Obviously that's not going to happen so then why is it then that I detest the government? First, it's not the government per se. I have no problem with the concept of courts, military, and police. I do have a problem with a forced monopoly over a given geographic territory that everyone must pay into. Such a concept is laughed at in most areas of life. Taking a page from Tom DiLorenzo's playbook, what if someone were to say,
"We couldn't possibly distribute food efficiently in a free market, therefore we need to establish one grocery store in a given territory. No competition will be allowed. Customers will be able to vote every year on what goods will be carried. When they show up to the store a shopping cart will be sitting for them with groceries already picked out for them by the elected store managers. Prices too will be determined by the managers. Oh, and everyone must spend a portion of their income (again defined by the managers) at the store. If you want to buy food elsewhere, well, we might allow that, but it doesn't change the fact that you must spend the obligatory amount defined by the store manager"?I'm guessing the possibility for abuse of such power is obvious to most people and so is the restriction of choice. But carrying out this analogy, dissenters of such a system would be accused of being anti-food just as detractors of social security today are considered anti-elderly or pro-euthenasia.
Why is it that the worst possible solution has so successfully been sold to people as the only solution? To rephrase what was just written above, Hans-Herman Hoppe put it this way
Assume a group of people, aware of the possibility of conflicts; and then someone proposes, as a solution to this eternal human problem, that he (someone) be made the ultimate arbiter in any such case of conflict, including those conflicts in which he is involved. I am confident that he will be considered either a joker or mentally unstable and yet this is precisely what all statists propose.This solutions is bad on both ethical and utilitarian grounds. It fails ethically because it uses force to make sure alternative products are not offered and because the level of participation is not freely or contractually agreed upon. It's bad by utilitarian arguments because it is logically true from the axiom of human action that hegemony makes one party better off at the expense of another while voluntary trade is beneficial for all parties. One can get into many contradictions if they don't understand the important difference between homesteading and conquest. Anyone confused about how I can promote exclusivity of property owners or contractual government but not of the state should read my post on Home Owners Associations.
I've been putting off blog posts because I seem to think they need to be of publishable quality (in which case I've failed in every post) thus I've made the barrier to starting a blog artificially high. So I'm stopping here even though I've just scratched this topic of why the good of the state in theory is very different than the state in practice, and how we can understand this difference by analyzing its means. But one last comment on the title of this post. I know many many smart people who promote the state, which is why I'm so confounded by their 1st grade logic when it comes to the state. We may be the most advanced civilization in the history of the world, but our fundamental means of interacting with each other on issues of politics are barbaric and 20 centuries behind our technological and scientific abilities.
