Why We Have Government

...and some anti-government memes

Jan 22, 2024

We have government because we desire undeserved “assurances”. We are too lazy and cowardly to create a decentralized voluntary system of incentives that in turn gives life to a spontaneously orderly society, so we instead relinquish our freedoms and dignities to an arbitrary group of “leaders” who will supposedly grant order to us and for us. But this elaborate and debatable “order” is unearned, entitled, and undeserved.

And the irony is that, the amount of effort, design, propaganda and getting enough people on the same page needed to make government work are more than enough for stateless voluntary systems of self-governance to emerge.

It takes a lot of indoctrination to convince the majority of humans that “government” or “democracy” is the “best system we have” in a matter-of-fact circular-argument fallacy. Government can only work if enough people believe it can work, if enough people are on the same page in accepting certain forms of “authority” as legitimate, and if enough people accept that government is “moral” and the “best system we can have.” Take one of those elements out of the equation, and government collapses. Imagine if enough people understood how self-governance works, and does so more effectively and morally than any form of government.

We have government because we all like perceived “assurances” that there will be a safety cushion for us in case we decide to laze on our backs one day. We can’t rely on the uncertainty of voluntary charity, so we’d rather have the economic suppression of state corruption and inefficiencies, as long as we can lick off the floor some of the ruling class’s scraps from the wealth they stole from us (through taxes, quantitative easing, inflation, regulations). And that’s assuming that the state’s handouts are a sure thing. They never are, because every “stable” state is just the time period between two periods of state-induced war, instability and chaos.

We enable government because we secretly aim to hijack it to our benefit at the expense of others through force. Voting is the most obvious manifestation of this moral corruption, which is why the evil of democracy is evident in buying out votes. With voting, you confess that you are willing to use the violence of the state to impose your will on others who happen to be the perceived minority (not the actual minority). This is why democracy is immoral; it assumes that everything is up for a vote, even individual freedoms and self-ownership.

Other more subtle ways of hijacking government for selfish gains on the backs of others are cushy useless government jobs, state funding, and lobbying for favourable regulations, which crush competition so as to create monopolies and oligopolies of insiders.

If we choose government, then we have no right to complain about any of the ills of government. We cannot detach war, corruption, inefficiencies and oppression from government because they are inalienable and inevitable characteristics of government. They are inherent to government because the foundation of government is rule of threat, not rule of incentive.