Technology

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.

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.

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.