re: #66 Obdicut

You’re quite welcome. And I come at it from the other end— what services are really good and necessary for the government to provide? How can we provide them as efficiently (read: cheaply) as possible?

Figuring those out will tell us the amount that we need to pay for via taxation, and then we can engage with the question of how to structure the taxation so as not to have adverse affects on the economy.

I have yet another way to go at it: Government is inevitable. Somalia has been mentioned as an example of an absence of government. But that is not technically true: There is no central government for the whole land, true. But there are several governing bodies controlling different sections of the land and these are mostly engaged in a constant state of strife and war with each other, dysfunctionally producing vast ammounts of human misery.

How are disputes between people supposed to be settled? By law? Who crafts, passes and enforces the law, and how? Power vacuums are often quickly filled by arbitrary players coming along. If democratically elected, representative institutions break down, simpler and more brutish forces will emerge. And they will likely be also be of a more “private” nature.

Whoever holds the ultimate power of force over a domain governs it. That sentence is true regardless of whether that power is an army, a militia, a private corporation conglomerate, or a theocratic court. This is a rather obvious transcendental political truth a lot of “libertarians” seem to forget or ignore, especially those coming from a common law background that has a lot to do with a tradition of self-governance and the emergence of legal traditions bottom-up rather than top-down.