Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Is minarchy possible?

I don't see there being a 'libertarian government' middle ground between anarchy and statism, since governments essentially act as markets for political corruption. Since any company can simply buy off politicians and regulators to get around legislation even in the rare cases where it might be beneficial, there's really no argument to be made in favor of putting justice, security, roads, utilities, whatever in the hands of government in the name of efficiency or equity. In the U.S., for example, the return on investment for federal lobbying is around 1000-5000 percent (versus an awesome stock return being around 30 percent). So the common objection of 'who will protect us from bad big business without government' is kinda moot when you look at the big picture of the fact that the bad big businesses have already bought and paid for your 'government' (eg. corruption market) a long time ago. I'd be fine with competing governments if that's what you mean but at that point you might as well just call them private security firms. Really all we'd need to do is undermine the power to tax (or at least collect those taxes) and everything else would follow. If they can't steal from you to line their own pockets and buy more gadgets to oppress people with then it should crumble on its own. One reason why I think Bitcoin is so promising. Of course one part of me thinks widespread anarchy will never be attained until we perfect the human ability to leave this planet and survive in space just like people sailed across the oceans to escape poverty and state oppression in the past. So for now in some respects it might be as much of a fantasy as a workable government that respects people's rights, lol