> The more power you give to the government, the less power the citizenry has.
Sure. So what's the solution in this particular case? Should we go full corporate and privatize border control and customs? The government has a monopoly on violence and law enforcement. Do you think privatizing this outside of government is a good idea? Do you really think this power would be less abused?
Don't pick a bad example to dismiss the whole idea of government. At least in theory people can vote out the government, or specific laws/regulations* but they can't vote out money.
*) Before dismissing my point, that only works in democracy, not oligarchy, which we have in the US. And if you're wondering how we've reached oligarchy, I may be simplifying things but it has a lot to do with the 'big government is bad' idea which has been floated around within the last century by the people hoarding most money.
> Well if nothing else, your points about corruption are arguments against government in general :-) Decentralize power back to the people themselves. If I have no power over another, then my corruption affects only me.
Tragedy of the Commons is what occurs then as well as an inability to defend oneself against those who use force.
Go move to some country with essentially a nonexistent government and see how this works out for you if you genuinely believe I am wrong.
> However, corruption at the local level affects a limited number of people, and since local politics are easy to influence, they can be changed. Local politicians get into criminal trouble all the time, so they are not immune to the law.
So your argument is to make it cheaper, easier, and dismantle the checks and balances by defunding the enforcement mechanism at the federal level?
Seriously? Do you not understand that logically plays out until the local politicians are unable to be held accountable to a higher authority?
> It is not the case that a government wields absolute power. I don't believe it's the case that there is no way to keep a government in check.
Tell that to the people of every tyrannical regime in the history of mankind. Perhaps they were just doing it wrong?
> Also, I don't think "someone else [having] the right to rule [us]" is a correct characterization of functioning democratic governance (even in a representative democracy).
How would you characterize it then?
> You have shown neither that the above is sound reasoning, nor that other frameworks are not.
What reasoning and "other frameworks" might you be referring to?
> And if 100 people decide I don't have a right to a spleen in a context without government, how does that go any better?
How is that relevant to what I said?
> But my point was deeper. One of the consequences of prohibition (of alcohol or drugs) was to remove government as a means of settling disputes for a group of people handling relatively large sums of money.
Why not say something like that then? :p Disregarding whether you've described a real problem, you seem to be suggesting that a government's decision caused a big problem, and therefore, government is.. good?
> Yes, precisely. And much like any technology it can be misused, poorly designed, poorly configured; and this can lead to frustration or harm.
This is just way out there.. :p But tell me, how exactly is government a "technology", how should it be "used", and why didn't we do so? :P
> Once again, that's not true. In a functioning democracy, governments are responsible to the people lest the groups with power lose it.
> In any system, the possibility of revolution serves as a partial check.
Again, I'd point to every single tyrannical regime ever. That "partial check" doesn't seem to be working too well.
Look, ultimately it's about how much abuse the general populace is willing to take.. before it's too late to do anything (see: North-Korea, USSR, etc).
Once there's a small group of "people" wielding power over everyone else, the people are guaranteed to end up suffering sooner or later. The ruling class keeps expanding and looting everyone else harder and harder, until you're.. say, in the US in 2014.
The US provides a prime example of what follows from a minimal, "Constitutional" government.
> Governments are also responsible to other governments, in some extreme situations.
Sooo.. War, or something? Well, maybe ordinary Canadians will rescue ordinary Americans from their government? :p "We must give America the blessing of Democracy! Now go forth and kill or be killed!" --> "Sir! Yes! Sir!"
> I'm not sure where you derive this ranking in which government is highest, or why only lower powers can be kept in check.
"Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." - Mao.
I'm sure you know how it works.
> Not always; when it's not, things suck even more; see, for instance, many parts of Somalia.
Again, it's all about the attitude of the general populace. If people accept that there's a ruling class bossing them around - even if it's a small one - it will grow and gain more and more power. The only limit to a government's growth is the attitude of its subjects.
The government fosters dependence on itself, through various social programs, health care, pensions and so on. Through the education system, the government conditions people into thinking it's absolutely necessary and beneficial, and through controlling the money supply, the government loosens the limits on how much money it can spend.
And here we are. Look at what the US has become. Note how the whole Western world's economies are going down the toilet too, and note how mass surveillance is spreading everywhere.
> Revolution is horrible, yes.
Yeah, and the thing is, without governments, there would be no revolutions! It's like, countless deaths could be avoided!
> I don't think "group of sociopaths in power hurting everyone" is a legitimate description of all government.
Would you settle for "looting everyone" then? That much is accurate at least.
> Your solution is to give over the power over ressources to private individuals, instead of controlling them democratically.
The idea that we democratically control the government is basically a myth. Once we elect a party based on some loose promises, they have free reign to do whatever they want. We're basically voting for one of 2 sets of ideas that we dislike the least, and then giving absolute power to the people who parrot those ideas. Those that aren't part of the elected party (department heads outside the cabinet) are also effectively unelected leaders and will continue to hold power after a new party is elected. What I want is a limit on absolute power, for anyone. Currently the state apparatus is a form of absolute power, and thus a magnet for the kinds of corruption we're talking about. I'd much rather we kept a balance of power between the economy, the individual and the state such that each has its own power and none can force the hand of another. But that's just idealism really, I just think that for now billionaires are the lesser evil compared to the state.
>>Government is less powerful nowadays than it has ever been since WW2.
I absolutely disagree with this. Under what metric and what government are you referring to.
US Federal Government has continually and unabatedly has increased and centralized its power since at least the Great Depression, Taking power from local and State governments transferring it to the Federal Government.
Under no metric can one say government in the US is less powerful today.
>The fight should be against the source of power, not against their powerless representatives.
The Source of government power is it monopoly on the initiation of violence, last I check it was only government with the legal power to steal, plunder, arrest, jail, and even kill people that disobey.
> A civilized government or corporation needs in some way cooperative with the people, that how you can attain taxes, profit , stability and trust.
In theory, sure, in practice, strongly disagree, but this would be too long a philosophical and political discussion to be had as a forum comment.
A civilized government doesn't need to be cooperative and nice with people, with their monopoly on force, overwhelming power over the individual, not to say it doesn't really care about you, in a country of tens or hundreds of millions of other people. You literally are just a statistic. Its only problem is if a huge majority of people rebel against it, but there is a very efficient way to avoid that: control of mass media and... psyops. Why would you rebel against the system when you're brainwashed it is efficient, friendly, and you have the power to change it? How would you organise against it, when all our lives are based on the Internet and technology that is easy to monitor?
> How much good does this do you once the government has sold off the national infrastructure ...
It does a lot of good if you vote in a government that buys back said infrastructure. "Sold" does not equal "destroyed".
But let me address your more general point as I understand it. There is no system that will protect you from a government that makes terrible decisions that destroy the country. What is your solution? Don't allow the government to sell anything? That's like banning knives because knives can be used for murder. Or perhaps have a committee that decides what can be sold? Well the government is already such a committee.
The only "solution" I see is to decide the government owns everything, so nothing important can be sold by mistake. Well the evidence of the previous century suggests that this creates much worse problems than it solves. This system has been tried, and it failed.
Governments, and people in general, make terrible decisions. Some of them outright disastrous. The best you can hope for is a system that lets you minimize the damage. Today it seems that democracy and capitalism is the best combination we have for minimizing the pain inflicted by people upon themselves.
> I don’t know the way around this, but I do think it’s good that power is not centralized in one governmental structure, even if that structure is Democratic
If your assertion is that nobody should wield nation-scale power, then I agree, and welcome to anarchism!
If your assertion is that billionaires are an effective check on governmental power, I'm... not seeing it. Particularly given how much power billionaires have to influence the government itself.
> I think we may have a different view on what the purpose of a government is.
Perhaps. I also suspect that we have a different view on what government actually is.
> Would you be ok with the military forcefully entering a tech company, pointing guns at the employees, and forcing them to do something?
I think representing all actions of government as being the equivalent of this is reductionist to the point of absurdity.
From my point of view, there will always be (and has to be) rules about how we interact with each other. The question is who will develop and implement those rules. Call it a necessary evil if you wish.
I prefer those rules be developed and implemented by us, collectively, because then we have at least some amount of influence over the process. If it's not done that way, it will be done by powerful entities such as corporations (or, in a maximally degenerate situation, warlords or mobs), where we have little to no influence over the process.
> And government should only have as much power as you think the worst possible people in charge should have
The problem is the worst people NOT IN GOVERNMENT already have more power than that, and can thus easily crush such a government and turn it into a de facto oligarchy.
> This is a recurring theme that I despise. People need to start to talk about the government in a democracy as "we". You are the government, the state is a collective you are part off and have power over. You are in fact dependent on others, that is the point of a society.
I take your point, but for an individual this is only true in a very abstract sense. The People may govern Themselves, but I do not govern myself in any meaningful way.
>Government is all about restricting what you can do (don't steal, don't kill, etc) under the banner of providing for other members of society (provision of safety, protection under the law, etc).
No that is not what government is all about.
The just purpose of government is to coordinate usage of communal property, for the general betterment. So levying a split rate property tax, to pay for national defense, would be a just exercise of government power, because the average person is better off with a portion of land rents being spent for this purpose, than the land title owners collecting this portion.
Where there is justification for the government using force against an individual, it is in subduing and punishing those who who violate people's rights. Banning theft is okay. Banning marijuana usage is not. This is basic non-aggression principle stuff.
>where there isn't, and you don't happen to have enough wealth to survive.
Then I either ask for help or resign myself to my fate. Robbing people cannot be justified, and legalizing such a solution is not sustainable.
>once they start to be replaced by computers / robots the changeover is going to be astonishingly fast, so you're going to have an awful lot of them hit the job market very quickly, worldwide, and most importantly d) they're not particularly well paid so they are unlikely to have a whole lot of wealth to invest.
Then they better start saving now! Their financial situation cannot be made someone else's legal responsibility, or else you create a political system where political activism can net you resources coerced from others, and one where the consequence of your irresponsibility can be passed on to others against the other's will. It totally perverts capital allocation and incentives, and is rank authoritarianism.
>Lots of announcements of huge layoffs across multiple industry sectors but almost no announcements of large job creations
There are always huge layoffs in an economy with hundreds of millions of people.
Statistics on large scale trends contradict the OP. We have seen unprecedented automation over the last 40 years yet today in the US the unemployment rate is the lowest it has been since 1963. Similarly all around the world over the last 30 to 40 years we have seen rapid automation and hundreds of millions of jobs being replaced by machines, yet there has been massive growth in the total number of jobs, increases in wages, and improvements in standard of living, over the same time span.
Anything less than statistics on global trends in employment is totally invalid as evidence for technological unemployment, and unsusprisingly, the author provides none.
>I would argue that when you give a subset of a population an institutionalized monopoly on the user of force, you're always going to get bad government eventually.
> What happens if a government starts abusing its power, spying on its own citizens, starting wars at their expense and detaining and killing innocent people all over the world?
You mean like the US? This is why I like the idea of one world government.
Let's treat each country in the world like a single individual, such that we have about 200 people on the planet. To me, this approximates how an anarcho-capitalist society would function, since there is (basically) no governing body. Yet the rich individuals in this system quite clearly abuse the poor individuals. Life is very nice though if you're a rich individual. I cannot see any guarantee that this won't happen with true anarchy.
If we had one world government, everybody would be subject to the same laws, there would be no outsourcing of torture and environmental destruction, there would be no military, and there would be no war. Importantly, your lot in life would not depend on where you were born, since there would be no immigration barriers. And there would be the full spectrum of political choices available.
Why is it such a problem that the US government collects taxes from a population earning fiat currency in an economy that the government provides? I like paying taxes, it keeps the country running. It also means that those people less fortunate than me are guaranteed some level of basic protection.
> A minimal government is one not worth buying. A big and intrusive government is one totally worth buying.
I get what you're saying. If a government barely has any powers, they yes, it's not worth corrupting, but I really don't think we're headed in that direction any time soon. Surely even a medium sized-government would still be worth corrupting?
Moreover, why can't we have both? A government with smaller influence, but still freer of money-influence than today's.
It seems to me that the current political reality is that Lesig's proposals would be much easier to achieve than bringing our government's influence to a level more agreeable to a libertarian.
I would speculate that democracies like our own broadly tend coverage to the middle of extreme views. If that's the case, then we won't achieve a libertarain-sized government, unless you convince a good majority of voters. Hence, it seems clear that we should focus more on the quality of government, right now.
> In practice, as soon as you get power, you have very little incentive to serve those who elected you and all the incentives in the world to make money from special interest groups.
Special interest groups are citizens teaming up to push their agenda, those are people who elected you. Special interest groups are not inherently bad nor are they automatically against the will of the electorate. Many are actually representing the electorate.
> Instead, think about this: why do you need some people sitting in a pathetic building ruling over you? Why do you think society cannot do without them and what is it that only governments can do, but people and companies can't?
There you go again treating government and people as if they're different things. You're presenting a false choice, it's not government rule vs freedom from it, it's government rule vs local warlord rule. Power abhors a vacuum and government is our solution to that problem, it's how we live civilly together. It's not nor will it ever be perfect as no human system is, but it's vastly preferable to the alternative.
The idea that people can live peacefully without a form of government is just silly, someone has to enforce rule of law and it can't be someone's private security force or the guy with the most goons wins every time. Either the people choose a government or someone will choose one for them, or decide to rule himself.
> One of the things that I don't understand about libertarianism. You abolish the government. Then what? x) Do they think nobody is going to step up and grab that power vaccum?
I don't think there is a 'vacuum' because people have a need for a boot on their face, that first the King put his boot on people's faces (which is now how it worked, it was a huge mixed bag), and then the govt must do it or else a strongman might do it again.
There is no 'power vacuum', just a need for certain societal order. How that societal order is provided is where all these things happen. Monarchies are 'a' way to provide that societal order (for national defense and other things for that matter). Similarly Democracies are another one of that. Imagine if you went to 900 BC and tried to install a democracy to the people there? Would it really work out? Would people happily rejoice? Or they'd lose their democracy to a King soon enough?
There is an argument that can be made that political systems people embrace, depends upon the weapon systems available to them [1]. That, printing press gave us the age of enlightenment (and Protestantism, which is a reversion of Christianity to the original text, as opposed to the Papal church), but the invention of (widespread) guns gave us the Democracy. Because earlier only a lifetime of trained soldier could fight but now the training of a firearm (to become lethal) can be acquired in a very short amount of time.
As an anarchocapitalist, in 2000s we envisioned private companies providing that societal order which allows us to get away with governments, and this was heavily criticized that this would just cause private companies to just become govts. But in 2010s, I can say that blockchain (and yes I understand the unpopularity of the idea) have the capability to create that societal order. In 2000s we always envisioned [2] that the free market money would look like Amazon Bucks or Walmart Bucks, but now we realize that with cryptocurrencies we don't need a single company but a decentralized network to do the same job.
1. Weapons Systems and Political Stability, by Carrol Quigley
>And yet, everyday, we give more and more power to governments...
I think we should be careful about blaming government itself. But instead focus on the _people_ that make up the government. It seems there is a serious lack of equal representation throughout our government. For the most part, it has become a matter of who has the larger bank roll.
It would be interesting to see a government with forced equal representation across the entire socioeconomic spectrum.
> I just hate the argument that government inherently because it's government is inefficient and will never be effective
The big incentive problem here is that democracies reduce the power held by private individuals. So (primarily wealthy, powerful) private individuals have an incentive to market the idea that government is inefficient to reduce the impact of decisions made by democratic choice.
This same conflict occurs throughout history. For example, the Magna Carta was a major concession of the power of the English King to lower nobility. There are always going to be people who dream of running their own fiefdom and see democracy as at best a nuisance and at worst an active impediment.
Sure. So what's the solution in this particular case? Should we go full corporate and privatize border control and customs? The government has a monopoly on violence and law enforcement. Do you think privatizing this outside of government is a good idea? Do you really think this power would be less abused?
Don't pick a bad example to dismiss the whole idea of government. At least in theory people can vote out the government, or specific laws/regulations* but they can't vote out money.
*) Before dismissing my point, that only works in democracy, not oligarchy, which we have in the US. And if you're wondering how we've reached oligarchy, I may be simplifying things but it has a lot to do with the 'big government is bad' idea which has been floated around within the last century by the people hoarding most money.
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