Re: more electoral defeats for the feudalists


Peter Bjørn Perlsø wrote:
ruetheday@xxxxxxxxxx <ruetheday@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Not really. I'm not sure how anyone could seriously suggest that
government IS society as opposed to an AGENT of society. Clearly there
are members of society who are not members of the government, so the
two cannot be equivalent.

Which is why it is silly to allude that there is anything but the
faintest of connections between the two.

That doesn't follow. That they are not the equivalent of one another,
but that one is the agent of the other, does not imply "the faintest of
connections".



"Government is a necessary institution, the means to make the social
system of cooperation work smoothly without being disturbed by violent
acts on the part of gangsters whether of domestic or of foreign origin.
Government is not, as some people like to say, a necessary evil; it is
not an evil, but a means, the only means available to make peaceful
human coexistence possible."
--Ludwig von Mises

That must been in the early years of Mises. :=)

It's from Liberty and Property, 1958. Von Mises was never an
anarcho-capitalist, he always vigorously asserted the absolute need for
government. In today's nomenclature, he was a minarchist. Hayek
actually went quite a bit further than that in laying out the
legitimate functions of the state. Anarcho-capitalism didn't really
come onto the scene until the early 1970's with Rothbard's publication
of For A New Liberty and David Friedman's, The Machinery of Freedom.
It largely hit a dead end at that point, for reasons elaborated in
Nozick's ASU.

From the standpoint that coercian is principally bad, it follows that
government is also bad.

Nonsense. Enforcing property rights and contracts requires coercion,
regardless of who's doing it - the modern state, the night watchman
state, or the private mutual protection agency.

.

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