jmowreader's Libertarian Hall of Fame

[jmowreader]

The preamble of the Libertarian Party's platform is:

As Libertarians, we seek a world of liberty; a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others.

Translation: Every man for himself.

So without further ado, I present to you the Libertarian Hall of Fame: intrepid men who exemplify the Libertarian Party's core principle of sovereignty over their own lives. None of them are actually IN the Libertarian Party, and the LP would definitely disown them all if asked. But...they're all Libertarians. Trust me on this.

Max Blanck and Isaac Harris. They owned the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. (A shirtwaist is a kind of woman's blouse.) Their libertarianism included spending almost no money on fire protection, running a firetrap operation and paying workers $6 per week. When their factory caught fire on March 25, 1911, 146 people died in the inferno. Many jumped out windows--and the factory was on the top three floors of a ten-story building.

Barney Welansky. This asshole owned the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston, which burned to the ground on November 28, 1942, killing 492 people in fifteen minutes. Welansky's libertarian acts include welding fire doors shut so people wouldn't skip out on paying their tabs, decorating the place with the most flammable decorations he could find and lots of them, boarding up a plate glass window, and having the joint wired by unlicensed electricians.

Jeff Derdarian. This libertarian owned The Station, a bar in Rhode Island. He is, or at least was, a reporter for a local television news department. His libertarian acts are fourfold:

* After Derdarian taped an expose on the dangers of polyurethane foam, he soundproofed his bar with the exact same shit.
* He bought the bar with white acoustical tile on the ceiling. He wanted it to be black because black is rock 'n roll, man, so he went to the lumberyard, bought five gallons of asphalt roof coating, and painted the fucking ceiling of his bar with it.
* He painted the fire exits black because white ones ain't rock 'n roll either.
* And then he exploited the age and size of his bar--you know, the one that had what Derdarian likes to call "solid gasoline" stuffed in the cracks behind the stage, fire exits you couldn't actually find in a fire, and a ceiling coated in tar--to justify not installing a sprinkler system.

Then he hired a band famous for its love of pyrotechnics to play, and then wondered why they set the bar on fire. One hundred dead, two hundred injured, many from both groups hit by falling chunks of molten tar.

The Schilling Family. These guys owned the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Kentucky, which was your generic aluminum-wired firetrap. When it burned down May 28, 1977, 165 people lost their lives so that one family's sovereignty over their own lives could not be infringed.

Emmett Roe. This paragon of libertarianism ran the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant in Hamlet, NC. He decided that workers were stealing the merchandise and padlocked all the fire doors from the outside. On September 3, 1991, a hydraulic line broke and sprayed oil onto a burner for a deep-fat fryer. The resulting inferno claimed 25 lives.

[musette_sf]

1. K&R

would rec 1000X if i could.

[FarLeftRage]

2. Yes Siree!!

liberarians are the most selfish pricks I have ever met!