The system being better than the alternatives and the system caring about you are two different things.
> The very idea that maybe the dearest leaders of whatever country you live in don't actually care about you doesn't seem to be able to penetrate people's minds, even though time and again they lie and abuse their powers.
Really? Because the prevailing opinion with people I speak to is that politicians are bastards, and that's replicated here. In fact, politicians are very rarely looked at in a good light. People dislike what we have! What's the approval rating of Congress?
Your rhetoric is the same I see time and time again. People need to "wake up" and see that the system is terrible, and they're so stupid for not seeing it. People do see it, we've got well past that point. The idea that there are significant problems with the way we run countries is painfully fucking obvious. You're not smarter than everyone else for seeing that there is corruption, or that people lie. These revelations are not new, they're not anything different from what we've seen for thousands of years.
The problem is nobody has a good plan for what else to do.
> Even if you hint to people that maybe we don't really need a government to live our lives in peace, at the very best it is suggested you go to Somalia.
Well it's a good point, we can point at countries without democratic-ish rule and they're often really terrible places to live. I get to complain about MPs spending expenses money on duck houses on the internet because I have reliable infrastructure and enough money to buy a computer and an internet connection. I'm not worried about a group of teens in the military coming in and raping my wife.
> Even if you hint to people that maybe we don't really need a government to live our lives in peace
We don't, not if everyone is nice. But "wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice" is the kind of political plan I'd expect from a 5 year old. Unless you have a concrete suggestion, something better than "not this", then you have nothing to add to an incredibly important conversation.
There is no shortage of genuine and detailed proposals for societies without government. People tend to mock and dismiss them immediately without any real consideration, generally with the argument that it's impossible to have anything else or that it's not perfect, but it's the best we can do. And this fits The Matrix metaphor perfectly: the state very deliberately and explicitly seeks to make people dependent on the states and to convince people of the necessity of having a state.
> Really? Because the prevailing opinion with people I speak to is that politicians are bastards, and that's replicated here. In fact, politicians are very rarely looked at in a good light. People dislike what we have!
Well, they dislike individuals. And that's to be expected, because they do shitty things when elected and people start noticing this over time. Yet they keep voting, hoping the next guy is going to be better and also because "the wrong lizard might get in" to use Douglas Adams' words.
> The problem is nobody has a good plan for what else to do.
Maybe you don't need a plan. Maybe you just need to get rid of the cancer which is government and let free people live as they please. Free market enterprise, no matter what horrors we've been told about it, doesn't seem to have a tendency to go to wars with countries every decade and kill millions of people. Not because the actors in it are noble, but because they wouldn't be able to finance those horrible things with the money they stole from others.
> We don't, not if everyone is nice. But "wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice" is the kind of political plan I'd expect from a 5 year old. Unless you have a concrete suggestion, something better than "not this", then you have nothing to add to an incredibly important conversation.
I have a suggestion. Free market and no government would be nice, but for reasons mentioned in the Matrix I can see many people would be very reluctant to believe it could actually work.
To have a free market, you need a government, if only for 2 things: enforcing contracts, and defining and enforcing private property (yes, defining: you need to decide what to do with the not-at-all-obvious kinds of "intellectual" property, such as copyright, patents, and trademarks.). And to do just that, you need some kind of system, which will need people to run it. Full-time civil servants (that means taxes), or part-time volunteers, something.
Oh, and while we're at it, since our world revolves a lot around money we should define and enforce a monetary policy: who gets to create and destroy the money, and how.
And by the way, people are not fully informed, perfectly rational agents that can solve NP-complete programs in polynomial time. You will have market failures, and will probably need a way to deal with them as they come up. (Not dealing with them at all is also an option, but then, natural monopolies may eventually grow into Super-corporations, Neuromancer style —not the best kind of governance if you ask me).
While we may not need the kind of government we have right now, we do need some kind of governance. Because if you have none, well… the world won't dissolve into chaos, but some forms of governance will emerge anyway, and they won't be of your choosing.
I get what you're saying. However without a government you are simply relying on people to be good and fair to each other. I don't know how long it's been since you last checked the people state of affairs, but no matter how bad you think politicians are or greedy government is, the majority of people out there wouldn't pay taxes to fund education, roads, hospitals, law enforcement etc unless forced to do so.
Of course they wouldn't. And why do you think that is? It's because they don't get good value for their money. People still need schools, right? Therefore, schools will be built. People still need roads, therefore roads will be built. People still need healthcare, so it will be provided. The only question is at what price and of what quality - the answer to it being at the quality and prices the market wants it to be provided.
Then, of course, there's this argument that the poor will not have enough to get those things. Well, let's look at other industries. Have low cost airlines made flights accessible to almost anyone? Yes they have and this happened only after the industry was deregulated. Or do only rich people have cars? Or anything, really? Why is it such an impossibility that private protection companies and private schools and private healthcare can be cheap and accessible?
And to address your other point:
>However without a government you are simply relying on people to be good and fair to each other.
And with a government, everyone relies on people in that government to be fair and good. Except that when they are not, you can't stop paying to them.
Because many people don't feel like it changes anything for themselves. People everyday vote with their money and their decisions in life and reap the results. They feel that what they do changes life around them. Voting had never affected themselves and most people are always angry at something that government does or doesn't do and can't do anything about it seriously. They all see crazy activists and how it's hard for them to gain anything from the system. That's why people don't vote.
> The problem is nobody has a good plan for what else to do.
There are plenty of plans, if one is willing to listen (anarchism). It's not the lack of plans that is the problem, it's people not having the guts to let go of what we have now. Constant indoctrination, since childhood, with the idea that is the best we can do is also a significant factor.
> I'm not worried about a group of teens in the military coming in and raping my wife.
The lack of official, internationally recognized state apparatus is not the reason this happens. For overwhelming majority of people, if they woke up the next morning and realized the state is gone, I'm pretty sure their first thought wouldn't be to go out on the street and start shooting. Those few that would are not deterred from such behaviour in the presence of state either.
> But "wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice" is the kind of political plan I'd expect from a 5 year old.
It's not about people being nice. It's about creating a system where there is no reason or incentive to be bad, a system where it doesn't make sense to be bad to others. But even if people are somehow inherently bad, isn't it logical to not want a system where such people can rule over you?
There's an old saying, I dunno who said it first: People hate congress, and love their congressman.
That may not be as true these days...there's a pretty big disconnect, and a big part of the issue is that nobody votes because nobody believes it makes a difference (because it doesn't). At best you get to choose the lesser of two assholes.
> The very idea that maybe the dearest leaders of whatever country you live in don't actually care about you doesn't seem to be able to penetrate people's minds, even though time and again they lie and abuse their powers.
Really? Because the prevailing opinion with people I speak to is that politicians are bastards, and that's replicated here. In fact, politicians are very rarely looked at in a good light. People dislike what we have! What's the approval rating of Congress?
Your rhetoric is the same I see time and time again. People need to "wake up" and see that the system is terrible, and they're so stupid for not seeing it. People do see it, we've got well past that point. The idea that there are significant problems with the way we run countries is painfully fucking obvious. You're not smarter than everyone else for seeing that there is corruption, or that people lie. These revelations are not new, they're not anything different from what we've seen for thousands of years.
The problem is nobody has a good plan for what else to do.
> Even if you hint to people that maybe we don't really need a government to live our lives in peace, at the very best it is suggested you go to Somalia.
Well it's a good point, we can point at countries without democratic-ish rule and they're often really terrible places to live. I get to complain about MPs spending expenses money on duck houses on the internet because I have reliable infrastructure and enough money to buy a computer and an internet connection. I'm not worried about a group of teens in the military coming in and raping my wife.
> Even if you hint to people that maybe we don't really need a government to live our lives in peace
We don't, not if everyone is nice. But "wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice" is the kind of political plan I'd expect from a 5 year old. Unless you have a concrete suggestion, something better than "not this", then you have nothing to add to an incredibly important conversation.