[quote]Varqanir wrote:
All right. I’ll play along.
Let us first, as Socrates was wont to say, define our terms.
The choice is between being dependent upon a government, OR being dependent upon God.
Which means that the choice of the one must necessarily obviate the other: If you choose government, there can be no God in your life, and if you choose God, there can be no government. Conveniently enough, we have words for the concepts of “no god” and “no government”. They are, of course, Atheism on the one hand, and Anarchy on the other.
So these are the choices the OP has given us. Atheism or Anarchy.
But neither has to be so bad.
Let’s look at Anarchy first. We conjure up an unpleasant image of the Mad Anarchist, cloaked in dark trench coat, the fiendish grin on his crazed face obscured by the dark shadow cast by his wide-brimmed hat. He clutches an old-fashioned spherical cast iron gunpowder bomb with smouldering fuze, poised to toss it into a government office before scurrying away down a dark alley.
But wait. In a true anarchy, the “anarchist” would cease to exist. In the total absence of government, an anarchist would have nothing to oppose. There would be no officials to assassinate, no buildings to bomb, no alleys down which to scurry. No cities, for that matter: it takes government to create infrastructure, and without an entity with the power to command resources on a scale that is only possible when you can extort taxes from a large population, there would be no highways, no power grid, no water or sewage systems, no sanitation systems, no telecommunications systems. There would of course be no banking, because fiat currency requires the illusion of government backing.
An existence completely devoid of government would be nomadic, agrarian, or perhaps even hunter-gatherer tribal. You would be responsible for yourself and your family, answerable to no one but God…which is to say, to the laws of nature, because none of the laws of men would exist.
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Trade builds infrastructures via the spontaneous order of voluntary interaction.
Infrastructure is not dependent on government. If that were the case we would not have the internet, for example. Similarly, roads came about based on paths of least resistance to commerce. Government did not build them.
The first cities did not come about because they were commanded from a lord. People voluntarily moved to certain geographic regions for trade and capital began to accrue there. Once they became large and wealthy they became targets for the warrior class which is where the first governments came from.
If it were not for the existence of the infrastructure in the first place governments would never have come about.
Rather than anarchy I prefer to think of it as a naturally ordered society dependent on peaceful and voluntary exchange. Only violence can disrupt it.