You have depression, don’t you?

But you don’t need government in its current form in order to protect people from groups who mean to poison. I don’t need a cop to protect me from a home invader, for example. In fact, the cop isn’t going to get there until the invader has done whatever they sought out to do, so maybe just to try to find them after myself and my entire family are murdered.

OR I can protect my family myself.

The act of poisoning someone is in itself objectively immoral. No good people who accept responsibility for the innocent in this world should be made to suffer the will of those who seek to do that kind of harm. In fact I would argue that the government likely was deficient in what they SHOULD have done to combat the poisoning done at that time.

In my view, if 5 people are producing food (simplifying things here) and they choose to poison that food and I and some of my goodly companions find out about it, we are completely within our right to use immediate and, if necessary, deadly force against those individuals. The idea should be simple: If you want to attempt to kill people, we will find and kill you.

The good must not suffer the evil to exist, and I say that as both an staunch atheist and someone not even in favor of the death penalty (but only because I do not want even a single person killed who wasn’t guilty.)

And you talk of businesses as if they are real people, and they’re not. A business is just this made-up human idea, and an extremely broad one at that, where we’re explaining swaths of people all working together to produce some kind of goods/services under the idea of generating wealth for everyone. The idea that a company can own property for example is nonsensical. A company can own property like my car can own property, or like a sidewalk can owe me money.

When a business I work for does something nefarious, I guarantee you that I didn’t lift a finger to see that come to fruition. I was duped by others who made those choices who defrauded me by not detailing what was going on. THOSE people who did those things are criminals and should be dealt with. The notion that a company for example can do something that say, results in the murder of 10 kids isn’t an “oopsies” where the state fines that business. The mere fact that this is how we deal with these things “collectively” is seriously messed up. The people responsible for making choices they knew were risky for people’s health that then resulted in the death of those kids should be tried and convicted of murder and locked away forever, and I don’t need a huge, overarching government that I didn’t consent to in order to make that happen.

And I agree with you - governments like what we have here in the US are a hell of a lot better than they’ve been in the past. I’m not saying I want to live in Stalin’s Russia, or under the iron fist of Genghis Khan here. What I’m saying is both logically and philosophically, the next direction we as human beings should be guiding the world to is a place where there is no such thing as victimless crimes; where everyone can live their lives the way they choose and where the only time a relative force monopoly flexes its power is to prevent things like murder, rape, theft, and fraud.

You build a coalition who needs some money from me and will protect me better than police and I’ll gladly pay for that, but do you know what that would be? A business, not a government. You could argue that it’d be a government if it were a force monopoly, but so what? So long as it’s consensual and works, I’m all for it.

When I say I’m anti-government what I’m talking about is being against people using violence against us against our will and not in defense of the innocent.

You don’t abide by any kind of government. You can’t. Your will cannot align to be violated. This is why you believe the purpose of voting is for, so when one person does something with your money that you don’t agree with, you believe you can get another person who won’t do those things.

I would argue that it isn’t that you’re in favor of government, it’s that you’re in favor of a justice system, school for your kids, roads, and other infrastructure. But to say you need the system of coercion we have in place else we can’t have those things is just nonsense. Would you not pay to have security if the government didn’t do police? Is your argument that other people wouldn’t? Who are these “barbarians” who wouldn’t? Do you know them? I don’t. I don’t surround myself with people like that, so it always diverts back to this idea that it’s the “others”, the “outsiders”, the “barbarians” who wouldn’t do this stuff if not coersed. Never us.

And even if you wanted to argue that you wouldn’t want to pay for police then you’re just arguing for less government, aren’t you? If you wouldn’t pay for police unless forced, then you don’t want police that badly. This isn’t a difficult concept. If I want something, I go and buy it. If I don’t buy it, I didn’t want it that badly. I fundamentally decided that I value my money more than the good or service itself, so I didn’t make the trade.

I simply take it one step further and understand that you shouldn’t be able to take my money to do anything with that I don’t agree with. If I agreed to it I would give you the money without the coercion. When I want something, I buy it from the store. When I don’t want something, you have to take money from me to get it if you won’t buy it yourself.

There is no such thing as governments, mind you. There are only people. If your neighbor were to come to your home and tell you they want $500 to do something with and you disagreed and they returned with a weapon and threatened you unless you gave it to them, you would immediately admit that such a scenario would be both immoral and crazy. The thing is, the propaganda you’ve been raised with is duping you into believing that this isn’t exactly what’s going on because they slapped a badge on your neighbor and convinced you that it’s not theft and authoritarianism.

If your neighbor made a nice looking badge and pinned it to their lapel, would that make it official? What if 10 of your neighbors all agreed that it was official and legit? Does it make it official and legit? What about 20 neighbors? What about 50? 500?

If not 1, then not 1 billion. No number of people agreeing to something warrants that it is legitimate. It used to be that millions of people agreed in slavery and slavery has never been legitimate. It was thought by many as legitimate, but so what?

There isn’t anything wrong with government if that government isn’t robbing you - that’s the rub. All a government really is is a relative force monopoly. If the government vanished tomorrow and your neighbors all gathered together with you and agreed to help one another and protect each other from outsiders who might seek to do harm to you or your properties, you would be a government, albeit a small one.

And I’m not saying we could or even should do away with current governments in the world tomorrow - even if we could. We would need 50-100 years or more to slowly wittle away these systems so that free people can take their place.

So to answer your question specifically, I don’t think it has anything to do with anarchists and everything to do with logic. If it is not OK for your neighbor John to do to you what I outlined above, then it isn’t OK for Tom to do it if Tom is a representative of the “government”. There is no such thing as saying you can rape someone because a group of people got together and decided what you decide is right is legitimate and therefore, it isn’t even rape.

The mere fact that your neighbor doing what the government does would be even legally classified as theft but when the government does it it’s not called by that same word should be a gargantuan red flag. Only the politicians and political manipulate language in that way. The honest of us just call it what it actually is - theft.

If I own something and you want it and I do not want to give it to you and you take it, that is theft. It doesn’t matter who does it or what “group” they are affiliated to. You don’t get to steal and then try and say it isn’t theft because your version is “legitimate”.

Like what, exactly?

Like roads? Police? Schools? How’s about grocery stores?

Let’s talk about grocery stores. Government in the US does not “do” grocery stories. The free market does (I say free with a bit of a grain of salt, of course.)

And there are no problems with food in this country. In fact, we live in a country of such overabundance of food that we have foodstuffs coming in the world over, and throw away roughly 65 billion tons - TONS, annually and have a weight epidemic.

The market is SO GOOD at food that it creates overabundance issues. Everywhere you look, food is available. I have like 20 grocery stores near me. I can get most of them to deliver right to my door. There are restaurants, fast food chains, diners, food in gas stations and rest stops, at kiosks, airports, on flights, at hotels, parks, on mobile trucks, and so much more.

Any argument you might propose could fundamentally be explained, at least at a high-level, by showcasing this concept. The government COULD have done food and then we would be having this same conversation, but you might say, “if there is no government, then we will all starve! Who will do food?”

But the government does not do food and I bet you if they did, we would have fewer options, food would be of lower quality, and food would cost more than it does today. Everything, and I will reiterate that - EVERYTHING the government does it does worse than the market can do.

Shipping? The U.S. Postal Service typically hemorrhages between 6.5 and 9.5 billion annually, and it has a MONOPOLY on certain aspects of shipping. FedEx and UPS on the other hand? They generate collectively over 180 billion in annual revenue. BOTH are on the fortune 500 list.

And how could we ever get all of these Amazon shipments without the government? Oh, wait, they don’t ship those either. Amazon sends shipments more accurately, with less waste, quicker, AND CHEAPER than USPS does, hands down, and it isn’t even a primary shipping company!

Or what about police? Security? Do rich people use police, or private security? Well of course they buy private security, but you and I can’t afford private security, so we rely on the police showing up after we’ve already been robbed, whereas the rich - in their gated communities - have mobile security keeping a constant watch for them.

But why is private security so expensive? Well, because the government regulates it so firmly. They want to be a monopoly on policing and security.

Same goes for education. Where do the rich send their kids? Public school? No? Private? Well of course they do!

Obama went to Punahou, a private college-prep school in Honolulu, and Biden too, went to a private Catholic high school - Archmere Academy. So why can’t we send our kids to these better schools? Oh that’s right, cost.

So why can’t Jeff Bezos just create Amazon Academics, and provide higher quality education at a lower cost than the governmental-run public schools? Well, because of government regulation, of course!

Imagine I was a millionaire and I wanted to invest in starting a business of educating K-12 students. Maybe I have a goal of setting down in a minority, impoverished area and providing high-quality education at a low price. How do I do this if the competition school that runs on stolen funding (taxes) doesn’t close down no matter how poorly they do?

In one of Chicago’s lowest-performing high schools for instance, the dropout rate reaches 36% (3% is the average across the rest of the state.) So what if I could create an educational program there with a dropout rate of say, 13%? TWICE as superior simply based around that single statistic.

Well it wouldn’t be possible because the government self-subsidizes without producing anything of value. I, as owner of a business, would need to produce value to consumers who want to pay for my services, but the government mandates your kids go to public school (especially if you can’t afford anything better), then sets all sorts of rules and regulations on me that itself doesn’t even have to follow, and can change whenever it wants!

Imagine I had to create 10 units of value in my school to produce the output for my goals. Imagine now that this other school produces 5 units of value. Nobody would send their kids to the 5 unit school, and it would go out of business - if this were the market we’re talking about.

But the state can just continue forcing you to use their school and take your money to pay for its failure, and I’m forced to charge you too much for you to send your kids to my school because of government restrictions and the fact that their school even exists in the first place.

I PROMISE YOU that if government education was weened out across the next 50-100 years and the private sector came in to fill in the gaps, education would improve dramatically and the cost would go down, not up.

Government is fundamentally always the problem because all the government is is a big gun everyone is arguing over (which is what politics is) who gets to wield.

My proposition is that there shouldn’t even BE an argument over who gets to wield the gun. The ONLY rational purpose of the gun is to stop people from murdering, raping, robbing, and defrauding, assaulting, etc. That’s it.

Just because I didn’t type out a 30 page dissertation does not mean my ideas are inchoate. You sound like quite a pompous and arrogant person.

I find that people like Crowder, Peterson, Rogan, and Shapiro have very valid views. I do not agree with everything they say/believe, but nobody should.

My question to you is why you believe you, “nearly fell down this pipeline”. What pipeline, exactly? If you can think for yourself than you should never feel threatened by ideas, no matter who they come from or what they affiliate with. How could this proposed pipeline have stopped you from realizing you are a gay woman? If you are a woman then you are a woman, that isn’t complicated stuff (though some people sure make it out to be.) And who cares if someone is gay? The notion of sexual orientation seems silly to me because nobody is sexually interested in everyone of a given sex, we’re all sexually interested in **features **some people may have, and I don’t care what features someone is interested in. It doesn’t really define a person.

To this day I still listen to what those people have to say sometimes. I throw out the things I disagree with and question things that seem shady until I can do my own investigating. Never have any of these people, “filled me with such hate and vitriol” that something or another occured.

I believe in equality under the law for everyone. I think all people should be treated fairly and with respect, BARRING their life choices (rapists and murderers I do not believe (for example) should be treated with the same level of respect as a good, innocent person.) I do not believe anyone is greater or lesser based on sex, sexual orientation, race, etc. I consider myself rational, logical, objective, and free-thinking, and more open minded than most people who think they’re open minded.

You can’t put some people into these buckets and just declare that they are bad people who will taint and tarnish others. You and I both have free will (in a manner of speaking, anyway) and at the end of the day it is up to us to sift through the information coming at us and weed out the bullshit from what is simply true.

But here is the problem… Many people feel angered, scared of, or even hurt by the truth. Nobody said that the truth was easy. Making up our own stories so that they protect our mentality and how we feel is oftentimes a lot easier than dealing with an existence that most likely contains no overarching god-being that frankly does not care what happens to us. Human existence isn’t fair, it isn’t just, it isn’t always good, and sometimes the bad guys win. Once you can accept that the truth can be very ugly but it still remains the truth and you can accept those truths, the better off you make yourself, and the stronger you become.

We’re here for a blip of time then we’re gone forever and none of us are ever coming back. Nothing has any objective meaning so we have to make meaning for ourselves. I choose to live a life filled with love and compassion, but coupled with the strength to say that if you attack me and those things/people of which I love, I will do everything in my power to snuff you out to protect those loves in my world.

But I digress, my interests here are why you believe you can so quickly correlate some of the people shown here as some kind of hate-filled monsters. I don’t see them that way - not a single one of them. I would take a step back and - in all honesty and with respect - ask you what it is within you that filles you with the vitriol to believe this in the first place, and why do you feel so threatened by ideas?

Take Peterson for example. I’ve listened to a lot of Peterson’s lectures and other discussions. Not once have I ever felt that Peterson’s ultimate points have been to harm anyone. I don’t agree with everything he says, I’ll again make that clear, but he has points that I would argue are quite valid and can make you expand your thinking. But listen to Peterson, not his “followers”. Don’t let them take him out of context.

That being said, here are a few more things about me: I don’t vote. I consider both democrats and republicans to be brainwashed. I find politics to be sinister at its core. I believe everyone should be treated well, barring they are good people who deserve it. I don’t want to hurt anyone, or take anything from anyone. I want everyone to be allowed to live the way they like so long as it isn’t harming others, and I’m a staunch atheist.

I very likely don’t even fit into a single basket you might often casually place people in. When I used to post on Reddit for instance, the leftists would call me a altright and the rightoids would say I was a libtard. THIS - if you ask me - is about the stage when you know your worldview is probably about as correct as it’s gonna ever be.

This is a good faith conversation, by the way. I am genuinely interested in how people think.

Removed by mod

Everyone is getting so close to the correct answer to the correct problem with all of this illegal immigration stuff. I’ll explain the problem and solution.

The problem - people say, is that people with different ideas from our own can come into a given government and vote to change the rules. The solution then is that illegal immigration is bad.

The true problem is that there is a given government where you can vote to control other people at all. Do away with that and you did away with the problem. Then anyone can live anywhere they like so long as they do so without violating the will of others (not murdering, stealing, raping, or defrauding.)

Governments are and have always been the actual problem. This isn’t complicated.

Look, you can live next door to me so long as you bought my neighbors house with their consent. If you try to attack me or my family in any way, I will defend myself. If you think my not believing in Allah is bad and you want to kill me, I will kill you in self defense. If you think it is bad but won’t attack me and my family, we can coexist.

The problem is that if you can come here and usurp an already evil and corrupt system (all governments are this) and use that system to create a law saying that I should be killed because I do not believe in Allah, thus sending government thugs to my home to carry out that deed, that is a massive problem and the culprit is not only you for being evil, but the government for existing in a state in which an evil person can contribute to an evil act of such magnitude, through the hand of the state.

This isn’t complicated.

The mere aspect of voting for a ruling class is sinister.

Ranting with you.

Where did I outline my own personal, subjective scale of what immoral acts were more or less heignous, exactly?

There is a right way to live and a wrong way to live. Murdering, stealing, raping and committing fraud is wrong. Everything else is some semblance of “right”. You and I might not agree on who you should be kind to and when, or who you should help and shouldn’t, or even how much an assailant should be punished, but that’s not the same thing as a fundamental understanding that theft is wrong.

Theft is always objectively wrong because you would never want to be robbed, ever. It is not logically possible for you to **WILL **to be robbed, because the second you hope someone will take something from you, the act of doing so no longer manifests as theft. If you **HAND **me $10, I did not steal it from you, but if you don’t WANT me to take that $10 from you and I do, that is theft.

This is higher level thinking (level 5), in psychology. Fundamentally, it is the concept of understanding that what’s ***subjectively ***right or wrong differs for different people, and in understanding that, we do not demand that you live the way I command or I live the way you command, instead, we both accept that you simply do not steal because IF either of us did not want to be assailed in that way, then we shouldn’t opt to wish it upon another.

Most people in the world exist at a lower level of thinking, usually around level 3. The first stages typically being pure selfishness, then an understanding that there are other people with wants and needs, then an awakened understanding that you can exert control over the wants and needs of others, and thinking that everyone is only self-interested and thus, you must be self-interested as well. This is why most third world countries exist in dictatorships, usually around the third or fourth level of thinking. The fourth level is when a general community all agrees on some set of rules. Think of a strictly religious state where the government created rules meant to prevent the bad, selfish behavior of people who only think at levels 2 and 3. This is level 4 thinking. Stealing is wrong and you won’t steal or else, and by the way, we get to decide what stealing is.

Level 5 starts to become more “enlightened” in a manner of speaking, where you begin understanding that your way of looking at the world isn’t the “only” way. Thinking continues evolving past this, mind you, and can still be dangerous at these upper levels, such as when you hit level 6, which is where wokeism/social justice tends to land. It’s the idea that since everyone has their own views, no views can be wrong, so for example, a woman could say that **men **are dangerous to woman, but because this level of thinking isn’t high enough yet to prevent conflict, will flat out refuse to say that illegal immigrants - who are often majority men - are dangerous to woman. If you point out the cognitive dissonance in that reasoning, it will usually lead directly to anger because it strikes a conflict within that individual’s ego that they cannot resolve. Usually they will just divert by making up some other nonsense claim that may not even be related to the original declarative.

But the highest tiers of thinking realize that while different subjects hold different values, that there is one fundamental cardinal attribute we all share: We do not want our wills violated. But conflict IS will violation. Maybe you and I both want the same thing but only one of us can have it. One of us has to get what they want and the other cannot. So the fundamental here is that the only “fair” way to discern conflicts of will is to do so logically. For example:

You already own that $10 and do not want me to take it so I should not take it.

Now if you take $10 from me and I take it back, you may not have wanted me to take it BUT logically, you originally violated my will to obtain that $10, so in already violating that logical enterprise of justice, I am entitled to right that wrong and recreate justice.

This is what self defense is, or when you imprison a murderer, rapist, robber, or fraudster.

Murder is wrong, KILLING, on its own, may not be. Understanding that if you try to kill my child and I try to stop you from doing so and in that attempt I kill you, I was just in killing you, even though your will was not aligned in that happening. But if your will is aligned in trying to kill my daughter, who did not want to be killed (a state set long before your desire to kill her), you are not just in committing the act.

This is actually fundamentally already how all societies on earth behave. In no culture ever has murder, rape, theft, or fraud been OK, but the “elite” (usually politicians) often still do these things - this is what we usually tie the word “corruption” to.

Corruption is a good word to use too, because it is the idea of “corrupting” the core principles of justice. You cannot murder. That is a core principle. If you find a loophole where you kill and are not punished, you are corrupting that system.

I hope some of this makes sense and is relative to your perspective of the conversation.

You understand first and foremost that you cannot steal that in which you already own, correct? Just like you cannot own that in which is stolen. Are we talking about semantics here, or ideas?

If your argument is that Walmart stole from you and thus, you are entitled to what they’ve stolen back, that would be true, so long as you could prove that this occured.

Can you prove without some kind of ethereal ideological viewpoint that this occurred? I could use mental gymnastics to argue that you’ve stolen from me too, so why don’t you go ahead and Venmo me $10,000?

I’m more than happy to reply to everything you’ve said here so we can have a discussion.

So you first made the claim that capitalism is a top-down tyrannical system. We need to define our terms here otherwise all we’re doing is arguing semantics.

I don’t know what you mean by capitalism, but what I mean is how it is typically defined by most major dictionaries. For example, Merriam-Webster defines capitalism as follows:

: an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market

So let’s break that down. Of course it’s a system, I don’t think we need to elaborate on that, but it also details the specific characteristics of what make it a system, including private or corporate ownership - which is a key. It specifies what kinds of goods, but “capital goods” isn’t well defined even by the dictionary. Merriam-Webster again for example defines capital (within this context) as accumulated goods devoted to the production of other goods, but it also defines it as a stock, or as the underlying value of accumulated goods. For the sake of my argument, I am going to just say that capital means, “stuff”. It’s an X variable. I can place anything I want into it.

And I don’t think we need to define a good because a good in this context is just something you can trade that isn’t a service. Mowing your lawn is a service, selling you a lawn mower is a situation where the lawn mower itself is a “good”.

So by capital goods I just mean any goods or services, which can be literally anything. I can sell you an idea, I can sell you a poem I’ve saved to a computer file, I can sell you the service of mowing your lawn for you, I can sell you a lawn mower, I could mow your lawn for the trade where you shovel my driveway, etc.

So then capitalism is defined as a system characterized by private or corporate ownership of goods and services (X variable). But this is a silly definition because there is no other form of ownership other than private ownership. So let’s define what ownership is. If we don’t understand what ownership is, we cannot continue our conversation.

Ownership can only be one thing. It is a state of human will in which a person desires exclusive authority over something but did not engage in any actions of which violates the will of another as it pertained to that something within a logical order of operations. It is logically impossible to own that in which you’ve stolen and it is also just as impossible to steal something you already own.

You can explain ownership like this: If you are walking through the woods and find a diamond on the ground that nobody in the world even knows exists and you suddenly manifest a desire to have exclusive authority over that diamond, you own it. It is that simple. This is because logically you fulfill both of the two requirements that do not create a logical contradiction. You do not own the ugly looking rock lying next to it because you simply do not care what happens to that, just like you do not own the dirt, the sticks, or the leaves you’ve been walking past that you care nothing about. If someone else came by later and took that ugly rock, you wouldn’t bat an eyelash.

Now since you own that diamond, if I come along later and see you with it and suddenly I also covet exclusive authority over it, I have fulfilled one logical requirement of ownership, but not both. In order for me to hold exclusive authority over that diamond which you already own, I would need to engage in some form of action of which violates your will as it pertains to your property. I.E: I would have to rob you - and if I do, I may possess exclusive authority over that diamond, but I do not own it because I stole it and I cannot own that in which I’ve stolen.

If you can own something you stole then theft and ownership are meaningless as ideas and become synonyms for one another, and any non-logical definition of ownership is wholly arbitrary, which means it has no cardinal essence. Aristotle coined the idea of every idea possessing an “essence”, which isn’t some spiritual concept but one explained by every idea needs fundamental attributes of which manifest that idea as independent of other ideas.

Annnnyway, so now we understand ownership. That said as we understand the underlying principles of what ownership has to be to not “not be”, we realize that the idea of a public, private, or “corporate” ownership is nonsense. Public property for example is nonsense. The notion of public property is simply ruling class propaganda. If I trade someone my labor for money then I take that money and buy a lawn mower, it is my lawn mower. If we are neighbors and you come to my house asking if I would like to go 50/50 on a lawn mower that we both agree to work together to set boundaries for use and maintenance and the like, that isn’t “public property”, it’s private property. It just means you and I shared - consensually - exclusive authority over that lawn mower apart from anyone else.

Now if I come to you and demand you give me $500 to buy a lawn mower telling you it will be our public property even though you didn’t consent, that isn’t public property, it’s just me stealing $500 from you to buy something you didn’t ask for and letting you have some level of (maybe) authority over it, maybe. If I feel like it. “Public property” is just a political way of describing property obtained through stolen means.

The same goes for corporate property. Unless there is a hierarchy of consent involved where there was an agreement between all parties that they all owned something, then there’s no such thing, and in such a case that would still just be private property, or better yet, just remove the middle man there because there’s only one form of property, which is just, “property”.

So now we can actually define capitalism.

Capitalism then is a system characterized by ownership of goods and services. Everything else past that is just reiteration of the definition. Why continue on by noting concepts of pricing and distribution? If I have ownership, I have exclusive authority. With that authority I can choose to make trades with others. These trades can be investments, for favors, for other goods and services, as gifts, or I can even destroy that property.

“Free market” at the end there is also another key facet of capitalism, and in order to have a free market you must be allowed to hold exclusive authority over your property. This means if you and I want to trade a lawn mower between the two of us and Joe from down the street shows up and uses coercion against us to stop us, we do not truly hold exclusive authority over our own property. Joe there is using violence to exhibit control over our property much like the state would in the instance where they impose certain regulations and laws.

At the end of the day I simply thus define capitalism as a state in which people own their property. I would argue that most of the time anti-capitalists are defining capitalism in a sense of say, crony capitalism, which I, as a self-proclaimed capitalist, would outright deny is capitalism at all. Crony capitalism is generally defined as a system where you can give money to people who can make victimless laws, and if you are in a system of victimless laws that restrict you from holding exclusive authority over your property, you do not exist within the confines of a free market, a requirement for the manifestation of the idea of capitalism itself.

Crony capitalism as an idea is extremely silly. That’s like if I took an idea like driving a car and said, driving is bad, but what I really mean is, crony driving is bad, with crony meaning others can pay people to drive me off the road against my will, rendering driving dangerous. Well sure, but that isn’t JUST driving. DRIVING isn’t bad. The aspect that there’s corruption leading to people trying to harm others who drive is bad. The “crony” is bad, not the capitalism.

Now granted, you can define capitalism any way you like. Words are simply methods of which we communicate. A word doesn’t really mean anything if we don’t want it to. I hope you understand that too. If you want to define capitalism in a different way that’s fine, but then you’re no longer talking about the system I’m talking about.

I have never met a self-proclaimed capitalist by the way who was in favor of any semblance of crony capitalism. All of the capitalists I know are in favor of the free market, where you and everyone else simply holds exclusive authority over your property.

Oh for sure. When I say I am anti-government I’m referring to current-age governments. The only just government would be one where violence is only utilized to protect people from things like murder, rape, theft, and fraud. Government wouldn’t take any taxes at all, as all funding would be consensual. Government would fundamentally function as any other business and would need to provide quality enough goods and services to warrant people paying them for them.

At this state, “government” would be kind of a silly idea. It would be like if in this neighborhood you paid Amazon for Amazon Protective Services at $19.99 a month and over there, Microsoft Safeguard, for $22.99/month.

And you would send your kids to a “private” school (the notion of public property is a misnomer), and more or less nothing would be RUN by a single overarching government. There would still be costs and if you refused to partake you wouldn’t receive those services.

Take roads, for example. In the future one option would be for homeowner groups to band together and buy up stretches of roads. Then those groups could further get together and make large-scale arrangements. Say 100 different such groups all created a Road of Virginia Association where 90% of the roads in the state of Virginia are owned by that organization. Now that group sets their own rules and governances. Maybe what they do is say, to drive on our roads you have to pass tollways where your car is scanned and you pay online per scan - maybe something as trivial as like, $0.10 a toll or something. Then other groups could follow suit.

If some billionaire bought up a stretch of road and said you have to pay me $1,000 a month to drive on it, nobody is going to drive on it, or other people could get together and just build a parallel road and drive on that, or more people/businesses will just blacklist that asshole from things (because now we have TRUE freedom of association), or maybe more people utilize drones so roads become more and more unneccesary.

There’s an infinite number of potential solutions but a tyrannical top-down government was never a good one. The answer across time has always been less government. We’re moving in that direction, for the most part it seems anyway. There are fewer dictatorships today than ever before. Fewer atrocities committed to a nation’s own peoples than in past times. Fewer entire nations wiped clean from the planet than ever before. More people climbing out of poverty than any time prior.

I’m not stupid. I don’t anticipate any semblance of utopia. Life is messy, and it always will be.

Life is messy and would always continue to be so. If someone breaks into your home you have a lot of choices to make and suddenly, and you might not have enough time to make them. If the person who breaks in has a gun and intent to murder you and your family, you could be the only thing that could stop that, so do you try to take them out in a non-lethal manner, potentially understanding that if they kill you your whole family is going to die next? If you’re armed, do you hesitate and ask questions? Are you confident enough that this person isn’t a legal threat to you and your family? How can you know, after all? And if you do hesitate, for how long? What do you do and say, exactly? Remember, you might only have 3 seconds left before you’re murdered and then your entire family is subsequently murdered, so take all the time you need.

Here’s the thing though. You broke into my home and I don’t know you. You broke into my home. All I know about you thus far is that you - for one reason or another - are willing to disregard a very pivotal aspect of the overarching trusting society. This is my castle in my own kingdom and I the ruler of that kingdom. It is my responsibility to first and foremost, protect those under my care. I MUST protect my family first and you, a distant second. I don’t necessarily have time to ask questions, or try alternative methods of detainment that may not work. I own firearms and have gone shooting many times. There is a reason why both military and police are trained to shoot in the torso - leg/arm shots are to difficult even on a non-moving target, and even if you DO succeed with such a shot, it guarantees nothing. I could shoot an assailant in the leg and they could still have full mobility in that leg, or they now shoot me with the gun they were holding, then move on to murder 4 other people, 3 being children.

The notion that you bring up shooting to disable tells me you don’t own a firearm and have possibly never even fired one. This is a children’s fairytale. With lives on the line with someone who broke into your home you can’t rely on a sentiment so childish. Tasers don’t even work on everyone, nor does pepper spray. People have been murdered after being tased. Here is a excerpt from the New Haven Register:

Several high-profile cases involve violent suspects or murderers who were completely unaffected by police Tasers. According to data and law enforcement field reviews, Tasers fail to incapacitate a target roughly 40% of the time.

With respect, homosapien, you seem super naive to the world. How old are you and where are you from? I ask that ironically understanding you are not likely to tell the truth to those questions.

I’ve actually fought my entire life against the “game” of business. I don’t like the lingo, I don’t like the corporate nonsense, and I don’t like how business in general is conducted. I mostly work by myself. I’ve simply learned some skills that let me produce value for businesses so they want to give me a paycheck, but even then it’s always an ongoing challenge because anyone can be removed from a role at any time and for any reason.

Completely agree. A cop should not instantly shoot. I never said they should anywhere in any one of my posts.

Rehabilitation of rapists prevents 35% of reoccurring events. Incarceration/death prevents 100%.

Ah, but I never said I was a commie. Communists anarchists are nonsensical. An anarchist is to monarchy as an atheist is to theism. It simply means no rulers. I believe the best state to exist in would be one without rulers. Communism is a nonsensical state as the abolition of the state and of money is a nonsense proposition.

I would imagine it would take 50-100 years to make huge governmental reduction changes.