This says it all. The proposition that government is evil is true; the proposition that government is a necessary evil is false.

Government is an addictive drug and riding our selves of it would be painful. Life without government would be much different; it would not be worse.

To round the view from this perspective, familiarization with the Gumplowicz-Oppenheimer theory of the origin of the primitive State is useful. According to this theory, the primitive state evolved from raiding, primarily by nomadic herdsmen, of early agricultural societies for the purpose of confiscating their food stores - a precursor to taxation. Eventually the nomadic raiders evolved into a settled governing class.

Bizarre.

You can't have read the article.

BUMP

In an exchange on another thread we discussed how the government relies on brainwashing, propaganda, whatever you want to call it, to reduce its need to resort to force (which is more expensive) to keep the people under control; specifically the use of the government schools for that purpose in modern times. No object of this brainwashing has outweighed that of instilling the idea of necessity of government as something people do not even question. This has been in progress for more than 12,000 years and has been quite successful. The historian Strabo recorded that ancient Persion governments, when a king died, deliberately left the throne vacant for a while. During that period, the powers that prevailed saw to it that crime and violence became rampant - to convey this message. Modern propaganda methods are much more sophisticated. Your immediate response of "bizarre" shows exactly the desired reaction.

From the article

Throughout history government has served as a vehicle for the organization of hatred and oppression, benefiting no one except those who are ambitious and ruthless enough to gain control of it.

BTW, why didn't you post the whole thing... or least give a link to it?

Kind of like the increase in crime due to LEO's doing mostly investigative work on terroriam will preceed their requests for more money for more LEOs?

What I really need instead of more government is to remember to use a good spell checker.

You get access by clicking on "Source", I guess I should have said that - I thought that when the listed source appears in red, rather than black, that indicates the URL is there.

Thanks for posting that particular passage.

A truly excellent essay about this is The Proper Role of Government by Ezra Taft Benson

Ta for the bump. I'm all for seeing someone giving it a go, setting up a nation without a government. I'll watch, and if it seems safe, I'll consider joining. Shades of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" etc etc.

FWIW, I think that the answer is: grim as gummint may be, no-one's dreamt up anything that's both better and workable.

FWIW2, I believe that companies are just as corruptible as governments, and that they can be just as important to your life. I speak as a commuter with long-suffering experience of Virgin Trains.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

If that were ony true anymore.
Where would the IRS be if that were a true statement?

The whole thing is here

Unfortunately, wise though he may have been, Mr. Jefferson fell for that propaganda too; as did even Schopenhauer. Voltaire seems to have been the only person before Gumplowicz who went on record as having fathomed the true nature of government. Governments are instituted by men to serve the interests of the men who institute the government. To the extent that "powers are derived from the consent of the government" that consent is obtained from a gullible majority that has been successfully brainwashed. Some in the governing class may suffer from "false consciousness", meaning, by definition, they believe their own propaganda.

Jim has asked us to post the entire article, if feasable, except for the WP and LAT.

Anarchy, as some have said of Christianity, has never (well hardly ever) been tried.

Consider the numbers given by Rummel in "Death by government". The average annual civilian murder rate by governments in the 20th century significantly exceeds the current annual murder rate in, for example, the U.S.

From the article:

Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together peaceably in Palestine, Lebanon and North Africa for centuries, until the situation became politicized after WWI. Until then an individual’s background and beliefs were just personal attributes, not a casus belli. Government was at its most benign, an ineffectual nuisance that concerned itself mostly with extorting taxes. People were busy with that most harmless of activities, making money.

It's a nice thought that everyone lived in fraternal joy in the ME and N Africa for centuries, but it's not very true--there were plenty of fights along the way. what's more, what was not very true in the ME and N Africa was even less true in the rest of the world. And finally, most of the ME, including Palestine, was a stinking cess-hole (witness Mark Twain's famous description) for many centuries, where people lived in abject poverty and misery. People were engaged in plenty of not-so-harmless activities as well as making money, including blood-feuds, religious feuds and plain-old feud-feuds. And there were plenty of times that they found there were ways of making money that caused a great deal of harm -- like pillage and murder. It's exciting to believe that it's only with government that mankind is capable of evil, but it's just not true. Look back before policing was established in, say, C16 Europe -- your chances of making it across France in one piece without attack were fairly low.

That's what I said! Give it a go, and I'll see what it's like and consider living there. Find a piece of land, stake a claim, set up (or rather don't ;^) the society and let the rest of us know how it's going. But I'm going to hold fire till you've got through your first war, fire, crime and response to crime. And sad to say in these dangerous times, terrorist attack.

BTW, there's two you missed off the list: anarchy, Christianity, Communism and Western Civilisation. Of course, that's according to anarchists, Christians and Communists. I believe that the last is attributed to Ghandi ("Western civilisation? It would be a very good thing" or somesuch.)