Government Explained (video)

[Truth_and_Liberty]

@PeaceRequiresAnarchy

The questions I want to put in people’s minds are “Why is X something that we decide about by voting at all?” and “Why are elections about X held out at national level, rather than at a local level or global level?”.

The first question is a great one. The second is definitely important too, but it seems secondary, like it is a follow up question to the first to further point out how odd it is that some arbitrary things are decided on by elections. The fact that X is decided by a voting process at all rather than by the usual voluntary market processes is the main thing that is arbitrary. The fact that this vote is taken at a national level as opposed to a local or global level is also arbitrary, but is secondary to the fact that the voting process exists at all.

You finished the first half of your script with:

“Narrator: At that, Charlie left Demville, confused. A few years later, he returned, and found that a radical transformation had taken place….”

In light of the second question that you said you wanted your video to present, my guess is that the second half of your script is about a “radical transformation” in which the voting process to decide what color hats people wear changes to a more local level. So now in Demville people wear different color hats because there are multiple districts that engage in hat voting that come to different conclusions. Perhaps some districts even decide that people don’t wear hats. This could then cause the viewer to wonder why the people don’t just localize the voting process all the way to the individual so that each person can decide for himself which color hat he wishes to wear or whether he wishes not to wear a hat at all.

The audience would reason that people have different preferences on things and so the voting process should be localized all the way to the individual so that they can all have what they want rather than force others to do things against their will or be forced to do things themselves by others that they don’t want.

When you rephrase your second question to “Why are elections about X held out at national level, rather than at a global level or local level or “extreme localized” individual level?” it actually becomes the same as the first question, so in a way it isn’t a “secondary” question as I said before.

I agree, and you’ve guessed exactly what I have in mind. I agree that the first question is more fundamental and direct, but that in some sense they are the same question. When trying to answer the first question, you basically have two approaches: ethical or economic. Either way, I find that people have difficulty applying the principles in general. I’m sure I could convince someone that hats should not be put to a vote, but then they’ll still believe that roads should be put to a vote, because it’s hard to imagine a free market in roads and the arguments don’t carry over so easily. And once roads are dealt with, they will move on to something else, like money or security, and each one requires altered arguments, because the particular concern is different in each case.

The second question I believe is a very effective short-cut. Once pointed out to them, most people can see that it is rather arbitrary that some things are voted on at the local level, others national, others international. Why? Who decided that? How do we know that’s optimal? Unless they support global government, they must have some reason to limit the scope of the voting. They must support secession to some extent. If you work out what that reason is, you then just extend that principle all the way down to the individual. We need a free market (which in this context means ultimated right to secession) in order to know the appropriate ‘level’ on which decisions should be taken, i.e. what firm size is optimal. Here is an old post of mine describing how I use this technique: https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/the-secession-approach-to-convert-people-to-anarchy/10612

What I want to do in this video is show that the people of Demville never were convinced that hats should be a matter of individual choice rather than being put to a vote. But they did come to believe in the principle of secession and localism, without realising that these are (when fully extended) exactly the same thing. In the same way, instead of arguing that drugs should be legalised, I’d like to see more people (non-libertarians, even) arguing that drug laws should be decided at an increasingly local level. Because that line of thinking leads to full legalisation and individual decisionmaking.

Re morality, do you think people who support drug prohibition would say that drug prohibition is immoral, but they support it anyway for some other reason (perhaps they think legalisation would have bad consequences) or do they actually think drug prohibition is the moral position? I think it’s probably a mixture, but the second notion is so easily dispelled that I prefer to focus on the people who agree that it’s immoral but just see no other way, e.g. “OK, taxation is theft (and theft is immoral) but we HAVE to have government because anarchy is chaos”. I think this is the more common position than someone who actually thinks taxation is not theft (e.g. social contract theorists). As I said before, I think George Ought To Help and The Philosophy Of Liberty make that point more effectively than I ever could, so I’m more interested in addressing more practical concerns. Besides, I think the immorality of forcing someone to wear a hat of a particular color is so obvious that it hardly needs stating, and is implied anyway when RedHat says that killing someone over socks is immoral.