregs of society, the worst people on Earth.  If they want to have an abortion, let them, they would have been demonspawn anyway.  If they want to race mix with a black and then get shot when he regresses to the mean like Mr. Belcher of the Kansas City Chiefs did, more power to them.  Why are we trying to protect these people?  Why would we have any sympathy for people who so clearly are causing their own problems and only have themselves to blame?

There was a time, in 1800's China, when opium was legal and so many Chinese were taking it that it was driving the country bankrupt.  They couldn't find anyone who was fit enough to hold a job, everyone was just lying lifelessly like a slug in opium dens.  China fought a war just for the right to ban opium and save themselves from the drug trade.  If we legalized drugs again, what's to stop society from collapsing all around us?  Well, there are a few differences now.  With the power of automation, human labor is pretty much obsolete anyway.  The type of people who would fall for opium addictions are no longer needed to keep the economy moving.  Second, people are more intelligent now and aware of the risks of drug addiction.  In the past, strange as it may seem, people thought of opium as a medicine and never imagined smoking was bad for them.  Cocaine was just a spicy ingredient for a can of soda.  Now that people are aware of the dangers of drug abuse, drug abuse would never be so ubiquitous as it was in the past.  Our health education and all of the warning stories of personal anecdotes of people's whose lives were ruined by drugs will steer the vast majority away from these self-destructive choices.  In fact, it's hard to know if a single additional person would take drugs if they were legalized today, since drugs are so often used despite their illegality and the cops seem to be completely ineffectual at stopping the drug trade anyway.

Innocent people will not get caught up in the crossfire of bad behavior.  You aren't innocent if you hang out with the wrong crowd.  If you date the wrong type of girl or boy, you aren't innocent.  If you have bad friends who constantly do bad things, you aren't innocent.  The economy won't collapse, because over 50% of income is made by the top 15% of Americans, who are all above this moral rot nonsense of illegitimacy and substance abuse.  We could easily retool the economy to rely on even fewer people doing even more, with the help of self-driving cars, 3-D printers, robotic manufacturing plants, etc.  And no matter how dumb and poor the average person gets, their stupidity and poverty will not osmosis into your children so long as you raise them in a segregated environment.  Live in an affluent suburb where the wrong type of kids don't exist, and you can safely send your kids to school without a worry.  If you can't afford it, just home school your kids.  Only send your kids to places where they can meet the right sort of people, so it doesn't matter who they befriend or date.  And lastly, if your children simply insist on being screwups who take drugs and drop out of school, just admit that personality and behavior is genetic, that no matter how you attempt to raise someone they still have free will and can't be controlled forever, and sometimes mistakes happen.  Protect yourself by having lots of kids, so that the percentages break in your favor, instead of against you.  If you only have one child and he turns out to be insane, that's your fault, you're suffering from your own mistake of putting too many eggs in one basket.  Any investment adviser could have told you to diversify, diversify, diversify.

Neither you nor your kids will suffer from a morally lax legal environment or morally lax media culture.  Ultimately people have total control over their own decisions and their own influences.  They can choose to watch soap operas and Hollywood, or to read Aristotle and Plato.  That's up to them.  No amount of bad cable TV shows can hijack their personality against their will.  If you surround yourself and your kids with good influences, like anime and the Great Books series, they will watch and read them first, just because they are more conveniently at hand.  After that they will be completely inoculated against all the trash of the outside world, simply because it's so hopelessly inferior in entertainment value that they wouldn't want to watch it anyway.

I don't agree with libertarians that poverty is 'your own fault.'  It seems to me that it's proven beyond all doubt that a person's job and income is subject to sudden, unpredictable, unpreventable disruption due to macro-economic forces.  There are stories of people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year before this latest recession now bankrupt and homeless just a few years later.  Technological change, sudden economic booms and busts, terrible economic mismanagement by the government, pervasive corruption like Enron or Bernie Madoff, suddenly getting cancer or having a stroke and needing million dollar health treatments -- people's jobs and wealth are so vulnerable on so many different levels that it's simply a miracle anyone survives.  Half of all college graduates can't find a job.  People with PhD's can't find a job.  Lawyers can't find a job.  There is no safe market and there is no safe field people can work in.  This crazy capitalist system throws so much into doubt so often that the lifestyle of the 1950's, an 8 to 5 job that could support the whole family for fifty years in a row, is just impossible.  I do not consider the current economic environment to be suitable for human beings leading a normal human life.  People should not have to get new skills every few years or so just to find work.  They should be able to do the same thing every day, just like the farmers or guild craftsmen of old, and make a steady income from it.  That's the pace of life we find enjoyable and that's the pace of life our brains have evolved to live.

As such, I want a safety net against the market, which is now so unpredictable that the stock market can drop to 6,000 and then shoot back up to 13,000 in a couple years.  When even professionals have absolutely no clue what is going on and even Lehman Brothers is going bankrupt, why do we demand perfection from the average citizen?  It's absurd.  Poverty could happen to anyone.  Unemployment can happen to anyone.  Bankruptcy can happen to anyone.

But we don't need a safety net against degeneracy.  The innocent are not mixed in with the guilty here.  It's just all guilty people all the way down.  The 'let alone' policy of libertarianism is perfect for this group of individuals.  Just let them burn, the libertarian way, all the way.