Destroying Your Statist Arguments

Miscellaneous General
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I think it would be neat to have a catch all thread of all the various arguments that people find out there in defense of the state. I am guessing that its going to end up being pretty funny, but we’ll see.

I would like to keep it amateur, and have it consist mostly of things you have heard other people say to you in conversation or posts that people have replied to you on the internet. And if people are having trouble with some, I guess this would be an ok place for that as well.

Although these are my favorite, here are some recent ones I have come across:

“You therefore think that having no government is an option because things work better without them. I don’t think its an option because I think that you would have so much competition that life would become unpleasant for the average citizen”

“you think about governments in absolute terms, I don’t. I think they can do good for people. I think they can create situations where they drive down prices”

"You don’t need a mansion to live. You don’t need a nice car to live. You don’t need breast implants to live. You don’t need to visit a steakhouse to live. At some point in your life you will need healthcare to live. That’s why it’s something that should be provided to everyone.

The first role of any Government is to protect their people. Whether it’s from foreign invasion or attack (ie by running an Armed Forces), from crime (police and justice system), from ignorance (education - because an uneducated population can’t provide the skilled people needed to provide the other services) or from disease (health care). After that everything else is gravy, as they say.

Taxes aren’t stealing, they are everyone in society paying into the pot to provide the services that all of society needs. It’s a common insurance policy against disease, ignorance, foreign attack and crime. You get no choice about it because if everyone had a choice about paying it then the premiums wouldn’t be met and society would eventually break down.

No matter what that twat Mises you keep quoting thought, the fact is that the ‘free market’ cannot replace Government, purely because it excludes the people who most need everyone else’s help - those with no money. If you want to live somewhere without Government where the free market rules everything, why haven’t you moved to Somalia?

Or do you only really want to see the free market so long as it doesn’t interfere with the comfortable life you already have in the over regulated hell hole that is the US of A?"

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Look no further than the politics sub-reddit for a wealth of idiocy. Here are some vignettes I’ve personally encountered in the past 24 hours (I am “angryrabbit”):

(Note the massive down votes I have. People LOVE me.)

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We are all happy the taxes not. We are all not the modern. [:P]

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The common theme among arguments I observe is the (fallacious) assumption that, because I do not want the government providing a service, I do not want the service provided at all.

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Why the hell do Democrats/Statists have such an emotional or fearful reaction against words like “unregulated”? and “free”? It seems non-libertarians always have a fucking problem when people are allowed to choose, or anything that is “more free”. What is with the biased everyone has against freedom of choice?

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I’m not entirely sure, but it does seem to be a very central premise to most statist thought. I think the basic concern is about what people will choose to do if allowed to “freely” choose.

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Republicans are just as bad, if not worse, for hiding behind a facade of advocating capitalism. Capitalistic approaches to sex are met with heavy resistance, for just one example.

bloomj31, keep in mind that whilst you talk about leftists as statists you are an avowed statist yourself. Whatever you say is utterly unscientific and irrelevant because, regardless of any appeal to subjective “political preference”, any message of peace and prosperity doesn’t follow from your Grundgedanke (central premise).

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I never said that I wasn’t afraid of what people would do if allowed to make choices freely. I also never said that this fear was singularly applicable to leftists.

Whether or not peace and prosperity follow from this central premise, I do not know.

I advocate socialism but not as much socialism as the leftists do. Or at least socialism for different things.

In other words, the fight between the right and the left in America is not a fight about whether or not socialism will exist but about what things will be socialized and to what extent they’ll be socialized. I’ve come to realize this by talking to people on this forum.

I should really add here that I’ve come to understand that peace and prosperity are not my central goals. They’re certainly top priorities. But my first priority is order. Order and by extension predictability and stability. Right now, what bothers me the most about the way the US government is being run is that it’s being run seemingly without any rules at all. So there’s absolutely no predictability. We have regime uncertainty.

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@bloomj31: You’re for socialism… and you value “order” above “peace and prosperity”. How does “order” come about? By someone demanding order?

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I’m for socialism when it comes to certain things.

I dunno how order comes about, I just know it’s maintained by force or at least the threat of force. I don’t think an-caps disagree with this, they just think that threat doesn’t have to be paid for by a public pot or that it needs to be centralized.

In other words, an-caps don’t favor a society without rules and laws and police and a military, they just think they should be created and maintained through private means.

So, in that sense, I think an-caps put order as a pretty high priority too, they just want to establish and maintain it differently.

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If order isn’t “peace and prosperity”, then order is violence and poverty? What you said didn’t come out all that clear. Maybe you want to reiterate.

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What bloomj31 is advocating is that most aggressive coercion is a systematic, regular, predictable pattern rather than random and unpredictable.

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came across these today:

"No, the value of currency is set by whoever issues that currency, end of. "

“At a basic level, whoever is responsible for historically minting a currency or today printing it sets, controls and safeguards it’s value. Without these controls you would get rampant inflation or deflation”

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I guess having a state is better than the hypothetical Hobbesian jungle, but people fail to realize that anarchy is not a lack of law per se. It is fallacious that a state is able to provide law in a “systematic, regular, predictable pattern”. See this piece by Kinsella on how civil legislation breeds uncertainty.

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Really, the whole argument falls apart. What is prediction good for, if not to prevent bad things from happening? To come to grips with reality and attempt to emotionally prepare for it? worthless

In any case, the state-managed society is obviously not perfectly predictable, nor is anarchy perfectly unpredictable. The question is can a system of competitive private insurers, investigators, police men, repo men, courts, etc produce more or less unpredictable, unwanted events, compared to a state owned and/or regulated (planned) system, for the same cost. If they function better than the state system, it is surely more preferable, because it involves only voluntary contracts between all participants.

I doubt anarchy produces more common crime, but even if it did, there would still be arguments that it is preferable.

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In exchange for utter security based upon low taxation margins. The benefits one receives under a minarchist state, so long as one assumes that a state of relatively peaceful anarchism is impossible, are massive. According to his assumptions bloomj is advocating an amputation of a finger to save the body. Indeed making force known as to its extent and its regularity is far more civil and less barbaric than performing this task randomly would be, although both acts are barbaric at their core.

I do not agree with the minarchists but I’m tired of seeing them get smacked around when everything that they advocate makes relative sense.

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Your summary of an-cap jives fine with mine. But according to you, you’re a socialist “about certain things”. What things and why?

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I never said the state managed society is perfectly predictable. I am not saying that an anarchist society would be perfectly unpredictable. Nothing is ever that black and white.

I’m also not under the impression that anarchists are about not having rules and law. I just…have less faith in private law and private courts than some an-caps do. That’s all. But hey, if you guys can make it work, I’ll be all for it.

I’m not really saying a peaceful and prosperous anarchist society is impossible, I’m saying I’m willing to bet it doesn’t happen anytime soon. So, since I don’t think we’re going to get that, I try to figure out how to make things work with what I’ve got. And what I’ve got is state managed societies. And I’m not totally uncomfortable with that as long as the people running the state are bound by some kind of clear, concise rules. As of now, they’re not. Now, as to which of our visions is more utopian, I think that’s irrelevant. What matters is that I want the same things as anarchists, for the most part, I just prioritize some of them differently and I go about getting them differently.

It should also be added that because humans cannot see into the future, there is always some measure of unpredictability inherent in life and thus inherent in all human systems. We can’t ever really know what’s going to happen in the future, we can just speculate.

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Roads, infrastructure, military, police, courts, garbage disposal etc.

The basics. Because I see no reason to switch things around. I don’t understand why I should want to make them private. They work ok for me the way they are and I don’t try to fix things unless I think they’re broken. The broken parts of socialism are mainly entitlements imo. They’re utterly unsustainable. It would be nice if that kinda socialism could work forever, but it can’t. Now, is the trade off between getting stuff now and not having stuff later worth it? I don’t know. Modern progressives think so. I think not.

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Yes, essentially. Then we can argue about how much coercion is acceptable and where it should be applied and all that but that’s a tough convo and I know that for most an-caps, any amount of coercion is too much.