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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

Needlessly cynical. Human organizations of all kinds have problems, including governments. If you don't believe that government can ever function in a manner intended by the people it nominally represents, then everything is hopeless, since we (the vast majority of people) were also screwed over without representative government. I don't agree that one needs to conclude this. You can believe in government at the same time as believing that it sometimes (often!) screws up and/or is the subject of regulatory capture.

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> since we (the vast majority of people) were also screwed over without representative government.

Without government we at least had choice. I think you're needlessly cynical. Humans can organize themselves quite well when they have maximum choice as individuals.

The robber barons of the early nineteenth century were bolstered by governments--not hindered. Governments have always been corrupt.

> Without government we at least had choice.

I don't consider "give me your stuff or I beat you" a choice.

Only difference is now the government says "give me your stuff or I beat you" rather than your neighbor

If I had bezos money, I would buy a large swath of arable land, build a large wall around it, and offer 100k so called libertarians to walk in with some supplies. But they couldn't form government. Absolutely no form of mandatory taxation of any kind. And once they went in, they would be committed for five years.

Oh, since we can't have them benefiting from positive outcomes of collective action, we'll pipe in polluted air and river waste to help simulate a truly free market environmental policy.

> Oh, since we can't have them benefiting from positive outcomes of collective action, we'll pipe in polluted air and river waste to help simulate a truly free market environmental policy.

That’s a completely artificial and shoehorned idea. If you want to prove a point about libertarians, do it properly in a closed system. They must be left to their own devices and are left to clean their own pollution.

>closed system

That's the point libertarians don't get: there is no closed system. There is no green field hypothetical.

'When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick"'. - Mikhail Bakunin

Get a firearm and train with it. Your government prevents you from defending yourself effectively.

Great solution for adult, able-bodied people. Much less so for minors, the elderly and the blind.

Community and family used to step in here. Now government at least claims to.

But lets be real... How quickly do the cops come? Do they catch robbers?

> Without government we at least had choice.

Yes, the choice between surrendering to the bandit (who happens to be stronger than you) or getting shot by him.

> the choice between surrendering to the bandit (who happens to be stronger than you) or getting shot by him.

"bandit" AKA government.

> "bandit" AKA government.

No, sorry. If you're thinking using excessively coarse categories like "governments," you're going to get things pretty wrong in most cases.

If that's too hard, then try this: if you think the government-as-bandit is bad, it'll be a heck of a lot worse when you're dealing with bandits-as-bandits, who don't even theoretically have any accountability to or responsibility for you.

Individuals are extremely weak; groups are pretty much always stronger. If you don't want to bullied as a weak individual, you need to band together with others, but then you're subject to how the group governs itself.

Without government we had a choice, and we chose to create governments.

Government was not dropped on our heads by the robber barons, it has been invented and re-invented throughout human history by regular people who need to solve problems.

> Humans can organize themselves quite well when they have maximum choice as individuals.

Yes, and then you’ll need a word to describe the collective actions of the organized humans. One such word is “government.”

Lysander Spooner wrote about this very thing in the 1800s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysander_Spooner

Many people didn't have a choice. Governments at the start are like mafias and will fight you until you acquiesce.

The history of the US is riddled with federal government takeovers and increased taxation of people who did not want it.

The history of the US is not even 300 years at this point.

Humans have been creating societies and forms of governance for at least 10,000 years. Get some perspective.

More people have existed in the last 300 years than in the previous 10,000 years.

Get some perspective.

We're talking about the nature of government and governance. Size/scale does matter to some extent, but much less than the range of variants that human societies have come up with over history.

Can you find me an example of this anarcho-libertarian system in the present/past that functions better than the current government systems of the developed world?

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