You only need to look around the world to see that race/colour has nothing to do with it.  There have been plenty of black leaders around the world.  There have been plenty of woman leaders around the world.  And none of them have been wonderful leaders any more so than all the white men leaders.

Everyone needs to get over this idea of government being what it tries to tell us it is.  And FFS stop looking for a fucking messiah.  The last time one of those came along it ended in WW2.

If a person murders someone (to use one example of an action) they are not legally responsible for that action?

I'm not responsible.   The government has nothing to do with me.  They are a racket that steals my money at gunpoint, nothing more.   If a thug steals my money on the street and buys some bullets with it and shoots someone with them I am not responsible.    If I cheered the thug on or made excuses for the murder that would make me pretty immoral which is why I don't defend the government at all.

A person's responsibility for their actions is not a legal issue???

The problem is limited liability.  If people make decisions they should be held responsible for them on an individual basis.  Saying a "corporation" did this or that is nonsense.  Individuals made the decisions but our corrupt system doesn't see it that way partly because lawyers can extract much more money from a corporation than one person.

People not being fully responsible for their actions breeds the exact results we see.

Nothing to do with capitalism.  It's a corrupt legal system.  Why is the legal system corrupt?   Because it can be.  Because the government has a monopoly on the provision of law and order.   You need free market competition in law and order to solve the problem.

Can you explain?  I don't understand the concept in relation to government.

Thanks for proving my point.  I don't have a wife that I beat btw, just in case it wasn't obvious to you.

It doesn't matter how many people they would have had, the communist system would have collapsed regardless.  You only need to look at China with it's more than a billion people and it is not more powerful than the US to know that population, while important, is not the determining factor.

All this is, fundamentally, is people looking for some good, in an inherently bad situation, so that they can justify said situation.

Unable to really find much they start pointing out worse situations and then using the excuse that "well, they weren't anywhere near as bad as x".   Which is really just a form of Stockholm Syndrome.

And that's assuming you are a good person.  If you're not a good person, you of course won't have any problem defending bad people.

Why would big government be any more of a solution to problems in South Africa than it is anywhere else?   

In fact, if you think Mandela is a good person and if you think it's just a matter of getting someone good to be your leader, then South Africa should be one of the best countries in the world to live in.  Since it isn't, either one or both of those premises are incorrect. 

I only beat my wife once a week.  That guy over there beats his every day!  My wife should thank her lucky stars that she is not with that other guy and shouldn't complain.

It's not about having a few governments.  It's saying people like you can have rulers if that's what you want.

The rest of us say that we want competing service providers to provide those services that the government currently claims a monopoly over, because we don't want rulers.

I probably wasn't clear in my posts, but that boiled down is what I mean.

You can pay for these people and all their cronyism and overseas trips and bailing out their friends etc etc since you are eager to have rulers.  And that's fine.  Me?   I'll pass.

You can choose to be a slave if you wish in a free society.

It's called plausible deniability.  You let others do the dirty work from which you benefit and then when confronted about it, you claim no knowledge.

The fact is that he and his goons just wanted the power for themselves.   Apartheid is a great injustice no doubt, but you don't solve it by giving the unjust privileges that the white people had and handing them over to black people.

That is the lesson that should be learnt from this whole sorry story.  

A majority does not rule any better than a minority.  Americans should be familiar enough with this fact.

As many others point out in the comment section, it is both the left and the right.  The simple fact of the matter is that power corrupts.

It's not necessarily about dismantling the state.

The state, as it currently exists, provides certain services, principally protection.  All we are saying is that for all of those services, people should be able to either continue to use the state or use other services that people provide in the market and not have to pay the state.   That then allows people like yourself who want the state to continue to pay for it, and people like me who don't want the state to use other services instead.  

The equivalent is going from a telephone monopoly which existed in most countries initially, to the current situation where you have a choice of providers.   People who want to continue to use the initial government telephone service can continue to do so.

Protection is just another service offered by the market.  There is no reason it should be a monopoly any more than money should be a monopoly within any given territory.

One thing I woiuld propose is instead of having general taxes, they should be individually itemised.  You are paying a certain amount for the police service, a certain amount for water etc.  Then people can choose which taxes they want to pay.  Which services they want.  And competitors should be allowed to offer alternatives.   Of course, were this to happen, government services would have to improve markedly to compete.  Unlike the current situation where they have a monopoly and don't really have to worry about their customers all that much.

I think you need to talk to the people who lived 50 years ago and ask them just how easy it was to emigrate compared to today.  My parents and grandparents told me stories where they would almost pay you to emigrate (from England to Australia).  Not the case today.  Today the process is much more arduous.  

No passports 100 years ago either.

Besides I mentioned earlier.  If you are not happy with your security service provider (Govt) why should you have to move hundreds or thousands of miles, give up your job, your local community etc and go into an uncertain situation when you could have a situation where it is as simple as changing your telephone provider or ISP?   It just doesn't make any sense.

Well, at least you agree with us on the nature of the state.   

Since the state is evil should not alternatives at least be explored?  Are we truly stuck with evil?  Or does the evil wish us to believe that we are stuck with it?

Oh sorry, it was actually in another thread, I got mixed up.  Here it is

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=343866.msg3846210#msg3846210


Highways between towns, assuming there is enough traffic to justify it, could be funded in various ways.  Maybe the big transportation companies could do it to ensure their goods get where they want.  Another example of profits exceeding maintenance costs.  They could be funded by advertising.  Or the big roads themselves could be some form of toll road if nothing else.    These are just a few things that I can think of.  I'm not in the business of roads so there is probably some idea that I am not even thinking of.  

I think road maintenance is probably a lot cheaper without all the state bureaucracy costs.  And the fact that it is a monopoly so let's face it, those road guys don't have to put too much effort in like any public service department.  

I don't know about where you live but here they dig up perfectly good roads and repave them just to make sure they use their budget for the year so that the budget isn't cut the next year.  This is what happens when you have perverse incentives.  

Well, I've been looking at the wars of the past few decades fought by the big powers, who have the biggest armies and biggest budgets ever and it looks to me like the big guys are consistently losing to small, ragtag, well-armed people of these countries.

There's a famous quote a Japanese military person remarked about the possibility of invading America in WW2.  He said it wasn't worth it because there would be a gun behind every blade of grass.  That it would be impossible to hold.  I'm paraphrasing but it was something like that.

I've already pointed out why there wouldn't be toll roads everywhere.  In fact, out of all the business models available for roads it seems like the worst one available to me.  But then I am looking at it from a business standpoint.    Not a position where I'm freaking out about the possibility of "no govt, no roads".

If you have a road you want to encourage throughput on it.  Otherwise, what's the point?


Like the way that shopping centres which maintain the roads and parking spaces in their car park complain about freeloaders, you mean?

It doesn't matter to them because the costs of maintaining them are so small compared to the profits they make.  They don't want to scare away potential future customers by complaining about the "freeloaders".