*Government is usually a force for good and makes the world a better place.

*Government, like a wise and experienced leader, knows what we should do and wants to help us live better lives. It can make rational, responsible, intelligent choices.

*Government lights the path for us with its own example, eg. by using its own resources wisely. It doesn’t overspend, waste, counterfeit, borrow, steal, murder, war, destroy. Not without a really good reason to, anyway.

*Government rarely fails to take into account the nature and result of its actions. It accepts responsibility and improves. It has only our best interests at heart.

*Government is merely the will of the people, acting together, to solve societal problems. Politicians are public servants who put their private lives aside to interpret the will of the people, and try to do the people’s business with the best of intentions.

*War happens because it is human nature to fight. Poverty happens because people are too greedy. Government must step in to curb human nature.

*Despite the harm government sometimes causes, we are better off with our leaders than without them. That would be chaos.

*The purpose of government is to wear smooth all the jagged stones in the stream. Government can take our dissent and strife, and turn it into discipline and cooperation.

*Government only fails because we don’t have the right people in charge.

*Government lives at the end of the rainbow and poops out ice cream and gold for the townsfolk. I read this in Newsweek.

Again, most libertarians would at least be highly skeptical. But I ask this because you do seem to believe that government is *able* to control resources responsibly and impose rational limits on growth. And even if it could do those things, does it actually care or have any lasting incentive to do it? Too often, people tend to want see others follow their vision of the world, but they do it vicariously via government force, thus relieving them of the responsibility for the disastrous outcomes. It’s like calling something “God’s will” no matter what the outcome. The assumtion that government is the solution to any problem is quite a leap of faith. Minds can only be changed by ideas, not jail and fines. Certainly to your credit, you are being an example and being the change you want to see in the world. Yours is a market solution to a problem.

Markets don’t need overlords to regulate and fail to the extent they are regulated. Indeed, none of us is as smart as all of us. Regulatory schemes to eliminate waste also eliminate innovation.

Consider this miracle (a la Leonard Reed’s Pencil): without anyone telling it to do so, and with no expert decrees, the market recognized the need for small-scale energy because energy prices were too high – and for whatever reason, it doesn’t matter to the market. A speculating entrepreneur started a company making wind turbines with the help of a greedy financier. A selfish retailer then re-sold the turbines, hoping to make a profit on something he didn’t invent or produce. And not to mention all the millions of other wasteful people who made the production and sale possible throughout the process. The market brought from a distant land to you, the ability to make ice cream – and nobody keels over and dies without an ice cream cone. But that isn’t waste. You, and others, simply satisfied a human want according to your own means, ability, and values.

And if I might go one further, the free-market is the whole reason you can make a living selling a luxury item like ice cream in a “self-sufficient” capacity. Only 100 years ago your reality today was completely unthinkable. That’s what is meant by “growth.” Not the products of credit expansion based on government fraud.

So it’s not a matter of preference or of last resort. Freedom isn’t just a nice idea, it’s the only thing that works. I hope you do browse this site more. I think you’ll find more in common with the Mises Institute than not. I think you’ll appreciate what a free-market/Austrian perspective has to say about “limits to growth” and how the market and prices, undistorted by government interventions, naturally finds limits without the use of force.

Also, I think your business is a really good idea. Best of luck with it.

Thanks for the link. I’ve looked it over. My huge reservation is the opposition to “limits to growth,” which I feel is completely without reason. This is a “huge reservation,” because not recognizing limits to growth seems to flavour almost everything else in the platform.

There are real limits to growth, and humans either need to voluntarily limit the impact of their activities, or have such limits imposed upon them — whether by government, or by nature.

I’m actually a “small l” libertarian. If I’m not harming others, I want the government to stay the hell out of my business. The problem is that “harming others” is such a broad term when humanity has arguably overshot its resource base. I don’t know where to draw the line, but it seems to me that to be a “good” libertarian, one must also voluntarily lead a simple life.

I’m looking forward to the coming fossil sunlight decline. It is going to show us, in no uncertain terms, that limits exists, and that limitless growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. It’s going to renew the honour in being things like “frugal” and “thrifty,” which in today’s energy-rich world, often are mistaken for “poor.” We voluntarily live below the level at which income tax is due, both to avoid supporting a government we don’t much care for, but also to voluntarily limit the impact of our actions.

I don’t like government telling me what I can and can’t do. But most of the rest of humanity behave as though they can’t accept nature telling them what they can or cannot do. That is simply madness.

Also, you may find this free book to be a good introduction to this site:
http://mises.org/resources/3793/Inclined-To-Liberty-The-Futile-Attempt-to-Suppress-the-Human-Spirit

Yes, we do use sea salt that we buy. The ocean is 1.5 miles away, so we couldn’t very well call it “zero mile” if we evaporated our own salt. And we do use electricity (from 100% wind source).

But we have a local populace who is wild about simple, slow, organic, healthy, minimally-processed, local food, and we can get $20 a quart for our ice cream.

It actually helps that the Big Bad Gubamint is so heavy-handed. If raw milk were legal here, some huge corporation would be competing with us for this product.

This is an interesting site. There seems to be a lot of cheering for “capitalism” and a lot of jeering of any way of interaction that does not involve competition. We are organized as a not-for-profit cooperative. We have “investors” who are guaranteed that the rate of return on their investment will never exceed the rate of inflation. They “invest” in a place to produce healthy food, local energy, and local livelihood.

I submit that a lot of the good things that people ascribe to “capitalism” really has come from cheap fossil sunlight, and that (for lack of a better term) what I call “financial capitalism” has been a great evil in the world.

I’m all for ownership of the means of production as a way of earning a living from one’s own labour. I bought a cream separator so I could make zero-mile ice cream. But something gets corrupted on the way to the bank. There’s something wrong with the notion that little bits of coloured paper get together in dark places and multiply. In the old days, if you needed capital equipment, you saved up for it. Up until a very short time ago, the three major western religions all forbade interest.

Where does this silly notion of continuous growth come from? Well, for one thing, we’ve seen continuous growth of fossil sunlight for the past couple hundred years. This is about to go into reverse, and those whose world view is predicated on growth are in for a big surprise, I’m afraid.

When energy declines, growth goes away. When growth goes away, financial capitalism goes away, as well. I see a return to feudalism, where those who control the true “means of production” — the ability to capture current sunlight — can employ armies of serfs for the cost of food and lodging. I see the current “double-dip” recession turning into a “continuous dip” depression, where the demand destruction from each recession creates a temporary burst of activity, followed by another bounce against the glass ceiling of resource depletion, each peak and dip lower than the previous one.

At some point, Cuba may not look so bad, when everyone there has enough to eat while half of America is near-starving. Capitalism has proven to be spectacularly successful at exploiting “unlimited” resources. I’m not so sure it is the best system for dealing with declining resources. Time will tell.

One time, I remember a lady showed up with her ice cream cart and started selling on the side of the street. A queue formed immediately and I jumped in line. I also set my stopwatch. (I always loved to time the lines.) Less than a half an hour later, It was my turn, but the ice cream lady had run out. She didn’t even say sorry. She closed her cart and went away silently, leaving me and 50 Soviet citizens disappointed.

Then they had Polar Cafe’s that were shaped like large igloos where they served ice cream at 11 to 12. Then from 2 to 4. That was it. Perhaps they were making ice cream with the hand crank method during the other hours. I seriously doubt it.

The wonders of capitalism give us choice and sufficient supplies.

Things have changed. A new Pinkberry will open in Moscow.

- You don’t need your own cow, although of course even oppressed Irish tenants usually had one. As long as someone nearby has one and is willing to sell you milk, or even barter it for some of the ice cream, that’s all you need.

- Likewise you can source many flavourings locally, e.g. berries.

- You don’t need rock salt. Any salt will do. In fact, if you are so purist that you aren’t willing to buy some that comes from a long supply chain, even home made potash will do as it’s not its salty taste that counts but its ability to melt ice.

- And you most definitely do not need electric refrigeration to make ice. Not only is a gas or paraffin lamp operated refrigerator quite good enough, there are even simpler batch freezing devices like the Icy Ball that can do it using almost any strong enough heat source (yes, it needs a stock of ammonia – but almost any village with craftsmen who could make them could also make the small quantity needed by destructive distillation of common raw materials). In fact, you could even get ice by judicious use of a Hilsch Tube, scraping off the ice build up, and that only needs compressed air you can get from a reservoir topped up by a jury rigged hand or pedal pump.

So yes, you can make ice cream at home without hidden use of a more developed economy. It’s just not worth it.

All this business about keeping the food supply safe is bogus. Why would food producers sell an unsafe product (this goes for small organic and giant corporate farms)? Also, buyer beware – know how to safely store and prepare food.