Settling the anarchist/minarchist debate

Here you go maybe you can rebut Thomas Pain's excellent treatise on why everything attributed to government is a lie. Oh and in the end he does leave the door open for a little government however it is in great contrast to his previous arguments in the treatise and I suspect it was to stave off his fellow founders from endless argument and perhaps ostracism.

However if he could see the results today of leaving a litle government I am sure he would be horrified.

http://mises.org/story/2897

I think that anarchism should be treated as more of a last resort - something to be tried after all other efforts have failed. I tend to find with my (few) anarchist friends, that when I describe my ideals they agree that probably there would not be much need for an anarchist society if these things were followed. Thus my opinion is let's exhaust these other options, demonstrate that they do not work, before heading into their panacea.

Whenever I read the anarchist essays that appear fairly frequently at places like lewrockwell.com, I feel that what is left out of the arguments is new understandings of how a state functions. Here are a few examples.

Increasing the district size for federal representatives has been a disaster. It has lead to an elected body that does not listen to the constituents. When the constitution was ratified, there were only about 33,000 people per representative. Today, that has grown to an average of nearly 700,000, with very wide variances. These huge bodies of people are far from homogeneous, so the people most likely elected are the most charismatic with the best financial support. What we really have is a plutocracy. Although the creators of the constitution intended to limit the size of the House, they failed in that endeavor and it has ended up costing us dearly. The way to fix this is to amend the constitution to require the number of house districts in a state to be equal to the states' population divided by 30,000, rounded down, with the remainder added equally to each district.

A second failure is the change from state appointed senators to publicly elected senators. This has removed the 'republic' aspect of our federal government as no element is innately concerned with the rights of the states, thus those rights have slowly been all but eliminated. The way to fix this is to amend the constitution to again require senators to be appointed by the states' legislators, however, instead of having set 'terms', the senators will be appointed indefinitely until their successor is sworn in. This actually works to fight on a few fronts: the loyalty of the senator is to the state, which protects the republic, the requirement that the senator serves until the successor is sworn in makes certain that the state has proper representation in the senate (the purported purpose of the 17th in the first place), and in times of crisis, when stupid things are happening fast in D.C., a state can send a replacement on a plane and end the madness in only a few hours.

The federal government should not be allowed to control the currency or to fund and raise any armies of any sort. It is these two powers that have lead to the majority of our losses in liberty.

The federal government should not be allowed to arrest or otherwise charge people who are not law enforcement officers or public employees, and then only when those arrested are found breaking local laws. This is to protect the republic by allowing the states to pass laws as they see fit, while still offering protections from overly corrupt local governments.

Jurors should have the right to be informed, individually, by the judges presiding over the cases they are standing, that they have the right to vote not guilty based purely on disagreement with the law itself.

No government, at any level, should have the right of eminent domain and the federal government should not be allowed to own land.

Taxes should only be collected through a consumption tax equally applied to all consumer transactions. This voluntary tax protects businesses and industries from manipulation through the tax code, does not tax savings or inheritance, and is voluntary, so in times of extreme abuses of power the citizens can abstain from paying taxes.

So I guess my argument here isn't really all that cohesive, but what I'm trying to get at is that if you remove the specific issues that anarchists have with government, then it is possible to demonstrate that if a federal government exists only as a baseline guarantee of rights, then it serves a useful purpose.

thanks guys! I will be posting this on other forums too, but for now I thought I'd try the DP.

For discussion.

My brain was on DHCP protocols when I stumbled onto this post, so I need a few minutes to shift gears before I can say anything remotely intelligent about it.

I'd like to talk about a melding of BMore and Octo's ideas.

Blah blah.. anyways, a bump for now..

:)

good luck.