Since it's full-on football season, I've got a modest proposal.
In the spirit of libertarianism in all things, let's deregulate football, too. No refs. No rules. Complete freedom!
Then, see if even one game doesn't descend into chaos.
No games are completed. Dozens of head injuries, broken arms, legs, bloody faces, even deaths.
Did I say that there are no refs an no rules? Most players would be ethical. But there's always the few bastards who'll cheat, lie, and steal to win. Grab a face mask. Rip a helmet from an opponent's head. Shove a knife into the quarterback's eye. The only rule is that there are no rules.
There will be no Superbowl. Every game is a Superbowl, a one-off, with no scores, winners, or losers.
The only real winners are the team owners who make bank from the Spectacle.
Your only obligation as a fan: A pledge to believe that the Spectacle is flawless.
Take this scenario and overlay the far right, anti-govenment extremists' plan for America, and you get the real Brave New World., not the classic book by Aldous Huxley. No government regulation of the economy. No checks and balances on power and wealth. No FDA or EPA. The team "owners" are the billionaires to whom all government assets are transferred and managed, in the spirit of "privatization."
And, the way things are going when we look at guys like the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, heavy regulation on what you can believe. Dictating your god. A manufacturing of a new consent that the United States is a Christian nation and that all citizens must pledge allegiance, not to the Constitution, but to fund amental absolutist Christianity.
In the economic realm, America's brave new world will resemble Putin's plundering of the former Soviet Union, spinning off all its assets to himself and his oligarchs. Putin could be the world's richest individual, but nobody really knows because Putin controls that information and hides his wealth from all public scrutiny.
Make no mistake. The fine balance between public interests and private greed is teetering. Despite all the macroeconomic statistics, the U.S. economy is deeply troubled by vast and growing inequalities.. And too many ordinary people, including the MAGA folks, are first in line to despise the government, though it's the only defense many people have to protect themselves from poverty, unaffordable medicine, bad water, and unbreathable air.
Do you really think, Donald Trum, America's would-be Putin, will give a damn?
What's more, having been well propagandized with ideological blinders, many ordinary people reflexively reject the idea of an annual basic income, paid for by the top 0.5 percent of taxpayers, when workers lose their jobs to an economy structured around an artificially intelligent labor force, rendering hundreds of millions of human workers obsolete.
Why do many people reject this idea? One reason. It's a progressive idea, not an one any Libertarian in the modern Republican Party would dare propose.
The political cousin of the billionaires' wet dream of a libertarian economy is fascism. With the inexplicable rise in anti-democratic voices, the fascist threat has never been more profound.
In football, most fans would be appalled that America's game would be deconstructed into a violent, lawless spectacle that served the capitalists and owners at the expense of the fans. And yet, in the real world, not the game, too many people blindly believe that we could get rid of government and somehow be better off.
If only Libertarians loved their country with the same passion that they love football. Then, instead of talking about doing away with government, democracy, and freedom, we'd be talking a lot more about making what we have even better.