I guess i'm kind of an ex libertarian that turned anarchist, meaning that through a lot of experience of trying to make the government system better, and observing other people fail to do so, i realized it isn't possible.
I have no answers other than the fact that history shows governments across time follow certain paths and have certain incentives. Generally, it performs a couple useful functions, but it also does things like wage war, oppress people, and steal and then misuse money.
The libertarian ideal is to reduce government to only it's basic functions in order to minimize the harmful things that government does. Generally, libertarians think that government should be limited to providing police, clean water, schools, defense, roads, and other very basic things. Their prescription is a minimalist government, which frees citizens and companies to figure out their own solutions to the rest of the problems that government currently solves.
An anarchist believes that government cannot be trusted to simply perform the basic functions we as citizens desire it to do. Because in practice, it has little to no accountability, and also always grows larger by the year, even when you have a constitution as we do, which was intentionally designed to limit it's scope. Never once has a constitution limited government's scope. So an anarchist would say the idea of having government is a fail in itself.
An anarchist does not have a prescription for what to replace government with. It is sort of like how an atheist does not have a moral prescription that serves as a drop-in replacement for what religion prescribes. Atheism closes one door and allows you to finally chose other ideas though. The possibilities of where to go once you've eliminated organized religion are endless. And so that's sort of the idea behind anarchism, is that once the large centralized power magically disappears, you're free to try all sorts of different experiments on how to organize society, on small, medium, or large scales. But the only hard rule is that people have to consent to being part of those societies. Not like now, where being born on a particular patch of land counts as consent to paying taxes to it and doing what it tells you to do.
But anarchism ever occurring is kind of a pipe dream. We know what happens in a power vaccuum - another government forms, and people get suckered into thinking that they can't live without it. Then they hand progressively more control over to said government. Rinse repeat.
So the libertarian and anarchist position is more of a philosophy than anything else. But so is the notion that we can turn around a government that's became corrupt by just voting in the right people. The history books show us few examples where a government apologizes for being bad and hands the keys over :lol:
What usually changes governments is lots of bloodshed, fiscal collapse, or some other catastrophic event.
lanet bankruptcy in another thread. So the State of California and various cities are dancing in the streets at a few thousand people losing their jobs because that means the GOVERNMENT gets to pocket the recycling money. How could unemployed people matter?
