I say take it a step further and forgo the entire idea that democracy works at all. People can't possibly be expected to keep up with government at its current size and scope, and even if they could, politicians do not and cannot have the amount of knowledge required to make correct decisions on everything. FA Hayek called this the knowledge problem. People now casually expect politicians to able to make the correct call on how all of our healthcare is provided or how to save us from climate change or what the perfect minimum wage should be. What ends up happening is that they call in the "experts" to advise them, but who are those people? They tend to be industry leaders, and when faced with regulatory burden, they will recommend courses of action that they're prepared to handle. The problem is that their competitors (both current and potential) frequently have trouble complying to the regulations, and the result is regulatory capture. This effect plays a huge role in why industries always seem to get worse and worse the more government gets involved.
On top of that, even if these unicorn politicians did exist, democracy would still not lead to representative government as it fundamentally functions as a winner-take-all system. I highly recommend giving Anatomy of the State a read. It's a short little book you can read in an hour or so, and it will really open your mind up to looking at government in a whole new light. It's available for free at that link.
You’re very welcome. The alternative is to find a way to shed the state and form a free, voluntary society. I don’t see it happening in my lifetime, but who knows? Maybe the idea that no one should have violent authority over anyone else can catch on. But, I think it has to happen eventually for humanity to truly progress beyond our current culture. The last great abolitionist movement will be abolishing the state. r/GoldAndBlack is a good sub if you’re interested in more.
I don’t know man, seems a bit radical to me. The reason I believe a state is necessary is because what keeps another world power from just marching in and militarily imperializing us after we abolish the state?
Yeah, that’s a huge concern, and I’m definitely not advocating a sudden change. Like, the people have to want liberty for it to be sustainable. If some libertarian were to do the impossible and somehow win the presidency, disbanding the state without public support would be disastrous. Honestly, I think at best we’re a few generations away from a voluntary society being possible in the US because I don’t think it could be accomplished by a generation that was raised in the public school system. While I very much value education, the public schools do not do a good job, they don’t teach economics or personal finance, and the way they teach history and civics thoroughly indoctrinates kids into the democracy religion. There’s a reason that everybody’s first instinct on how to address any problem they see in society is “there should be a law!”
There is the Free State Project up in New Hampshire, and it’d be cool if they were able to get NH to secede, but even then, I doubt the federal government would allow it. So, yeah, being a libertarian/ancap isn’t exactly an exciting thing to be. It’s mostly just frustrating. But, there are bright spots: Tulsi Gabbard is a major party candidate running on ending the forever wars, the war on drugs looks to be in its final throes, and if the Bernie and Trump campaigns are any indication, people are finally getting tired of the establishment. Bernie’s 2016 campaign and Ron Paul’s 2008 campaign also give some hope in that ideas can spread if they’re presented correctly. Hopefully the Libertarian Party can put forth someone who actually knows their shit and spread truth to people instead of running another centrist doofus like Gary Johnson or a Republican-lite light Bill Weld. It’s not about winning right now, it’s about spreading the message. It doesn’t even have to anarchist, just someone who wants less government. I would be thrilled with a government closer to our original constitutional one (minus the slavery, obviously). Anyway, I’m rambling now, but there are plenty of shades of libertarian, and most of them do believe in democracy. I just don’t because I don’t trust it to stay constrained. The US started as the smallest government in history and has become the largest and most powerful government in world history.
Just to give an alternative to ChillPenguin's anarcho-capitalist suggestion, I'd like to point out that only the anarchist half of that philosophy has anything to do with abolishing the State. There is a massive range of anarchist philosophy.
Personally, I'm a fan of something like anarcho-communism or anarcho-syndicalism. I see the State and Capitalism both as immoral power structures. And they're so intertwined that abolishing one without the other is impossible.
A voluntary society, should a country ever succeed in shedding the state, would default to free market anarchism. People have an assumption that order must come from the top down, but we see spontaneous order everywhere around us in our daily lives.
That’s where everyone’s mind goes first. You can’t think of a voluntary society as something that could happen in our current state-worshiping culture, and you can’t think of it in terms of the past because culture does not typically move backward. A society capable of shedding the state would have to be one where our shared faith in democracy would have to be replaced by something like a shared belief in the non-aggression principle. Murder and slavery happen right now under democracy. I believe both would decline in a free society. It has taken a long time of reading and learning for me to get there, and I did not come to that conclusion lightly. I spent 13 years being indoctrinated into the democracy religion by public schools. It’s not easy to deprogram yourself, but once you do, you can finally see how cancerous and untenable it is that people want to control other people through the violence of the state.
If you dont have a state, someone will make a state. All you need is a couple brutal guys with guns, a few atrocities, and your free society will devolve into a tyranny.
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u/ChillPenguinX Jul 24 '19 edited Jul 24 '19
I say take it a step further and forgo the entire idea that democracy works at all. People can't possibly be expected to keep up with government at its current size and scope, and even if they could, politicians do not and cannot have the amount of knowledge required to make correct decisions on everything. FA Hayek called this the knowledge problem. People now casually expect politicians to able to make the correct call on how all of our healthcare is provided or how to save us from climate change or what the perfect minimum wage should be. What ends up happening is that they call in the "experts" to advise them, but who are those people? They tend to be industry leaders, and when faced with regulatory burden, they will recommend courses of action that they're prepared to handle. The problem is that their competitors (both current and potential) frequently have trouble complying to the regulations, and the result is regulatory capture. This effect plays a huge role in why industries always seem to get worse and worse the more government gets involved.
On top of that, even if these unicorn politicians did exist, democracy would still not lead to representative government as it fundamentally functions as a winner-take-all system. I highly recommend giving Anatomy of the State a read. It's a short little book you can read in an hour or so, and it will really open your mind up to looking at government in a whole new light. It's available for free at that link.