Quote:
Originally Posted by MaDalton
that'd be happening in some imaginary fairyland maybe, reality proves for the last couple of thousand years that you would have to be alone on a deserted island to make that work.
i dont know how old you are but i am defintely old and disenchanted enough to accept what is reality. and that is that without proper laws and enforcement we would have a fucking riot out there.
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You must be making certain assumptions that are completely wrong about what I said.
As long as there are humans on this planet, there will be humans that violate other people's rights. Having a property right in something means you have the exclusive authority to determine how that resource can be used. If someone tries to violate those rights, you obviously have the right to stop them. So you also have the right to hire someone to do that for you.
What a government actually is is an organization that performs that task for you.
I never said we live in or should be living in or even could be living in some fairy land where everybody is friends with everybody else and no one commits any crimes. No, what I'm saying is that the existence of crime, the presence of criminals is a fact of life. The question is "how do you deal with this?". Do you allow the organization that is tasked with protecting people (the government in this case) to commit crimes or do you think that that organization should abide by the same rules as everybody else? Some people think the government should be able to do whatever it wants because it's the government. I say: "no, every act of injustice is immoral even if it is committed with good intentions".
No offense and professionally I like your style, but while on the one hand your are 'disenchanted ', you seem to have a kind of 'blind faith' in government. Like I said, governments are made up out of normal people. They are also imperfect. They don't always act with good intentions. They also get jealous. They also act to cover their asses or protect their positions. They can't exactly predict the outcome of their actions. They aren't 'immune to financial incentives'. They couldn't prevent all crimes even if they had unlimited resources. etc.
There's places where the government controls what comes in and what doesn't, when you have to get up and go to bed, where you can go and where you can't go. Those places are called prisons. Yet, even though the people there are completely under the control of those in charge, fights still take place, people still get raped, people still manage to get a hold of drugs and use them,...
What I'm worried about, and I'm not directly addressing you personally here, is that people have started to expect that the government fix everything. They have this almost religious, blind faith in the ability and the intentions of their governments and are willing to give up their personal rights and those of their fellow men in an attempt to reach this Utopian paradise. They allow their rights to be violated and forget what the purpose of that government was all about in the first place: to protect people's rights.