Topic: End of Governments - page 8. (Read 6579 times)

No, it isn't. Well, not "secure" or "well adjusted", but they certainly are industrious.

Drug trafficking is an excellent example of a secure, industrious, and well-adjusted population. Thank you for such fine examples. I am getting such a good education here.

Those aren't "ifs," they're if-then statements. As for evidence to back up those statements, you need only look at the black market. People want drugs. They are willing to pay for them. (There is a market need for drugs.) Other people are willing to provide these drugs, even at significant personal risk.

That's a lot of ifs. Evidentiary facts would be better.

Most roads are actually built by private contractors... Paid for with public funds.

I suppose if no one stole the money to pay these people, no one would ever pay for roads to be built, right?

If a market need exists, someone will be willing to provide it. If no one is willing to pay for it, no market need exists.

Where do your free-market fairies live that don't have publicly financed infrastructure? Because if they were so efficient and profitable, sure they must have streets paved with gold, food shelves bursting with the sweetest fruits and meats, and flying cars!

That's just mean but I laughed anyway.

No offense, cbeast.

I agree. That's why so much of that infrastructure is fucked. It's the product of the billions of coercive efforts on the part of State actors, not the result of billions of consenting efforts on the part of individuals.

You can either have the evils of a consensual system or the evils of a coercive system. I choose to live in a consensual system as far as is humanly possible in the larger coercive system.

You don't seem to get the point he's trying to make cbeast, as long as two parties involved consent that is a free market, do you think the government could get all of those without peoples consent? The problem is of course the percentage of people who consented at the time all the spending started has massively decreased because people hardly vote any more and when questioned about this our 'leaders' just shrug and go "Yes it's a problem" then carry on as normal as long as they have a majority.

Going a little bit off topic here, but if we're going to talk about this mathematically I'll put it into perspective for you. I'm sure you've seen these 'opinion' polls which are made up of about 2000 people or so which morons claim represent the opinions of an entire country. Well elections are a lot like that except on a slightly bigger scale, if you have millions upon millions of unregistered voters or people who specifically choose not to vote and only a couple of million register and vote for a party then that does not mean that the couple of million people are actually representative of the country nor are their leaders.

Don't think just because you're told it's 'publicly' funded that it's the case, in fact with the UK in particular we have a problem of supposedly 'public' government services being outsourced to privately funded agencies because of cost and so on. Who do you think that the government hands out it's contracts too? Who do you think produces all the military equipment they purchase? The whole situation is so fucked up it's probably going to take historians several thousand years into the future even more years to uncover all the bullshit and propaganda that has been made by our governments to trick gullible people like you cbeast. You seriously need to start at least researching the things people tell you because you sound like how I thought when I was younger and believed all the bullshit I was told too.

You win. You are so smart.

Like the publicly funded oil pipelines - oops, no, not those.
Or the publicly funded electrical grid... oh, not that, either.
Maybe the publicly provided internet you're using... oops, not that, either.

Perhaps your public school education explains why you needed GPS to find the grocery store....

Oh I don't know. I had to travel on publicly funded roads to get to the store. I had to use publicly funded GPS to find my way there. Most clerks at the stores are probably home-schooled;-) but some of them were products of a public school. I could go on, but suffice to say that much of the modern industrial and economic infrastructure is not the product of a free-market.

If you've ever conducted a transaction or made a trade in which you and the other person consented to the exchange, the free market fairy was hovering over your head.

Crack a history book. Plenty of evidence.

Nope, but it does need evidence for which there is none.

Thankfully, you don't need to believe in it. Reality doesn't need belief.

I saw what you did there. Going back to my original argument.


In fact, I never profered the notion that free-market principles provide any services for the greater good of a populace or individual. In fact, I don't even believe in the free-market fairy.

You're right, you don't. You don't need anyone to mow your lawn for you, or to cook your meals for you, or to make your clothes for you, either. Providing these things for someone, however, is a service. (Or, arguably, a product, but we needn't split hairs.)


Again, you're correct. Specialization and division of labor make doing these things more efficient. You could grow your own food, and make your own clothes, and be 100% self-sufficient. You'd have little time for anything else, though. Which is where service providers, such as farmers, clothiers, and the like come in.

The question is, do the service providers for Security operate under the free-market principles which have so greatly increased prosperity in other areas of life, or do they continue to operate regional monopolies and use force to extract their payment?

Definition of service: The action of helping or doing work for someone.

Again, you do not need anyone else to protect you from harm. You just have to have good survival skills. It just makes life easier when we cooperate and specialize our skills for efficiency. How this is organized is irrelevant. All I am saying is that a collective organization is more efficient at providing a broad range of the necessities of life for the the most people. They theoretically maximize resources for the collective good of everyone.

I can cook a meal for myself. That does not mean that providing me with a meal is not a service. And when I speak of the "service" of security, I am specifically referring to provision of the need of protection from harm. Though Food and Shelter are certainly services that can be provided, they lie outside the scope of most private defense agencies. (And outside the scope of Government as laid out in the Constitution, as well.)