Concerning the unannounced Putin/American war, a reader remarks:
Attacks like the one on Colonial are made by large, organized-criminal groups which absolutely need some kind of shelter — the kind Russia (or other nations) can provide. And with capitalism’s constant rush to the bottom on paying for the effort, infrastructure and technological insurance to avoid these kinds of things, we will only see more and worse in the future until (if ever) we see some political come-to-Jesus moments on cooperation for security.
In our societal organization, government is, or should be, the responsible party for security issues such as this, with the ability to lay taxes or go into debt in order to raise the resources for the countermeasures. It’s been a tenet of the libertarians that the free market can do damn near anything society needs, but when, as my reader notes, the rush to the bottom would interfere with accomplishing necessary goals, it’s clear the markets’ ability to resolve this category of problems is deeply flawed at a fundamental level.
The other part of the problem, of course, is the fact that our systems are vulnerable in the first place.
