Liberalism has unfortunately failed.

Interestingly, Reagan’s administration was the last one to really espouse classical liberalism. And of course Reagan was the grandfather, the architect of all our misery.

Free markets will not fix anything. A free market optimizes to consume the world’s resources as fast as possible. This was effective for a couple of centuries in a world where humans only consumed a tiny portion of its resources, because the unsustainability was covered up by the seemingly-unlimited new resources that were always being discovered, but it was always a multi-generational Ponzi scheme, and now the bills are coming due.

I don't have a good solution. Many years ago I was in a underground performance and art space in Brooklyn, filled with RVs, standing on a hand-built platform that served as a sort of second floor, and an earnest young woman told me something like this: "Anarchy does not mean chaos. Anarchy means that power flows up from below, and does not trickle down from above.”

So calling myself an anarcho-socialist might not be entirely unreasonable. But this only gives me a good view of the problem, not any hint as to a solution.

Avoiding disaster might yet be possible if we somehow managed to get wise and educated leaders who were entirely disinterested and divested, able to make difficult decisions today in order to ward off problems decades from now, and had a populace that would support those difficult decisions.

I suspect I'd be better off wanting a pony, because that I might get.