People insist on deluding themselves that we somehow “need government” to supposedly safeguard our most basic interests, such as the protection of property and bodily integrity. Most people understand that all the rest (infrastructure, healthcare, education, etc.) can be provided by voluntary initiatives, better and cheaper than by the corrupt middleman of government.
But not only does the unmotivated centralised monopoly of violence (AKA government) do a poor job protecting your property and bodily integrity, but it is usually the culprit threatening your bodily integrity and depriving you of your property ownership. Did you think property/municipality taxes, inheritance taxes, property transfer fees, and nonsensical city planning regulations grant you ownership of anything? If so, I invite you to participate in my get-rich-quick scheme early while there’s still time! (For legal purposes, I disclose that this was just a bad joke).
And your bodily integrity? The vast majority of murder, assault, rape, and theft are conducted on property which is the sole responsibility of the government. Not only that, but we feel more threatened by a police cruiser than a gang-affiliate car in the rearview mirror. Cops get a hall pass to legally brutalise people on a whim and get away with it. This means that the police attract all kinds of degenerate psychopaths desperate for their gay power highs. Not only that, but government’s senseless prohibitions (e.g. street drugs) create drug gangs and all the violence, corruption, and collateral damage associated with them. The alcohol prohibition era should have taught us a lesson about the destruction caused by ridiculous prohibitions. Some people just want to get high. Let them. It’s easier to control whether your bus driver or your brain surgeon is high on the job than to forbid all drugs across the board, and then waste the vast majority of your policing resources to pretend to fight against the drug gangs the government created in the first place.
Plus, government forbids you to defend yourself in meaningful ways. Most governments around the world prohibit gun ownership. And those few countries that allow it impose so many limitations on their use that they render them in many cases almost useless. Oh, and you can’t defend yourself against an aggressive overstepping cop… ever.
Want more examples of the government representing a risk to your bodily integrity? All these petty geopolitical interests are the result of consolidated power in the hands of a few neo-aristocrat politicians. The vast majority of citizens don’t give a fuck about the borders of Ukraine or in what language the governments of Israel-Palestine run their bullshit bureaucracy. People just want to live and thrive in their immediate communities. It is only when they are grouped into belligerent tribes led by warmongers that people become hateful little drones in service of tyrants with Napoleon syndrome. Even if your country is not involved directly in any conflict, your government funds this war or that rebel group, which means it exposes you to reciprocal terrorism. How many citizens of the atrocious EU must die due to terrorism invited and encouraged by the gay military policies of this neo-empire currently occupying Europe?
But the problem isn’t that government doesn’t protect our basic interests. The problem is that most laws and regulations - arbitrarily made and violently enforced by government - have nothing to do with your bodily integrity or your property. Government taxing you to the bone to fund NGOs to promote LGBTQ+ “awareness” in Pakistan (when we know it’s just a money-laundering scheme) has nothing to do with the protection of anything. The government passing arbitrary regulations that crush small competitors while deliberately granting an unfair advantage to big monopolising corpos (with enough money to lobby corrupt politicians) isn’t about protecting anything. The government passing laws enforcing bullshit “compliance” that only creates more income streams for its legalese parasitical class isn’t about protecting anyone.
Fair laws are not those created by corrupt professional bullshitters voted in through the corrupt practice of buying votes from corrupt voters. The only fair laws are those created by voluntary initiatives where enough people who want something enough are willing to put their money where their mouths are to have skin in the game. To learn how voluntary incentive-based decentralised systems of self-governance emerge, read my post ‘Laws without government,’ as well as my reading list on voluntaryism.
No, we don’t need government for lawmaking or law “enforcement.” If laws are good, they don’t need to be “enforced” by anything other than organised self-defense by people who only want self-defense; not arbitrary sales taxes, tariffs, and quotas that enrich corrupt politicians on the backs of the labour of others.
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