Nice arguement Icy, but I'd like you to lay out exactly why it wouldn't work.
You have no precedent to go on, but you assume that teh fact is self-evident, which I obviously say it isn't.
Soo...
Icymonkey wrote:
I'd prefer that too, but then again, I'd also prefer if property didn't exist and we all lived in a stateless society where there was no racism, no war, no poverty, no violence, and we could all join hands and sing kum-ba-yah by the goddamn fireside while smoking pot and eating granola bars. But that's just me. And, of course, just because I'd prefer it doesn't mean it would work in reality.
Which has relevance as to whether my own suggestion works in reality...how?
I mean honestly, apply to my arguement instead of making non-comparisons.
Icymonkey wrote:
If the government is to exist at all, it needs money. Now, as wonderful as your utopian dream is of making the government some kind of charity which simply operates via donations, it would never work.
If you want to reduce the amount of money the government spends, that's a different issue. We're taling about the relative proportion of that budget, whatever it might be. Even if we were talking about some kind of libertarian paradise without a social safety net, and more importantly without a military and a minimal, unarmed police force (as military expenditures take up about 20 times more of our budget than welfare does), it would still need at least a few billion dollars to operate.
Hold on, 20 times more? That is, and I like to say this, a communist lie. Data pending, but watch this space.
Also, why not both? I don't see why it wouldn't work, unless of course you assume every human being is going to assume a police force and military arn't worth their money, which is a rather tenuous concept, especially as how "we're cutting police!" is a threat used to cajole people into voting for a tax hike.
Icymonkey wrote:
Charging for their services? Then the government wouldn't be a government. It would be some kind of weird protection-service company operating in some kind of anarcho-capitalist environment. Let's say I don't want to subscribe to the service, so I don't pay. Then I decide to murder someone, or, alternately, I myself am murdered. If I wasn't a "subscriber", what could the government do?
Kill the murderer, be it you or someone else.
Any other questions? Whatever entity it is, I call it government, you can call it swiss cheese, it keeps order. And it would charge on a per-case basis, not like a monthly subscription fee. So in the case whoever wished to get the murderer found would be charged a fee.
Tho the concept IS amusing, "YOU can subscribe to AMERICA(tm) 6 weeks for only 99.99!"
Icymonkey wrote:
As for the idea of the government operating on donations... I think I've already addressed that.
"OMG IT NO WURK" doesn't really count as 'addressing' anything.
Icymonkey wrote:
The government is a special moral case. They can do things that normal citizens can't. The government is a very specialized organization created to prevent anarchy. While one large, democratically elected organization forcibly taking some property from everyone to fund its protection of those same people is bad, a strong person forcibly taking the property of a weak person simply because there's no well-funded organization in place to stop him is worse.
Wait, first you say its a special moral case, then you agree with me and say "Well, sure, its bad...but WITHOUT taking everything by force, there would be no order."
Er, even in a statistical analysis, the govt takes by force 887,880,000,000 or so dollars by force just in income tax, by what logic is that better than getting held up for your lunch money?
And, by what logic does "no taxes" = "no government"? As I have already outlined above a proposal for change, and you have just said "OMG IT NO WURK," assuming I would trust your judgement implicitly (hint: I don't.)
Icymonkey wrote:
As nice as it is to have clear-cut, unbreakable rules such as "taking things by force is always, always to be avoided", in the real world, ethics can only be matter of choosing which things we want to avoid more than other things.
And if I say you're wrong, and its just
your ethics that force that?
Icymonkey wrote:
By the way, what the hell? I'm the one supposed to be defending idealistic, unrealizable dreams involving a stateless society, and you're supposed to be the one pointing out that in the real world, things don't work that way and we have to make compromises - not the other way around.
Perhaps because I'm not advocating a society which demands of man impossible feats of so-called morality, like anarchy or communism does?
Crazy thought there.
Icymonkey wrote:
(Keep in mind, by the way, that I'm all for reducing the size of the government - starting with our bloated, money-sucking, inefficient military and intelligence organizations.)
Er, what do I care about that again? No data, no advocacy, no plan, no reason, just...yeah. There.
-MiB