Every single argument against statelessness applies to the state even more
"But who will ever take care of the poor?"
“But without government, can you guarantee to me that such-and-such won’t happen?” Well, with government, can you guarantee to me that the same such-and-such won’t happen? Because it is happening, and the more government intervenes in society, the more of such-and-such we seem to get: from poverty and illiteracy to crime and war.
“Who will take care of the poor?”
Take it easy there, mother Tereza. If you were that charitable you wouldn’t expect others to pay for it. You’re just moralizing to seek undeserved reverence.
My favourite fallacious objection against statelessness is the self-righteous virtue-signalling condescension about “the poor:” “But without government, what will we ever do about the poor “poor?”
This insane straw man presumes that government takes care of the poor with its patronizing welfare at the expense of working contributors to society - people who never voluntarily chose to give their charity. If they don’t want to give charity, then forcing them to do so goes against what society wants - so it defeats the purpose for government to redistribute labour through taxation and welfare. If working people do want to give as much as they want to the people the choose to give, then there is no need for forced charity (welfare). And even today under statism, people still give to private charity even though they are already taxed to the bone for welfare.
So, we conclude that the forced taxation of the working class to supposedly support the supposed “poor” is nothing but a grift: a swindle to enrich the middle-man government - not to mention a devious way to buy votes with other people’s money.
Moreover, forced charity (welfare) enables freeloading and an ingrateful entitlement to other people’s hard-earned labour, while it fosters resentment in those forced to support welfare abusers. Charity is a privilege, not a right. State welfare turns charity into a right - a to other people’s labour, which is the definition of slavery.
Besides, if government was supposed to be taking care of poverty, then why do we seem to get more and more poverty, more wealth disparity, more taxation, more drug abuse, more welfare abusers, even from other countries? Why does it seem that, the more government expands its regulations, its overreach, its fiscal and monetary policies, and its participation in GDP, the more poverty we get, and the more filthy-rich multi-billionaires we get?
The state does not take care of the poor; it creates the poor. Government literally and deliberately causes poverty through its decelerating effect on the economic cycle. The state suppresses the economy due to taxation, restrictions, bureaucracy, needless regulating, and of course, regulating in favour of its lobbyists to crush competition and deliberately create monopolies/oligopolies.
The gap between economic potential and economic output is called unemployment. With unemployment, employees lose their negotiating leverage because they need to outcompete each other for fewer available jobs: so the employees themselves agree to get paid less and less. Government is the cause of this; no one else.
Thus government is the main cause of poverty. Poverty and income inequality are caused by government and no one else, and to assume that the entity that creates a problem will solve the problem is insanity.
The definition of insanity is assuming that the cause of a problem will solve the problem.
Who will ever take care of the poor? Definitely not the institution that made them poor in the first place.
To wrap up
“Without government, who will take care of the poor?”
With government, who will take care of the poor?
And the burden of proof lies with the statist, because the non-existence of the state is the default. The elaborate institution of the state is the alternative hypothesis. And so far, it is extremely poorly justified.
Every single objection against statelessness debunked using logic and evidence
I will be posting a series of in-depth essays addressing common objections against statelessness… you know what I’m talking about… Snarky self-defeating questions like: “But without government, what can ever be done about education, policing, justice, welfare, national security, roads, property,”
…those every other straw man, false attribution, burden of proof, appeal to tradition, and ad hoc fallacy argument on which the irrationality of statism rests.
Useful reading:
‘Human Action’ by Ludwig von Mises
‘Chaos Theory: Two Essays on Market Anarchy’ by Robert P. Murphy
‘For a New Liberty: A Libertarian Manifesto’ by Murray N. Rothbard
‘The Market for Liberty’ by Morris and Linda Tannehill
Thank you for reading. I appreciate your time.
Kindly like, comment, share, or subscribe for free. Or not. It’s all the same.
The argument from “the poor” takes a special kind of myopia or ignorance. Governments have been taking care of the poor (about as well as they take care of anything else) for a a microscopic fraction of their historical existence.
To paraphrase Jefferson, a government with the power to fix everything has the power to destroy everything.
Excecpt that no government really has the power to fix everything. But our government does have the power to destroy everything. And nuclear weapons and bio-lab death viruses aren't even the only ways.