From what I hear Egyptians speaking, they are so euporic they are going to get their democracy.
For some of libertarians this sounds ironic. Isn’t now the perfect chance to radically reduce the power of the state? What are the main issues preventing this?
Without having any insider information, it looks like the main problem is a strong army, which is almost a branch of the government. I guess it is not going to disappear no matter what. They have a perfect excuse - “of course we cannot reduce army, it protects the country from Israel’s invasion!”
Do you think a libertarian defense would be adequate to prevent “settlement” of Sinai by Israel? Or would it be needed? Or maybe there are other, more important reasons the Egypt will not become less stateful?
I think it is somewhat a fallacy to list steps on how a society transitions to a libettarian one… for example, step one do this, step two do this etc… but it if Egypt really wants to achieve this kind of society, they should tell the US to piss off… but that is very unlikely because the US gives them MONEY!!! and I believe starting this year or next, we will start giving them more money than previous years..
Nobody in Egypt asked for a freedom paradise on earth. They asked for very modest and not unreasonable reforms, not uthopia. For example they could have insisted Mubarak to be brought before a court to answer for his crimes but instead they just asked him to step down and not try anything funny with his son. They can even keep their money and their villas.
Also remember the Egyptian military is more dependant on US military aids than that money can lead to believe. Egypt doesn’t have large stocks of spares and ammunitions for her US built tanks and fighter planes. It also depends on US technicians to carry out maintenance of such sophisticated systems as radars. This is Israel’s insurance policy: even if Egypt is taken over by “Islamists”, let them start a war with little ammunition and even less spare parts. Let them figure out how to carry out maintenance of a long range radar. The Israeli learned this lesson the hard way in 1973 when they were the ones caught without ammos, forcing the evil Richard Nixon to initiate Operation Nickelgrass and to threaten the USSR with nuclear annhilation should they start a similar operation to the benefit of ther Arabian client states.
Because the establishment figured out that having an ill dictator step down to be replaced by his former military buddy apparantly suffices to break the revolution.
If a new leadership takes over then looking at history it will not be much better. It would be interesting to see what would happen if they did not replace it. I am not sure how much of egypts gdp is government related. But i do not think it is as much as we see in the west. It might be that the people would not even miss the government in terms of services. I heard they are protesting because there is 60% unemployment. But at the same time the western governments would never allow a country to have no government, because if it succeed then they would look bad.
I think the Nation-State/American Empire is going to bankrupt and we are going to move into privately-held feudal government, akin to Singapore, long before we hit the libertarian age.