Everything is disposable these days. Shoes don’t last as long, electronics only work for a couple years, even food seems to run right through me with great rapidity. They don’t make ‘em like they used to, but I doubt we’d take proper care of them even if they did.
I sometimes feel anarchists are like people who would throw away a remote when the batteries run out because they’re not standard AA or AAA, they’re those flat batteries you have to unscrew a panel to get to. “It’s too hard… I should stand up when I want to turn it on, anyway.”
Consider this: the government is a car. Yes, you can walk or even ride a bike, but if you want to get out of the tiny, piss-ant, backwards town you’re from, you need the car. The Egyptians didn’t build the pyramids as a hippy, tribal commune.
I believe in accepting not only the risk, but the inevitability of government abuse in exchange for the potential to do things our ancestors didn’t even dream possible, like going to the moon. It’s not that success requires abuse, merely that abuse of the power necessary to achieve enormous success has the potential to be as great as the success itself.
If you have trouble wrapping your head around this… odds are, if you’re reading this, you love guns, so… government doesn’t oppress people, people oppress people - and they will, especially if there is no government.
Taking the gun metaphor further: guns level the playing field. You can be weak, a woman, physically challenged (to a point), young, old, poor… whatever; if you have a gun, you can neutralize someone who is stronger, faster, richer or anything.
Of course, they can use it on you, too, but it’s best to have the playing field as level as possible.
Government (especially democracies) level the playing field better than any system yet devised. In fact, the only way I can imagine making it more level is to only allow those who are poor to vote, because those with money already have the power inherent in their wealth, which puts them at an advantage.
Oh wait, I forgot to translate it into anarchist… it creates a “hierarchy.”
I respect anarchist ideals, but why do they think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater? There’s literally a few things that need to be changed, that’s it:
- End the war on drugs
- End foreign interventionism
- Simplify the tax system
- Eliminate artificial barriers of entry in industry
This last one might not appeal to some of you, but I like it:
- Create a new police force whose sole job is to police the police
You could hire all those people laid off from ending the drug war. If I missed something major, let me know.
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