Comment on Opting Out of the State by Rad Geek
… do the first responders get to "opt out" of helping you? … (etc. etc., blurgle blargle)
Of course they do get to do that. Nobody is obliged to rescue me if I've never made a prior agreement with them.
Now was this actually intended as a good-faith question? Are you willing to take "No" as an answer? If I agree (as I do) that they obviously have every right to opt out of rescuing me, will you agree that I have every right to opt out of being taxed to fund them?
However, the entire discussion here is based on the really quite insane notion that agencies of government violence (e.g., the police, the military, and the fortification of U.S. national borders) are social services rendered to me. They are not. Government force is not a social service, let alone a service I have requested; it is antisocial coercion, a condition imposed on me, through the threat of overwhelming force if I should resist, without my consent, and quite against my will. You and I are not their customers, or their clients. We are their victims, and their milch-cows. You can decide for yourself whether that is what you personally like being; but speaking for myself, I would be immensely better off if I had never been subjected, and if my friends and loved ones had never been subjected, to coercion by government drug police, government highway police, government border police, and all the rest of the host of political control.
Lest you forget, "market anarchy" is what followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. Today, we refer to it as the Dark Ages. . . .
Well, it sounds like you believe a lot of ridiculous nonsense about what "market anarchy" means. (Manorialism, of course, is the antithesis of both markets and anarchy, in the usual meanings of those terms.) Or else you believe a lot of ridiculous nonsense about what medieval Europe was like. Or, most likely, both.
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