Technology

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.