[quote]orion wrote:
vroom wrote:
Headhunter wrote:
All relationships between human beings MUST be voluntary on all sides. Otherwise, one is the slave and the other is the master.
Placing human beings as somehow subservient to a ‘greater whole’ violates this principle and has been basically disasterous in human history.
Do you have even the slightest clue how humanity has organized over it’s existence?
There have been rulers of all stripes from day one until now. In fact, all governments, including yours and mine, have the responsibility to exert authority over their own territories.
Now, luckily, much of the west lives in a democratic environment with their rights and freedoms defined and enshrined in basic government documents at the constitutional level.
There is less control on us, our civilizations, generally, than there was in past times.
However, any pipe dreams you may have about setting up something akin to the supposed freedom of anarchy is simply a delusion.
You can rant and rave about your pet ideology all you like. In fact, when I was younger and read about anarchy and so forth, I found it alluring, for a week or two until I figured out reasons why I would not want to live in that situation.
Basically, their are too many assholes on the planet. Somebody, somewhere, would be forcing other people to do something against their will. However, instead of having protections, you’d have to enforce your own desires and freedoms.
This is great if you are a single young male – since you have all the power and nothing to lose. It’s not great if you are a woman, or if you have a family at home while you are away every day working for a living.
Society helps protect us from the depravities of humanity. Your fantasies about survival of the fittest aside, there are not many people that would not voluntarily choose our model of society over the completely uncontrolled model some of you wingnuts would suggest is “right”.
Again, left to our own devices, humanity has time and time again assembled into various types of societies and organizations. Just like other mammals on the planet, social hierarchies are a natural and ingrained phenomenon for us.
So, your little ideologies are in fact in conflict with nature, reality and the choice of the vast majority. However, don’t let that stop you fretting about the end of the civilized world. If the bombs drop and all the governments collapse, at least you’ll be prepared!
Do you have even the slightest clue how humanity has organized over it’s existence?
Monarchs took what was theirs, less than 10% of GDP and left you the fuck alone.
Their job was to enforce law and order and to defend the country and if they were reeeaally generous they built a university or a hospital for the poor.
Funny how banking, medizine, industries all developed on their own, usually in areas were the state was weak or had heavy competition i.e Greek city states, Renaissance city states, the Hanse in Germans “freie Reichst?dte”, and of course England with its notoriously weak monarchs.
Europe is an excellent example because geography alone made sure that governmets had to compete and remained relatively weak compared with China, Japan or any form of oriental despotism where one ruler could kill any innovation he did not like.
HH is constantly arguing for a society, a richer, more complex and ultimately more humane and succesful one than a government could ever hope fo building.
Most companies can only provide ONE good or service, coffee, insurance, cars, etc…
Yet you seem to think that government, the leviathan, the coldest of all monsters, can provide quality policing, health services, schooling, roads, without any competition, real cost analyses, any real incentive to change if things go back and all that with stolen money.
You Vroom, indoctrinated to the bone by the times you live in and the dying myth of the Enlightenment, that a society is something you can rationally build like a machine.
This constructivist attitude is one of the core ideas of collectivism and it is just plain wrong.
You are obviously deeply convinced that the government equals society at least to a large degree, though a free society can only grow when a government builds and defends a solid frame and gets out of the way.
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You know companies that provide only one good or service? Since when?
DO you really think that if there was no government the nation wouldn’t just immediately split between a few huge corporations, that’d act like mini governments?
If there was no public services, single corps would just take it all over. Not individual small businesses. They wouldn’t be able to complete with the capital of the large corps. At all.