> 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.
> If you don't want govt to do {bad thing}, you shouldn't give it the power to do {bad thing}, even if that authority is necessary to do {good thing}.
I didn't. I've never said "Yes, take this power", only "that power you've claimed, please don't use it like that".
> Between [voting] and not changing govt, you have consented.
Pft. Silence is not consent. And 'changing governments' means leaving the place I was born. That's not a valid choice.
> You're confusing "it would be bad for govt do to {something}" with "govt has no authority to do {something}".
Not at all. I'm claiming that because it'd be bad, and obviously so, that no competent person would have given them that power. And even if some people did that doesn't reasonably substitute for consent from the rest.
> [That the government has valid authority is] almost always the case, so assuming otherwise is silly.
No, that the government claims valid authority is almost always the case. That says nothing for their actual legitimacy by any objective and useful standard.
> While true [that knowingly buying stolen property is theft], that's not the case here.
Yes, it is. If something is sold without the consent of its owner, that is theft.
As long as a government claims to rule by a mandate from the people (unlike North Korea for instance) they can't very well act for people do don't consent to their rules.
That many (most? all?) governments do this simply means we haven't yet seen many (any?) legitimate governments.
> 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.
> Im questioning the value of a solution with the application of force.
Governments use force. By definition. That means you question the value of governments.
I don't. The alternative is warlords, who also use force.
The benefit of a Government, specifically of a mostly democratic one, is I have some say in when and how that force gets used, without myself having to be a warlord.
> A dangerous tool, that requires all sorts of limitations to make sure it is not used abusively.
Absolutely. A Constitution enacting checks and balances, and guaranteeing free speech and a free press, are the best ways I know to limit that power.
> And injecting things into people against their will is pretty high up there.
Sure?
Allowing nuclear testing where it can impact people is also bad. (We did that.)
Allowing the for-profit sale of known carcinogens is also bad. (We do that. See: asbestos, tobacco.)
We've also committed absolute atrocities. [1]
Clearly we need more checks and balances, and a more powerful press.
> It is not the intention of the act alone that decides if its moral or not: the act itself is.
Is the act of murder moral?
I'm pretty sure you would say, "no."
What about when the US sees Germany invading neighboring countries, and killing Jews and gypsies? Is it moral for the US to start murdering German soldiers, in open war?
I'm pretty sure you have to concede, "yes."
Therefore, it is not the act alone. The intention also plays a part.
> I think we have had enough experiences to know that if the government decided what to do with your own body, great tragedies follow.
I'm pretty sure great tragedies will happen regardless, and unfortunately, governments have to make decisions. King Solomon's wisdom over deciding to cut a baby in half comes to mind.
> can you ban drugs and alcohol
I think a far better parallel track of conversation is antibiotics.
If you don't follow the prescribed course of antibiotics, you can breed drug-resistant bacteria. That's a very good argument in favor of limiting access to antibiotics, to people who have consulted with a doctor.
There are countries (India) where antibiotics are much more freely available, and people don't use them properly. They take them for a few days, until they feel better. Breeding dangerous strains.
The argument can be made that governments should stop you from improperly using antibiotics, because it increases the risk to all of us.
> Can you decide on forcefully aborting, or forbidding abortion?
We do decide that. We have to make decisions about how our laws work.
> How people are dressed?
We decide that, too, yes.
> Its not the act of using a hammer on a nail that is in question: its the hammer itself, and the act of nails voting who gets hit next.
Hitler 2.0 comes up. Should we murder his soldiers?
I vote yes. How vote you?
> Why would government enacted violence be any more dignified than individual violence?
"Dignified" is an interesting word choice.
"having or showing a composed or serious manner that is worthy of respect."
The simple answer is that the government composed a law in a respectful manner, and hopefully the officers of the government carried out the law in a respectful manner.
When they don't, we're supposed to hold them to account.
> What change does it make to the morality of a violent act if it was voted on?
Catholics say a phrase, "in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do."
It can be immoral to NOT act.
It would be immoral to not intervene in WW3 with Hitler 2.0.
The way we decide if it's time to intervene is that we vote on how our representative government is run.
> 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
> 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.
> But is it a bad thing for the population to not be fully in charge? Isn't the point of "tyranny of the majority" that sometimes the majority can/will make the wrong decision?
People have very different opinions on this. I think if you're going to take away peoples' natural freedom and subject them to the yoke of government,[1] it is a moral imperative that they, not holy men, control that apparatus.
[1] Which I think is necessary--I have no anarchist leanings.
> The government has demonstrated that they will abuse every power given to them, and even those that weren't
I think this mixes up what is true and what people (myself included) wish was true.
Governments don’t have power given to them. Their default state is God-Kings ruling on personal whims.
Governments have power taken from them, either by corporations, or by religions, or by other governments — sometimes these groups even call themselves “the people” — but the restrictions are not stable equilibriums, they are constantly fought against on all sides.
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
> You cannot create a tool that gives de-facto total power, and then make rules that forbid those who want to abuse the tool from doing so, where those who want to abuse it are also those who are in charge of enforcing the rules.
Have you heard of a few little inventions called laws, police, and separation of powers? Because the things you have just declared impossible is quite common - we call it a "legal system".
I cannot believe I have to explain this. The entirety of our civilisation is based precisely on what you confidently proclaim "doesn't work".
Is it perfect? No. Is it better than anarchy? Yes.
> The only thing that does work reliably is to avoid creating concentrations of power in the first place.
This is what is impossible. Power concentrates like it's a law of nature. Government is utterly inevitable. And if you have a counterexample, please tell me and the rest of the world.
>> You cannot create a tool that gives de-facto total power, and then make rules that forbid those who want to abuse the tool from doing so, where those who want to abuse it are also those who are in charge of enforcing the rules.
> The entirety of our civilisation is based precisely on what you confidently proclaim "doesn't work".
You seem to have overlooked the word "total". That also has been tried, and no, it doesn't work.
Sure, we have to have a government. But stop giving it more power. It's got enough already.
> I’d like to see a real world example of what you mean.
The German Enabling Act of 1933.
> when leaders are allowed to arbitrarily extend their reign past with their laws allow
What if they just use the provisions in the fundamental law that allow changing the structure or terms of government?
A state can either have a thanatocracy in which the dead dictate the details of government to the living, or it can have process by which even the fundamental law can be changed. If it has the latter, that process can, within the preexisting democratic system, be used to terminate democracy without anyone exceeding the power allowed in law.
> in fact the government does have the right to do that
Not necessarily.
It is certainly true that the government has the power to do it. But the point of having a free country with the rule of law is supposed to be that might does not make right. The fact that the government can take your house if it decides it wants to does not, in itself, mean it has the right to.
Any such right ultimately depends on the government being responsible to the people and the people accepting that the government is acting in their interest and that what it does is for the overall good of society. The larger and more bureaucratic the government becomes, and the more it uses its power based on utopian visions of people who do not suffer the consequences if they are wrong, the harder it is for the people to accept that the government is acting in their interest and that what it is doing is for the overall good of society.
> My point in the first half is that you can’t look solely at the costs without looking at the benefits
There is no benefit from a political authority wielding entity which has not been provided by an entity that does not wield political authority. Therefore the political authority is not necessary for those benefits.
> Removing the government would shift that death to elsewhere and not remove it.
Removing the hundreds of millions of people who were killed in the name of national security and the maintenance of political authority would not magically make them die for some other reason instead.
> That’s why government needs to be iterated on not removed.
Whether you call providing the benefits of typical governments without their horrendous costs an iteration or a removal is semantics. My concern is that it gets done.
> Every kWh wasted guessing nonces on renewables isn’t spent decarbonizing the grid where we do actual productive things.
This would assume that those energy forms restricted to specific geographic locations are not so restricted. This is not true.
> I mentioned in another reply 97% of all bitcoin mining hardware will be thrown out, burned, crushed or buried all without ever mining a block successfully in its entire useful life.
Most e-waste won't mine a block successfully in its entire life. If it could contribute to the peaceful destruction of the state, hard to imagine a better use it could've been put to, given the statistics.
> I know there are other consensus mechanisms but they just rely on feudalistic control of the supply and just create systemic inequality without accountability.
You mean like being born economically so deep underwater it's impossible to ever even break even because of the economic mismanagement of your political authority wielding organisational unit? At least ledgers using those consensus mechanisms only levy debt on people who choose to participate.
> There’s no good that comes of this. In basically every case decentralization and permissionlessness is not what anyone actually wants or needs.
It's clearly what a whole lot of people want, as to whether they need it or not, time will tell. For all the aforementioned reasons, I think the case couldn't be clearer that they do, however.
>There are advantages to the efficiency of authoritarian power, but how do they handle peaceful transition of power?
Europe had hereditary transitions of power, which were about as peaceful as any other form of transition of power. In Rome you would choose your successor and he would be the next emperor.
> I probably could not be persuaded that limits on speech and government censorship are good long-term for the health of a society that I'd want to actually live in. I think it's a good thing for governments to ultimately be accountable to their people.
Just because it's supposed to work that way doesn't mean it actually works that way. Do you think Americans are using free speech well? Do you feel like the government is accountable to you? In America you have free speech but it's not practically useful for anything. Have a go at trying to stop some government abuse of power.
> > The primary result is that we should all work to make a humane
tyranny (if such a thing is even possible; it sure sounds like an
oxymoron, doesn't it?)
> It's not possible, governments need checks and balances, things get bad
really fast when they have absolute power.
If it's not possible then I think we're destined for a very nasty future.
I don't think a technologically sophisticated government can afford to be non-totalitarian (in the narrow sense I'm
using here: making "total" use of available information technology. Cf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness ). I think if
it tried it would be undermined by other governments.
In re: this point, I find it discouraging that the Communists won in
their imperialistic effort to subdue the people of HK. I was hoping that
technology would give the masses the edge over the central government but
it doesn't seem to have played out that way.
> > Yes, your privacy is a social fiction, but in return, we can stop almost all crime.
> No we can't,
What would prevent it?
> and (longer conversation) it wouldn't be desirable to in
any case. There is a strong school of thought that we don't want perfect
enforcement of all laws, at least not ones based around nonviolent
crimes.
I don't agree. I feel strongly that laws should be legitimate or
repealed. We can't have perfect enforcement, but technological advancement is exponentially reducing the cost of enforcement, eh?
Is the answer selective enforcement? That doesn't sound right does it?
If there are laws that we believe should be imperfectly enforced then
that should be written into the law.
For example, if you smoke pot, is it better for that to be legal, or
illegal but most of the time cops won't bust you for smoking a joint?
> To me, it is hypothetical, because we still had a Capital riot even
with increased surveillance. After the riot, it didn't take ubiquitous
surveillance to catch those people, they bragged about it in livestreams
on social media. We can do better with the capabilities we have.
Well, I'll say this: the Capital riot is unprecedented in USA history and
I think it will be a while before we can draw reliable conclusions from
it. It does seem to me that the problems with the response to it that
day did not stem from insufficient information.
> It seems intuitively correct to say that the NSA surveillance is
improving security, but (surprisingly) I don't see strong evidence that
the programs are actually helping to catch terrorists. We're giving
additional capabilities to people who aren't leveraging or making good
use of the capabilities that they already have.
That's kind of my point: rather than trying to sequester the technology
(which I believe is impossible) we have to use it well, or we'll fall
into some sort of dystopian system.
> > I'm not a particularly good person (I do my best) and I like my privacy, but I think I would have to take that bargain.
> I wouldn't. To me, it sounds like a nonsensical comparison, it's like
asking whether or not I'd switch to eating only bugs to stop a
kidnapping. I don't believe that it would help, I don't believe the
bargain you're proposing makes sense on an individual level. And as a
widescale solution to crime on the macro level, the consequences of
constant surveillance for everyone are worse than a kidnapping. It's not
a good trade.
I wasn't clear. It's not a trade. You're going to be livestreaming
anyway, whether you like it or not, so do we also stop the kidnapping?
That's the question.
I can't find the news article now, but I was reading a few months ago
about this exact scenario: A young child in China was kidnapped and the
authorities used the system there to locate and rescue the kid within a
few hours.
We in the West could do that too but if we don't because we value
our personal privacy over the occasional kidnapped kid, well, I'm no fan
of the CCP but that doesn't seem like a defensible moral position to me.
> I do agree with you in one way, which is that regulation of this tech
is not a perfect long-term solution. We need to figure out how to enforce
regulations, and outside of the regulatory world we need adversarial
research into the technology itself as well. Banning facial recognition
will not be enough, on its own, to solve the problem -- solving the
problem will require a combination of multiple solutions. But it is a
problem we should try to solve. Whether that's by normalizing mask
wearing, researching how to combat systems like gait detection, making it
easier to detect cameras -- we should be thinking about how to give
people tools to hide from omnipresent facial recognition.
To me that just sounds like closing the barn door after the horse already
bolted. The technology is already deployed and more and more gets
deployed every day. We should be talking about a universal
highest-common-denominator of laws for the planet so that the decreasing
cost of asymptotically-prefect enforcement becomes a solution rather than
a problem!
That makes more sense to me than fighting it because the laws are crap
and unevenly enforced.
> I happen to disagree that it is the only logically consistent position
When I say it's a logically consistent position, what I mean to imply by that is for people who think that government is an abomination, it is logically consistent for them to hope for the dismantling thereof. You, who most decidedly do not think that government is an abomination, as a lawyer, are logically consistent in thinking that it should not be dismantled.
> Much like a corporation is the legal stand-in for the will of the collective shareholders, a government is the societal stand-in for the will of the people at large.
Except that it most clearly is not.
> A society that tries to maintain no government, or very limited government, is at an unstable point. In the best case it will collapse from internal conflict but be left alone from there (e.g. Somalia, tribal areas of Afghanistan/Pakistan). In the normal case the society will simply be eventually overrun by those who choose to organize (e.g. USA vs. the Native Americans, Hitler vs. the appeasers), but a government will spring up again one way or another.
That's a normalcy bias, there have been many points throughout history with no centralised productivity extracting parasitic force initiating agency. In fact, the variant we have now with extremely high direct taxation on the incomes of almost all productive activity within a society is the historical anathema. Not only that, but this fails to take into account the methods of control the state actually uses to exercise control on its population, and that currency control was recently removed from their hands.
Agorism becomes a very real threat under these circumstances
As a nash equilibrium, an involuntary centralised productivity extracting parasitic force initiating agency is not at all stable. It stands to reason that it will only be able to maintain control by either force or fraud. Right now they're going with fraud, from the amount of discontent I see with the political state of the world I don't know how much longer it will last until they devolve to force.
>>IMO, this is a false equivalence -- governments are uniquely different from other entities.
This is another difference on our world view. I do not believe they should be. The foundation of the American style of governance is "For the people by the people".
The government is the common organization of individual natural rights. Any legitimate force the government has comes from the common organization of the natural and individual right of self defense. We the people ordain and establish governments to protect our individual rights. As such the common force is to only do what the individuals have the natural and lawful right to do, to protect our rights.
So if it would be unlawful or unethical for me to enter your property, mow your yard and take our car as compensation it should also be unlawful / unethical for the government to do the same
Granting government special powers is how government abuse occurs. Just look at all the police abuse, this occurs because we have given the police immunities, protections and powers not afforded to the general public. This power will, is, and always will be abused by those that hold it
This was the fundamental problem with the Monarch system we revolted from over 250 years ago, and as we granted the government ever increasing levels of power far above what a normal citizen could ever dream of the resulting problems are clear, evident and predictable. Including the resulting Wealth inequality which I can and have made a case is cause by government regulations not by capitalism or lack of regulations
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.
Well, "luckily" the real power is not with rank-and-file politicians that indeed do come and go: http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.fi/2014/02/the-dollar-and-d...
> 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.
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