How Liberty will advance during Bankruptcy

    While trolling through the news feed and reading an article about $21 trillion in unaccounted government spending, I got another rude reminder that state bankruptcy, in one form or another, will be heading our way. Usually this is a despairing topic to talk about, but this time I'd like to talk about how, really, this is an opportunity.

    Bankruptcy is that wild time when a state truly does "run out of other people's money," and during this time, many of the services that the public relies on simply will not be available. On top of this, there is the non-trivial follow-on effect to the businesses that were built, intentionally or unintentionally, on large or local government contracting. Once bankruptcy hits, people will suddenly find themselves scrambling for all of the following:

> New sources of work

> All of the goods needed for daily living

> Replacements to services that have suddenly gone absent

Have alternatives ready

    Once the items mentioned above are scarce, odds are that a lot of people are suddenly going to be very receptive to alternatives. If you are a libertarian, you should, therefore, have that alternative ready. If you are good at teaching, for example, you should be the local go-to person for private network schooling (the next generation of home schooling). If there is a Threat Management Center in or near your city, you could get some friends together, take courses, and become a viable security alternative. Or, perhaps you could build some expertise on starting and operating large home and community gardens, and again shift the narrative away from "Who will take care of me?" to "I can take care of myself, and those who are unable to do so."

    As you build this expertise, the other thing you can do is become a traveling volunteer, and work specifically in bankrupt cities or locales. You could also perform disaster relief. Always use the opportunity to work with real journalists to make this into a story where, by the time the State gets around to rendering services, you and yours were already there, solving the problem, thereby making said services redundant. This is when you will start seeing situations like we had seen in the 2012 Chicago Public School strike, in which churches, parents, and other organizations started actively providing education during a protracted strike. Some have speculated that the strike ended in part because the sudden outburst of alternative brought the legitimacy of the public schools into question.

How long do we have to wait?

    Now of course, we don't have to wait for a Soviet-style collapse where everything disappears in less than two weeks. It might also come more slowly, in the form of budget rearrangements in which some departments see consistent cuts to keep the others fully funded, or in cases where the actual services are drained while the administrators are keeping everything inside of their circled wagons (think of the education system).

    In this case, "bankruptcy" happens once conditions are not fully collapsed, but merely bad enough to warrant action. Many school districts are already there, and the above-mentioned Threat Management Centers got their start in Detroit, once services became nearly non-existent. In a similar vein, libertarians are also stepping up in disaster relief, with the recent formation of the Liberty Coalition for Disaster Relief.

To close this out, remember again that the debt and deficits in nations around the world, while very concerning should also be seen as an opportunity. If you are a libertarian I would encourage you to start being the solution, today. You might be needed sooner than you think.