"Anarchy isn't really meant to "work.""
Oh
Discussion
Haha I guess that was a pretty bad answer.
Anarchy seems like an asymptotic goal that you can never really reach. But if you actually limit a governments functions to protecting the rights of the people it was declared to serve. So protecting life, liberty, and property ala Frederic Bastiate's "The Law" then you would be pretty close to anarchy.
It sure didn't work out that well here in the states. Once people realized they could vote for politicians that promised to plunder their neighbors and then created these cartoonist puppet political parties it started to go to shit.
This is probably why voters were required to own property in the beginning.
Yeah I agree. I think property ownership being a necessity probably kept things pretty balanced here. I think we were largely taught "women couldn't vote" was a trick. I view it more of there was a vote per household. But yeah between opening voting up to everyone and then flooding the country with all sorts of people that can't comprehend the basis of the country let alone agree with the values things seemed to get out of control fast.
I was really only teasing about your answer. I think no government is a decent goal. I just don't think it's an option because we have strayed so far from the original meaning of what a nation is. But I guess does an anarchical society even consider itself a nation? I mean would there be a border? Would anyone be free to come and go or does everyone have to agree on the format and function of things? I don't know I'm riffing
I think property ownership was used as a proxy to select for those who had received a classical liberal education (trivium and quadrivium), and a basic Christian understanding of human rights. I'm not a Christian, that's just what I think was the logic there.
Anarchy is a goal you’ll never reach. So in the meantime imo it’s about optimizing governance to be minimally tyrannical and maximally beneficial to honest moral people.
The issue is that we are rapidly approaching anarcho tyranny which is the inverse: maximally tyrannical and maximally harmful to moral honest people. So at this starting condition I will take anything that either makes the gov less tyrannical or makes it benefit good honest people more. Stopping the flow of immigrants seeking hand outs is a no brainer. It has barely any negative consequences except maybe hypotheticals about Palantir boogiemen which imo are overstated or at best properly stated and going to happen whether or not we evict freeloaders from the Third World.
Approaching?
"In the Criminal Code of 1926 there was a most stupid Article 139 – “on the limits of necessary self-defense” —according to which you had the right to unsheath your knife only after the criminal’s knife was hovering over you. And you could stab him only after he had stabbed you. And otherwise you would be the one put on trial. (And there was no article in our legislation saying that the greater criminal was the one who attacked someone weaker than himself.) This fear of exceeding the measure of necessary self-defense lead to total spinelessness as a national characteristic. A hoodlum once began to beat up the Red Army man Aleksandr Zakharov outside a club. Zakharov took out a folding penknife and killed the hoodlum. And for this he got….ten years for plain murder! “And what was I supposed to do?” he asked, astonished. Prosecutor Artsishevsky replied: “You should have fled!” So tell me, who creates hoodlums?"
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 1918-1956.