Everyone is getting so close to the correct answer to the correct problem with all of this illegal immigration stuff. I’ll explain the problem and solution.
The problem - people say, is that people with different ideas from our own can come into a given government and vote to change the rules. The solution then is that illegal immigration is bad.
The true problem is that there is a given government where you can vote to control other people at all. Do away with that and you did away with the problem. Then anyone can live anywhere they like so long as they do so without violating the will of others (not murdering, stealing, raping, or defrauding.)
Governments are and have always been the actual problem. This isn’t complicated.
Look, you can live next door to me so long as you bought my neighbors house with their consent. If you try to attack me or my family in any way, I will defend myself. If you think my not believing in Allah is bad and you want to kill me, I will kill you in self defense. If you think it is bad but won’t attack me and my family, we can coexist.
The problem is that if you can come here and usurp an already evil and corrupt system (all governments are this) and use that system to create a law saying that I should be killed because I do not believe in Allah, thus sending government thugs to my home to carry out that deed, that is a massive problem and the culprit is not only you for being evil, but the government for existing in a state in which an evil person can contribute to an evil act of such magnitude, through the hand of the state.
Of course it isn’t complicated when you simplify everything down so much as to not even resemble real life. This type of civilization may work for groups of around 250 people but much bigger than that you need infrastructure and other large projects that require a lot of organization and funding. How do you propose those things are done without some form of government?
Like roads? Police? Schools? How’s about grocery stores?
Let’s talk about grocery stores. Government in the US does not “do” grocery stories. The free market does (I say free with a bit of a grain of salt, of course.)
And there are no problems with food in this country. In fact, we live in a country of such overabundance of food that we have foodstuffs coming in the world over, and throw away roughly 65 billion tons - TONS, annually and have a weight epidemic.
The market is SO GOOD at food that it creates overabundance issues. Everywhere you look, food is available. I have like 20 grocery stores near me. I can get most of them to deliver right to my door. There are restaurants, fast food chains, diners, food in gas stations and rest stops, at kiosks, airports, on flights, at hotels, parks, on mobile trucks, and so much more.
Any argument you might propose could fundamentally be explained, at least at a high-level, by showcasing this concept. The government COULD have done food and then we would be having this same conversation, but you might say, “if there is no government, then we will all starve! Who will do food?”
But the government does not do food and I bet you if they did, we would have fewer options, food would be of lower quality, and food would cost more than it does today. Everything, and I will reiterate that - EVERYTHING the government does it does worse than the market can do.
Shipping? The U.S. Postal Service typically hemorrhages between 6.5 and 9.5 billion annually, and it has a MONOPOLY on certain aspects of shipping. FedEx and UPS on the other hand? They generate collectively over 180 billion in annual revenue. BOTH are on the fortune 500 list.
And how could we ever get all of these Amazon shipments without the government? Oh, wait, they don’t ship those either. Amazon sends shipments more accurately, with less waste, quicker, AND CHEAPER than USPS does, hands down, and it isn’t even a primary shipping company!
Or what about police? Security? Do rich people use police, or private security? Well of course they buy private security, but you and I can’t afford private security, so we rely on the police showing up after we’ve already been robbed, whereas the rich - in their gated communities - have mobile security keeping a constant watch for them.
But why is private security so expensive? Well, because the government regulates it so firmly. They want to be a monopoly on policing and security.
Same goes for education. Where do the rich send their kids? Public school? No? Private? Well of course they do!
Obama went to Punahou, a private college-prep school in Honolulu, and Biden too, went to a private Catholic high school - Archmere Academy. So why can’t we send our kids to these better schools? Oh that’s right, cost.
So why can’t Jeff Bezos just create Amazon Academics, and provide higher quality education at a lower cost than the governmental-run public schools? Well, because of government regulation, of course!
Imagine I was a millionaire and I wanted to invest in starting a business of educating K-12 students. Maybe I have a goal of setting down in a minority, impoverished area and providing high-quality education at a low price. How do I do this if the competition school that runs on stolen funding (taxes) doesn’t close down no matter how poorly they do?
In one of Chicago’s lowest-performing high schools for instance, the dropout rate reaches 36% (3% is the average across the rest of the state.) So what if I could create an educational program there with a dropout rate of say, 13%? TWICE as superior simply based around that single statistic.
Well it wouldn’t be possible because the government self-subsidizes without producing anything of value. I, as owner of a business, would need to produce value to consumers who want to pay for my services, but the government mandates your kids go to public school (especially if you can’t afford anything better), then sets all sorts of rules and regulations on me that itself doesn’t even have to follow, and can change whenever it wants!
Imagine I had to create 10 units of value in my school to produce the output for my goals. Imagine now that this other school produces 5 units of value. Nobody would send their kids to the 5 unit school, and it would go out of business - if this were the market we’re talking about.
But the state can just continue forcing you to use their school and take your money to pay for its failure, and I’m forced to charge you too much for you to send your kids to my school because of government restrictions and the fact that their school even exists in the first place.
I PROMISE YOU that if government education was weened out across the next 50-100 years and the private sector came in to fill in the gaps, education would improve dramatically and the cost would go down, not up.
Government is fundamentally always the problem because all the government is is a big gun everyone is arguing over (which is what politics is) who gets to wield.
My proposition is that there shouldn’t even BE an argument over who gets to wield the gun. The ONLY rational purpose of the gun is to stop people from murdering, raping, robbing, and defrauding, assaulting, etc. That’s it.
I am only going to respond to you once and I will only address the food issue because there’s other stuff I want to do with my evening than debate with someone so clearly firm in a position.
Are you familiar with the founding if the FDA in America? Its a very interesting story and if you’re open minded enough I’d highly suggest you read The Poison Squad. Before the FDA was created businesses were adulterating their food products with dangerous substances (something that has happened throughout history) in order to make more money. One example is they were adding formaldehyde to milk so it could sit on the shelf longer without smelling spoiled.
Businesses don’t care about producing a good product, they care about making more money and they will do that in every way they possibly can regardless of how many people it hurts or kills. You may say that “then those businesses will go out of business” but what if every possible option is doing it? What if you can’t tell just from using it? (Good example is asbestos in talc powder). Regulations save lives.
I’m not trying to say governments are perfect but at least we, as citizens, get more of a say in what it does than we do with any company. That goes 10x for mega corporations who own entire supply lines or industries. I understand you have a problem with government corruption, as everyone should, but to pretend that corporate corruption isn’t just as bad if not worse is fooling yourself.
But you don’t need government in its current form in order to protect people from groups who mean to poison. I don’t need a cop to protect me from a home invader, for example. In fact, the cop isn’t going to get there until the invader has done whatever they sought out to do, so maybe just to try to find them after myself and my entire family are murdered.
OR I can protect my family myself.
The act of poisoning someone is in itself objectively immoral. No good people who accept responsibility for the innocent in this world should be made to suffer the will of those who seek to do that kind of harm. In fact I would argue that the government likely was deficient in what they SHOULD have done to combat the poisoning done at that time.
In my view, if 5 people are producing food (simplifying things here) and they choose to poison that food and I and some of my goodly companions find out about it, we are completely within our right to use immediate and, if necessary, deadly force against those individuals. The idea should be simple: If you want to attempt to kill people, we will find and kill you.
The good must not suffer the evil to exist, and I say that as both an staunch atheist and someone not even in favor of the death penalty (but only because I do not want even a single person killed who wasn’t guilty.)
And you talk of businesses as if they are real people, and they’re not. A business is just this made-up human idea, and an extremely broad one at that, where we’re explaining swaths of people all working together to produce some kind of goods/services under the idea of generating wealth for everyone. The idea that a company can own property for example is nonsensical. A company can own property like my car can own property, or like a sidewalk can owe me money.
When a business I work for does something nefarious, I guarantee you that I didn’t lift a finger to see that come to fruition. I was duped by others who made those choices who defrauded me by not detailing what was going on. THOSE people who did those things are criminals and should be dealt with. The notion that a company for example can do something that say, results in the murder of 10 kids isn’t an “oopsies” where the state fines that business. The mere fact that this is how we deal with these things “collectively” is seriously messed up. The people responsible for making choices they knew were risky for people’s health that then resulted in the death of those kids should be tried and convicted of murder and locked away forever, and I don’t need a huge, overarching government that I didn’t consent to in order to make that happen.
And I agree with you - governments like what we have here in the US are a hell of a lot better than they’ve been in the past. I’m not saying I want to live in Stalin’s Russia, or under the iron fist of Genghis Khan here. What I’m saying is both logically and philosophically, the next direction we as human beings should be guiding the world to is a place where there is no such thing as victimless crimes; where everyone can live their lives the way they choose and where the only time a relative force monopoly flexes its power is to prevent things like murder, rape, theft, and fraud.
You build a coalition who needs some money from me and will protect me better than police and I’ll gladly pay for that, but do you know what that would be? A business, not a government. You could argue that it’d be a government if it were a force monopoly, but so what? So long as it’s consensual and works, I’m all for it.
When I say I’m anti-government what I’m talking about is being against people using violence against us against our will and not in defense of the innocent.
Ok, good. Seems like we agree on a lot of things. However, there are some misconceptions I want to clear up about my position and my reasoning behind it.
First, we seem to be running on different definitions for both corporations/businesses and governments. I’ll just include the definitions I’m using under the spoiler tag.
definitions
Corporation/busiess: Legal entity/system providing a service or product for profit
Government: A legal entity/system organizing and governing a collection of people by creating laws, collecting taxes, and providing public services
First of all, both corporations and governments are just “made-up human ideas” so that’s a meaningless phrase. They are simply 2 examples of how humans choose to organize themselves to accomplish goals that a single person cannot, something you’ve already admitted is necessary “I and some of my goodly companions”. They are, I would argue (but I’m not a social scientist so my knowledge is limited), the 2 most powerful entities/systems humans have. The power they wield comes from collective societal agreement which has been enshrined in some legal code (including money in this as it’s only worth what society agrees it’s worth).
If a government in your society doesn’t exist what is the agreed upon legal code? (side note, I don’t even want to imagine what a code of law would look like if it were devised by a for profit company)
can you guarantee everyone in your society, which you’ve argued can be over 250 people, will agree on a singular legal code without some kind of government with a legislative branch?
How do they even go about figuring out the legal code without some organization?
If they do agree on a legal code, who are the people spending time on maintaining and updating the code and how are they paid?
For the sake of argument lets say your society does have a legal code and has found some way to fund, without taxes, people to maintain that code. Let’s also say that you have caught a business trying to adulterate their product using unsafe materials but the spokesperson for the corporation says you have no proof and uses their marketing department to spin the story in their favor.
How do you adjudicate this issue in your society? There’s no judicial branch of government.
My point being that any large group of people would need some kind of system to handle each of these aspects of society; law, taxes (funding), public services. It doesn’t have to look like our current governments but you need a set of systems to organize and pay for things. That’s not even getting into the whole issue of providing services to impoverished areas of the society, something a for profit company would not do except for positive PR and that would be woefully insufficient.
So, establishing that we do need some kind of entity/system to organize large groups of people that leaves us with 2 options; corporations or governments. I am of the belief that individual potential corruption is shaped like a normal distribution (bell curve) where the majority of people can be corrupted by greed and power but there are a small portion who are incorruptible.
If that is true and human corruption follows a bell curve we have to assume that whatever systems we have organizing society will eventually have people in the top positions who can be corrupted. That means that they will do everything they can to gain as much power and money as possible. The only way I know how to defend against this is through checks and balances on power.
In a corporate governed system this is supposed to be the “free market” where people only support companies they agree with. There are several problems with this view. Namely, there’s no way to stop monopolies or cartels from forming as there’s no further checks than consumer spending and people must spend money on necessities in order to live.
In a more traditional government system, let’s say a democracy, this is supposed to be the separation of powers into different branches. This still has weaknesses, namely demagogues, but I’d argue it’s far more robust than a purely free market system.
Agreed that things like governments and corporations are made up ideas, but ideas need to be properly defined so we know what we’re communicating.
You asked if a government in your society doesn’t exist what is the agreed upon legal code?
You’re asking the wrong question. When I say that I’m against government, what I mean is I am against the idea that I can be born into an agreement and made to suffer that system. I was born and continue to live in the US, but I did not agree to give the government tens of thousands of dollars annually, which they take without my consent. I argue that all government is, fundamentally, is a relative force monopoly. If say, the drug cartels in Mexico can simply do what they wish and the Mexican government can’t stop them, then the actual government in Mexico are the drug cartels, not the Mexican government. Saying it’s not is just not properly defining what government is.
In a government where there’s freedom for all there would be two systems in place to define what is legal. One would be logic. It’s simply immoral to murder (not kill, murder), steal, rape, defraud, or assault. You cannot do those things and free people understand that even if a relative force monopoly makes a “law” saying you can, that doesn’t legitimize it, and you are well within your right, as given by nobody at all, to seek out and use violence against those who would commit those acts, regardless of what the “law” said.
If it were legal in the US to rape, would you rape? Would you allow another to rape if you had the power to stop them? Would you stop someone who tried to rape your child? Who cares what the law says?
We already realize that law does not correlate to right and wrong.
The second aspect of law would be that in which is consented to, but that depends entirely on who owns what, and I don’t mean arbitrarily owns what, but objectively (logically) owns what.
You can logically work out what is owned and what is stolen. It isn’t difficult.
And to own a thing means you hold exclusive authority over it. If I hold exclusive authority over my house for instance, then it doesn’t matter what other people agree to, or turn into “law”, you never hold authority over my house. If you do, then you are stealing my authority over my house from me, which is theft. If you use theft, I am authorized to use violence against you to stop your theft.
So it doesn’t matter how many people you have who agree to something if it pertains to violating my consent over my property. A million people can all vote and agree to kick me out of my house, and you’ll succeed if you use violence against me, but both logically and philosophically, I would be well within my right to use even deadly force to stop any thugs you send to me to do so.
A “just” law is only one where you are protecting the will of others within a logical order of operations.
Now that being said! You CAN hold agreements between owners of property. Maybe 50 people in a region all agree to buy all of the neighboring roads, and they each agree to put fourth 5% of their income per year to do so. Maybe they all agree this will be a “law”, and they agree upon a punishment that can be enacted if someone doesn’t do this. NOW what you have is a situation where you CAN use violence against someone who goes against the agreement because we’re not talking about the group violating the consent of the individual, we’re talking about the individual engaging in an action of which violated a preexisting will of the group.
Another question you had:
“Can you guarantee everyone in your society, which you’ve argued can be over 250 people, will agree on a singular legal code without some kind of government with a legislative branch?”
You don’t need to. If everyone in my “society” want to make a rule saying you can remove Joe from his home, all you’re doing is banding together to do a sinister deed. That is a corrupt society to begin with, and an authoritarian one.
You don’t and can’t agree to do something with someone else’s property, because it isn’t yours. This is like saying that your neighbor, Tony, has some kind of right to your car because he lives next door. That’s absurd. You and only you can decide what happens to your car unless what you want to do directly violates Tony’s rights over his will. For example, I can’t drive it into his house and set it on fire because I would need to have initiated an action of which violated Tony’s will, so I can’t do that.
Now if Tony and I both got together and CONSENTED to go 50/50 on a new car, it’s up to us and us alone to set the “law” on who can make utility of that car, or who can destroy it, sell it, who gets what if we agree to sell it, who maintains it, puts gas in it, etc.
You don’t get to come along and make demands of Tony and I regarding our car. It’s ours, nor yours. Leave us alone and stop trying to dictate the choices of others.
The problem with your line of questioning - and I mean with with respect, truly - is that you’re thinking about all of this in this scope of the concept of “public property”. There is no such thing. There is property, full stop. The idea of “public property” is a blatant misnomer. Think of it like this:
Menards owns a lawn mower and they agree to sell it to me. It’s my lawn mower. It’s mine because Menards did not steal anything from anyone else to make it, my will was aligned to own it and the will of those who consented to the system that is Menards hold a will to accept selling it to me, and because what I traded for it was mine as I did not steal the money I traded for it.
But if Tony next door again comes to my home with a baseball bat and tells me I am now going to give him $500 towards a lawn mower, and it will be in the best interest of the neighborhood because 9 other people all got together and agreed it was, and thus, it isn’t theft what Tony is doing, Tony is just lying - it’s just theft.
You can’t “legitimize” theft by wearing a badge or saying you come from some official sounding group name. Other people agreeing to rape you doesn’t legitimize rape any more than other people agreeing to rob you legitimizes theft. Is this making sense?
But again, if Tony and I both consent to buy a lawn mower together, then we are both consensual property owners of that lawn mower and nobody else can tell us what to do with it.
So your other two questions here aren’t the right questions to ask either:
“How do they even go about figuring out the legal code without some organization?” - and - “If they do agree on a legal code, who are the people spending time on maintaining and updating the code and how are they paid?”
Nobody ever said there wouldn’t be organization, or even violence. There could still be police, firefighters, teachers, engineers, and everything else that governments tend to monopolize or “provide”.
Who sets the laws for the roads? Well, which roads? Who owns the roads? Do I own the road leading to my home? Do Tony and I own it? Did all 50 of us who live in that area get together and consent to all go in and buy the roads? Then the owners of those roads set the laws for those roads.
Maybe Tony and I own a little piece of road and the only law is we don’t want you to go more than 40MPH while driving on it. Well there you go! And if you don’t like our ruling about our property, key words there, OUR PROPERTY, then you don’t need to use it.
I make the laws in my own home. If you don’t like it, you’re free to leave. In fact, if I asked you to leave and you flat out refused, I would just be warranted to use violence against you. If I couldn’t get you to leave with violence even, then deadly force would be warranted. And yes, that would be warranted if it got to that serious of a situation.
But that’s already how governments generally work today. If you come into my home and I ask you to leave and you refuse, I call the police and the police will use violence against you. What on earth do you think they do if you resist that violence? Play nice?
Your next question:
“How do you adjudicate this issue in your society? There’s no judicial branch of government.”
However the property owners who have been faulted want. Maybe in my area we’ve set up a system for this. What is most likely is as a “formal”, current government waned, this would open up avenues in the free market for people to offer these kinds of services. In fact, many judicial systems are already handled by courts not run by the government. Many kinds of issues even in the US are resolved by these kinds of courts because it’s better than utilizing the government to do so, as governments tend to be more corrupt, very slow, and very poor quality in basically everything they do.
Maybe you have Amazon Justice, Microsoft Courts, and Elon Musk’s Justice-X to choose from, and maybe the people in your area all consent to use a specific one so they agree to all go in and pay for those services. Maybe those small groups of people also get together with other small groups of people and form larger organizations who also agree on certain things. You can still have society without authoritarianism. The notion of, “whatever would we do if we don’t let other people rob us and our neighbors to do things” is so absurd it makes my head spin.
I’m not saying no organization. I’m not saying no schools, no security, no military, no roads, etc. I’m saying NO MORE AUTHORITARIANISM. No more theft on a grand scale. No more telling me when I turned 18 that I had to sign up for a draft where if some old man decided I had to die oversees then I either did so or I’d be locked away. No more forcing me to days of being a juror without my consent, where the state would pay me pennies a day and I lost precious time with my family, my job, and my entire life.
There is no such thing as a social contract - not within the constrains of what it’s depicted at as of current. That’s all just authoritarian propaganda.
Everyone is getting so close to the correct answer to the correct problem with all of this illegal immigration stuff. I’ll explain the problem and solution.
The problem - people say, is that people with different ideas from our own can come into a given government and vote to change the rules. The solution then is that illegal immigration is bad.
The true problem is that there is a given government where you can vote to control other people at all. Do away with that and you did away with the problem. Then anyone can live anywhere they like so long as they do so without violating the will of others (not murdering, stealing, raping, or defrauding.)
Governments are and have always been the actual problem. This isn’t complicated.
Look, you can live next door to me so long as you bought my neighbors house with their consent. If you try to attack me or my family in any way, I will defend myself. If you think my not believing in Allah is bad and you want to kill me, I will kill you in self defense. If you think it is bad but won’t attack me and my family, we can coexist.
The problem is that if you can come here and usurp an already evil and corrupt system (all governments are this) and use that system to create a law saying that I should be killed because I do not believe in Allah, thus sending government thugs to my home to carry out that deed, that is a massive problem and the culprit is not only you for being evil, but the government for existing in a state in which an evil person can contribute to an evil act of such magnitude, through the hand of the state.
This isn’t complicated.
Of course it isn’t complicated when you simplify everything down so much as to not even resemble real life. This type of civilization may work for groups of around 250 people but much bigger than that you need infrastructure and other large projects that require a lot of organization and funding. How do you propose those things are done without some form of government?
Like what, exactly?
Like roads? Police? Schools? How’s about grocery stores?
Let’s talk about grocery stores. Government in the US does not “do” grocery stories. The free market does (I say free with a bit of a grain of salt, of course.)
And there are no problems with food in this country. In fact, we live in a country of such overabundance of food that we have foodstuffs coming in the world over, and throw away roughly 65 billion tons - TONS, annually and have a weight epidemic.
The market is SO GOOD at food that it creates overabundance issues. Everywhere you look, food is available. I have like 20 grocery stores near me. I can get most of them to deliver right to my door. There are restaurants, fast food chains, diners, food in gas stations and rest stops, at kiosks, airports, on flights, at hotels, parks, on mobile trucks, and so much more.
Any argument you might propose could fundamentally be explained, at least at a high-level, by showcasing this concept. The government COULD have done food and then we would be having this same conversation, but you might say, “if there is no government, then we will all starve! Who will do food?”
But the government does not do food and I bet you if they did, we would have fewer options, food would be of lower quality, and food would cost more than it does today. Everything, and I will reiterate that - EVERYTHING the government does it does worse than the market can do.
Shipping? The U.S. Postal Service typically hemorrhages between 6.5 and 9.5 billion annually, and it has a MONOPOLY on certain aspects of shipping. FedEx and UPS on the other hand? They generate collectively over 180 billion in annual revenue. BOTH are on the fortune 500 list.
And how could we ever get all of these Amazon shipments without the government? Oh, wait, they don’t ship those either. Amazon sends shipments more accurately, with less waste, quicker, AND CHEAPER than USPS does, hands down, and it isn’t even a primary shipping company!
Or what about police? Security? Do rich people use police, or private security? Well of course they buy private security, but you and I can’t afford private security, so we rely on the police showing up after we’ve already been robbed, whereas the rich - in their gated communities - have mobile security keeping a constant watch for them.
But why is private security so expensive? Well, because the government regulates it so firmly. They want to be a monopoly on policing and security.
Same goes for education. Where do the rich send their kids? Public school? No? Private? Well of course they do!
Obama went to Punahou, a private college-prep school in Honolulu, and Biden too, went to a private Catholic high school - Archmere Academy. So why can’t we send our kids to these better schools? Oh that’s right, cost.
So why can’t Jeff Bezos just create Amazon Academics, and provide higher quality education at a lower cost than the governmental-run public schools? Well, because of government regulation, of course!
Imagine I was a millionaire and I wanted to invest in starting a business of educating K-12 students. Maybe I have a goal of setting down in a minority, impoverished area and providing high-quality education at a low price. How do I do this if the competition school that runs on stolen funding (taxes) doesn’t close down no matter how poorly they do?
In one of Chicago’s lowest-performing high schools for instance, the dropout rate reaches 36% (3% is the average across the rest of the state.) So what if I could create an educational program there with a dropout rate of say, 13%? TWICE as superior simply based around that single statistic.
Well it wouldn’t be possible because the government self-subsidizes without producing anything of value. I, as owner of a business, would need to produce value to consumers who want to pay for my services, but the government mandates your kids go to public school (especially if you can’t afford anything better), then sets all sorts of rules and regulations on me that itself doesn’t even have to follow, and can change whenever it wants!
Imagine I had to create 10 units of value in my school to produce the output for my goals. Imagine now that this other school produces 5 units of value. Nobody would send their kids to the 5 unit school, and it would go out of business - if this were the market we’re talking about.
But the state can just continue forcing you to use their school and take your money to pay for its failure, and I’m forced to charge you too much for you to send your kids to my school because of government restrictions and the fact that their school even exists in the first place.
I PROMISE YOU that if government education was weened out across the next 50-100 years and the private sector came in to fill in the gaps, education would improve dramatically and the cost would go down, not up.
Government is fundamentally always the problem because all the government is is a big gun everyone is arguing over (which is what politics is) who gets to wield.
My proposition is that there shouldn’t even BE an argument over who gets to wield the gun. The ONLY rational purpose of the gun is to stop people from murdering, raping, robbing, and defrauding, assaulting, etc. That’s it.
Your feathers are showing, Javert.
Inchoate ideas, articulated incoherently. Yet implying the inclusion of an incessant ideology.
Just because I didn’t type out a 30 page dissertation does not mean my ideas are inchoate. You sound like quite a pompous and arrogant person.
You’re right: it’s the half-baked nature of your ideas which is revealing, not the brevity. The brevity is a mercy.
I am only going to respond to you once and I will only address the food issue because there’s other stuff I want to do with my evening than debate with someone so clearly firm in a position.
Are you familiar with the founding if the FDA in America? Its a very interesting story and if you’re open minded enough I’d highly suggest you read The Poison Squad. Before the FDA was created businesses were adulterating their food products with dangerous substances (something that has happened throughout history) in order to make more money. One example is they were adding formaldehyde to milk so it could sit on the shelf longer without smelling spoiled.
Businesses don’t care about producing a good product, they care about making more money and they will do that in every way they possibly can regardless of how many people it hurts or kills. You may say that “then those businesses will go out of business” but what if every possible option is doing it? What if you can’t tell just from using it? (Good example is asbestos in talc powder). Regulations save lives.
I’m not trying to say governments are perfect but at least we, as citizens, get more of a say in what it does than we do with any company. That goes 10x for mega corporations who own entire supply lines or industries. I understand you have a problem with government corruption, as everyone should, but to pretend that corporate corruption isn’t just as bad if not worse is fooling yourself.
But you don’t need government in its current form in order to protect people from groups who mean to poison. I don’t need a cop to protect me from a home invader, for example. In fact, the cop isn’t going to get there until the invader has done whatever they sought out to do, so maybe just to try to find them after myself and my entire family are murdered.
OR I can protect my family myself.
The act of poisoning someone is in itself objectively immoral. No good people who accept responsibility for the innocent in this world should be made to suffer the will of those who seek to do that kind of harm. In fact I would argue that the government likely was deficient in what they SHOULD have done to combat the poisoning done at that time.
In my view, if 5 people are producing food (simplifying things here) and they choose to poison that food and I and some of my goodly companions find out about it, we are completely within our right to use immediate and, if necessary, deadly force against those individuals. The idea should be simple: If you want to attempt to kill people, we will find and kill you.
The good must not suffer the evil to exist, and I say that as both an staunch atheist and someone not even in favor of the death penalty (but only because I do not want even a single person killed who wasn’t guilty.)
And you talk of businesses as if they are real people, and they’re not. A business is just this made-up human idea, and an extremely broad one at that, where we’re explaining swaths of people all working together to produce some kind of goods/services under the idea of generating wealth for everyone. The idea that a company can own property for example is nonsensical. A company can own property like my car can own property, or like a sidewalk can owe me money.
When a business I work for does something nefarious, I guarantee you that I didn’t lift a finger to see that come to fruition. I was duped by others who made those choices who defrauded me by not detailing what was going on. THOSE people who did those things are criminals and should be dealt with. The notion that a company for example can do something that say, results in the murder of 10 kids isn’t an “oopsies” where the state fines that business. The mere fact that this is how we deal with these things “collectively” is seriously messed up. The people responsible for making choices they knew were risky for people’s health that then resulted in the death of those kids should be tried and convicted of murder and locked away forever, and I don’t need a huge, overarching government that I didn’t consent to in order to make that happen.
And I agree with you - governments like what we have here in the US are a hell of a lot better than they’ve been in the past. I’m not saying I want to live in Stalin’s Russia, or under the iron fist of Genghis Khan here. What I’m saying is both logically and philosophically, the next direction we as human beings should be guiding the world to is a place where there is no such thing as victimless crimes; where everyone can live their lives the way they choose and where the only time a relative force monopoly flexes its power is to prevent things like murder, rape, theft, and fraud.
You build a coalition who needs some money from me and will protect me better than police and I’ll gladly pay for that, but do you know what that would be? A business, not a government. You could argue that it’d be a government if it were a force monopoly, but so what? So long as it’s consensual and works, I’m all for it.
When I say I’m anti-government what I’m talking about is being against people using violence against us against our will and not in defense of the innocent.
Ok, good. Seems like we agree on a lot of things. However, there are some misconceptions I want to clear up about my position and my reasoning behind it.
First, we seem to be running on different definitions for both corporations/businesses and governments. I’ll just include the definitions I’m using under the spoiler tag.
definitions
Corporation/busiess: Legal entity/system providing a service or product for profit Government: A legal entity/system organizing and governing a collection of people by creating laws, collecting taxes, and providing public services
First of all, both corporations and governments are just “made-up human ideas” so that’s a meaningless phrase. They are simply 2 examples of how humans choose to organize themselves to accomplish goals that a single person cannot, something you’ve already admitted is necessary “I and some of my goodly companions”. They are, I would argue (but I’m not a social scientist so my knowledge is limited), the 2 most powerful entities/systems humans have. The power they wield comes from collective societal agreement which has been enshrined in some legal code (including money in this as it’s only worth what society agrees it’s worth).
For the sake of argument lets say your society does have a legal code and has found some way to fund, without taxes, people to maintain that code. Let’s also say that you have caught a business trying to adulterate their product using unsafe materials but the spokesperson for the corporation says you have no proof and uses their marketing department to spin the story in their favor.
My point being that any large group of people would need some kind of system to handle each of these aspects of society; law, taxes (funding), public services. It doesn’t have to look like our current governments but you need a set of systems to organize and pay for things. That’s not even getting into the whole issue of providing services to impoverished areas of the society, something a for profit company would not do except for positive PR and that would be woefully insufficient.
So, establishing that we do need some kind of entity/system to organize large groups of people that leaves us with 2 options; corporations or governments. I am of the belief that individual potential corruption is shaped like a normal distribution (bell curve) where the majority of people can be corrupted by greed and power but there are a small portion who are incorruptible.
If that is true and human corruption follows a bell curve we have to assume that whatever systems we have organizing society will eventually have people in the top positions who can be corrupted. That means that they will do everything they can to gain as much power and money as possible. The only way I know how to defend against this is through checks and balances on power.
In a corporate governed system this is supposed to be the “free market” where people only support companies they agree with. There are several problems with this view. Namely, there’s no way to stop monopolies or cartels from forming as there’s no further checks than consumer spending and people must spend money on necessities in order to live.
In a more traditional government system, let’s say a democracy, this is supposed to be the separation of powers into different branches. This still has weaknesses, namely demagogues, but I’d argue it’s far more robust than a purely free market system.
Agreed that things like governments and corporations are made up ideas, but ideas need to be properly defined so we know what we’re communicating.
You asked if a government in your society doesn’t exist what is the agreed upon legal code?
You’re asking the wrong question. When I say that I’m against government, what I mean is I am against the idea that I can be born into an agreement and made to suffer that system. I was born and continue to live in the US, but I did not agree to give the government tens of thousands of dollars annually, which they take without my consent. I argue that all government is, fundamentally, is a relative force monopoly. If say, the drug cartels in Mexico can simply do what they wish and the Mexican government can’t stop them, then the actual government in Mexico are the drug cartels, not the Mexican government. Saying it’s not is just not properly defining what government is.
In a government where there’s freedom for all there would be two systems in place to define what is legal. One would be logic. It’s simply immoral to murder (not kill, murder), steal, rape, defraud, or assault. You cannot do those things and free people understand that even if a relative force monopoly makes a “law” saying you can, that doesn’t legitimize it, and you are well within your right, as given by nobody at all, to seek out and use violence against those who would commit those acts, regardless of what the “law” said.
If it were legal in the US to rape, would you rape? Would you allow another to rape if you had the power to stop them? Would you stop someone who tried to rape your child? Who cares what the law says?
We already realize that law does not correlate to right and wrong.
The second aspect of law would be that in which is consented to, but that depends entirely on who owns what, and I don’t mean arbitrarily owns what, but objectively (logically) owns what.
You can logically work out what is owned and what is stolen. It isn’t difficult.
And to own a thing means you hold exclusive authority over it. If I hold exclusive authority over my house for instance, then it doesn’t matter what other people agree to, or turn into “law”, you never hold authority over my house. If you do, then you are stealing my authority over my house from me, which is theft. If you use theft, I am authorized to use violence against you to stop your theft.
So it doesn’t matter how many people you have who agree to something if it pertains to violating my consent over my property. A million people can all vote and agree to kick me out of my house, and you’ll succeed if you use violence against me, but both logically and philosophically, I would be well within my right to use even deadly force to stop any thugs you send to me to do so.
A “just” law is only one where you are protecting the will of others within a logical order of operations.
Now that being said! You CAN hold agreements between owners of property. Maybe 50 people in a region all agree to buy all of the neighboring roads, and they each agree to put fourth 5% of their income per year to do so. Maybe they all agree this will be a “law”, and they agree upon a punishment that can be enacted if someone doesn’t do this. NOW what you have is a situation where you CAN use violence against someone who goes against the agreement because we’re not talking about the group violating the consent of the individual, we’re talking about the individual engaging in an action of which violated a preexisting will of the group.
Another question you had:
“Can you guarantee everyone in your society, which you’ve argued can be over 250 people, will agree on a singular legal code without some kind of government with a legislative branch?”
You don’t need to. If everyone in my “society” want to make a rule saying you can remove Joe from his home, all you’re doing is banding together to do a sinister deed. That is a corrupt society to begin with, and an authoritarian one.
You don’t and can’t agree to do something with someone else’s property, because it isn’t yours. This is like saying that your neighbor, Tony, has some kind of right to your car because he lives next door. That’s absurd. You and only you can decide what happens to your car unless what you want to do directly violates Tony’s rights over his will. For example, I can’t drive it into his house and set it on fire because I would need to have initiated an action of which violated Tony’s will, so I can’t do that.
Now if Tony and I both got together and CONSENTED to go 50/50 on a new car, it’s up to us and us alone to set the “law” on who can make utility of that car, or who can destroy it, sell it, who gets what if we agree to sell it, who maintains it, puts gas in it, etc.
You don’t get to come along and make demands of Tony and I regarding our car. It’s ours, nor yours. Leave us alone and stop trying to dictate the choices of others.
The problem with your line of questioning - and I mean with with respect, truly - is that you’re thinking about all of this in this scope of the concept of “public property”. There is no such thing. There is property, full stop. The idea of “public property” is a blatant misnomer. Think of it like this:
Menards owns a lawn mower and they agree to sell it to me. It’s my lawn mower. It’s mine because Menards did not steal anything from anyone else to make it, my will was aligned to own it and the will of those who consented to the system that is Menards hold a will to accept selling it to me, and because what I traded for it was mine as I did not steal the money I traded for it.
But if Tony next door again comes to my home with a baseball bat and tells me I am now going to give him $500 towards a lawn mower, and it will be in the best interest of the neighborhood because 9 other people all got together and agreed it was, and thus, it isn’t theft what Tony is doing, Tony is just lying - it’s just theft.
You can’t “legitimize” theft by wearing a badge or saying you come from some official sounding group name. Other people agreeing to rape you doesn’t legitimize rape any more than other people agreeing to rob you legitimizes theft. Is this making sense?
But again, if Tony and I both consent to buy a lawn mower together, then we are both consensual property owners of that lawn mower and nobody else can tell us what to do with it.
So your other two questions here aren’t the right questions to ask either:
“How do they even go about figuring out the legal code without some organization?” - and - “If they do agree on a legal code, who are the people spending time on maintaining and updating the code and how are they paid?”
Nobody ever said there wouldn’t be organization, or even violence. There could still be police, firefighters, teachers, engineers, and everything else that governments tend to monopolize or “provide”.
Who sets the laws for the roads? Well, which roads? Who owns the roads? Do I own the road leading to my home? Do Tony and I own it? Did all 50 of us who live in that area get together and consent to all go in and buy the roads? Then the owners of those roads set the laws for those roads.
Maybe Tony and I own a little piece of road and the only law is we don’t want you to go more than 40MPH while driving on it. Well there you go! And if you don’t like our ruling about our property, key words there, OUR PROPERTY, then you don’t need to use it.
I make the laws in my own home. If you don’t like it, you’re free to leave. In fact, if I asked you to leave and you flat out refused, I would just be warranted to use violence against you. If I couldn’t get you to leave with violence even, then deadly force would be warranted. And yes, that would be warranted if it got to that serious of a situation.
But that’s already how governments generally work today. If you come into my home and I ask you to leave and you refuse, I call the police and the police will use violence against you. What on earth do you think they do if you resist that violence? Play nice?
Your next question:
“How do you adjudicate this issue in your society? There’s no judicial branch of government.”
However the property owners who have been faulted want. Maybe in my area we’ve set up a system for this. What is most likely is as a “formal”, current government waned, this would open up avenues in the free market for people to offer these kinds of services. In fact, many judicial systems are already handled by courts not run by the government. Many kinds of issues even in the US are resolved by these kinds of courts because it’s better than utilizing the government to do so, as governments tend to be more corrupt, very slow, and very poor quality in basically everything they do.
Maybe you have Amazon Justice, Microsoft Courts, and Elon Musk’s Justice-X to choose from, and maybe the people in your area all consent to use a specific one so they agree to all go in and pay for those services. Maybe those small groups of people also get together with other small groups of people and form larger organizations who also agree on certain things. You can still have society without authoritarianism. The notion of, “whatever would we do if we don’t let other people rob us and our neighbors to do things” is so absurd it makes my head spin.
I’m not saying no organization. I’m not saying no schools, no security, no military, no roads, etc. I’m saying NO MORE AUTHORITARIANISM. No more theft on a grand scale. No more telling me when I turned 18 that I had to sign up for a draft where if some old man decided I had to die oversees then I either did so or I’d be locked away. No more forcing me to days of being a juror without my consent, where the state would pay me pennies a day and I lost precious time with my family, my job, and my entire life.
There is no such thing as a social contract - not within the constrains of what it’s depicted at as of current. That’s all just authoritarian propaganda.
You’re a capitalist hegemonist that believes in ideologically inconsistent and incompatible sovereign citizen nonsense.
You want warring states politics.
You’re a conservative, Javert, the only one buying your lies is you.
I have never seen anyone put so much effort and confidence into being this fucking wrong and stupid.
You really know how to make it look difficult, Javert.