Comment by slopinthebag
2 days ago
You can reverse it. "If the government gets involved" doesn't work unless you presume government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of no government anyway).
2 days ago
You can reverse it. "If the government gets involved" doesn't work unless you presume government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of no government anyway).
> unless you presume government is beneficial
That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore.
The alternative is worse. No government at all implies anarchy which is worse that all but the very worst governments, and from which IMO some form of government will emerge anyway.
>No government at all implies anarchy*
No government at all can just imply anarchism, ie. a kind of self-governing that doesn't ascribe to our conventional ideas about government, presidents, pms, members of parliament, senators, etc.
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Why is highly organized/systematized violence preferable?
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Is it? Don't know about other countries, but I am pretty sure the constitutional bedrock of the United States is to limit the federal government's ability to be malignant, even at the cost of some benefit. Whether that has been achieved is a separate question.
>That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore.
Sure you do. You just don't have a society that looks like ours does. And that doesn't necessarily mean monarchy or fascism or chaos as the only alternative.
The society you do get, might still even have a government too! Thinking government is not beneficial doesn't mean you dispense altogether with one. It can mean you have very difference tolerance and guardrails for it, as opposed to when defaulting to "government is beneficial".
What's more "government is not beneficial" might not even mean "any and all government is not beneficial". It might mean government of the type that's the "constitutional bedrock of our societies", and the mockery they call "democratic rule" is not.
> Sure you do. You just don't have a society that looks like ours does.
You've skipped a few steps, until you overthrow the government all you have a broken society with a system of governance that's deemed to be illegitimate, therefore its rules and actions are illegitimate.
If you want to tear up the constitution and implement a new system of governance with "less government" then you're effectively advocating for a revolution. Just be honest and don't try to sell this as an incremental policy change.
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The idea that government could _not_ be involved is nonsense. You simply don't perceive some government involvement as involvement because you take it for granted. The only question is where do you personally want to draw the line, and by what principles do we organise government involvement.
You probably don't want the government to stop being involved in securing your property or maintaining roads. None of the tech firms want the government to stop being involved in securing IP rights. Etc. etc. etc...