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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

The line you quoted doesn't say that people will act reasonably, but rather that they are capable of acting reasonably.

The interesting (and massive) problem is figuring out why some people act unreasonably in the same situation as someone else who doesn't. If it's something that can be addressed through mechanisms like the provision of healthcare, UBI, equality, or addressing inequality then perhaps society can be structured to have a very minimal government without the need for so many laws simply by making sure everyone is treated fairly and not left in a position where unreasonable actions are a solution to their immediate problems.

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> addressed through mechanisms like the provision of healthcare, UBI, equality, or addressing inequality then perhaps society can be structured to have a very minimal government

The (most likely/obvious implementation of the) first half of that seems diametrically opposite of “very minimal government”.

Having a government that's there to do no more than take in tax receipts and spend the money on essentials would be minimal compared to what we have at the moment. Right now the government involves itself in practically every aspect of people's lives. It doesn't have to be that way.

But your minimal government wouldn't work. If you have taxes then you need a justice system to enforce collection of taxes. You'll also need a military to prevent outsiders from taking your treasury.

The provision of healthcare, UBI and the like is itself incompatible with "very minimal" government - each of those would involve government control over a non-trivial fraction of GDP. I'm not saying that these things aren't worth doing; some of them may well be. We should be mindful of the costs, however.

For that matter, anarchist thought hasn't historically shown much awareness wrt. the importance of, e.g. social capital provision, as enabled by voluntary "grassroots" institutions like churches and community clubs, as something that's incredibly effective at promoting reasonable, pro-social values and behaviors. (Some of these institutions necessarily involve various sorts of hierarchy and ranking, such that, e.g. a Scout Guide would rank higher than a newcomer Scout. Many anarchists would intuitively dismiss any such hierarchy as inherently coercive - despite the entirely voluntary character of these organizations.)

There has actually been a great deal of thought (and some practice) on provision of services and community grassroots organizations by some strains of anarchism. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism

However whether a bottom up, decentralized, participatory democracy still counts as government... I will leave up to the reader.

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