A different vision of an emerging world 128

Have you heard of Cafayate?

It’s way down south in Argentina. In a wine valley.

It seems to be the nearest thing to John Galt’s hidden valley that exists in the real world.

You can read a little about it here – though not nearly as much as you might want to know if you’re a free-market libertarian.

Jeff Berwick is the author of the report. He issues a free-market financial newsletter called The Dollar Vigilante.

Berwick explains that the people associated with it are “best described as financial freedom fighters“.

The Dollar Vigilante (TDV) is unwilling to live under a corrupt statist system of finance controlled by a few to impoverish the many. TDV began as a way to help foment a movement, long in progress, by individuals worldwide, to rid themselves of government controlled fiat money in favor of assets of real value void of manipulation. It is the hope of TDV that it can help create a community of dollar crash survivors who can survive the collapse of the global financial system and prosper from the new free-market financial system which will take its place.

The world is changing. The nation-state is passing away. Socialism is failing as it must.

Back to tribalism? Or forward to new communities of members freely associating according to their taste? – In “phyles”, to use the Greek word for clans. But not clans in the old sense, not clans bound by kinship or place of birth, but elective clans. You choose the company you want to keep, the type of economy you want to participate in.

A new vision of an emerging world, different from any other.

Not even quite the same as Ayn Rand’s, though she and her Atlas figures who carried an ungrateful world on their shoulders would surely have liked it.

Not only is it incredibly beautiful here but most of the value lies in the community. … Doug Casey often talks about “phyles” – which is an ancient Greek term for a tribe or clan. He is of the belief that nation states as they exist today are a brief abberation and that the world will trend more towards likeminded people living in areas (call them countries if you wish) with other similar like minded people.

This makes a lot of sense and is, in general, the way things are trending. If people like communism, let them all gather together somewhere and create their own communist phyle. A few years later and most of them will be dead from starvation or murder but, hey, at least they got to do what they wanted with other like minded people as opposed to forcing the rest of us to follow their insane socialist/communist ideas.

In Cafayate, “libertarian/anarchist/austrian-economics adherents” are gathering. We – not anarchists ourselves, but libertarian austrian-economics adherents who argue for minimal government – suspect that many if not all of them are atheists too.

It, quite possibly, is the world’s first libertarian enclave!

Galt’s Gulch does exist and it is in Cafayate, Argentina!

Worth reading about, thinking about – and visiting perhaps.