[tomdemaine]

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Because ownership confers legitimacy. Not only that but it is a democracy of votes. You (and everyone else) get to vote for every single product and service every minute of every day through your spending and donating habits.

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Right, and for the same reason that unbridled democracy sucks, unbridled capitalism sucks.

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But if you can impose your preferences though violence why can't I? Why can't anyone? The fact is that under the current system they can. Whoever wrests control of the gun dictates the terms. That's how you get things like the War on Drugs. All logic and evidence points to the fact that it's a colossal waste of time money and human life and yet a certain group of people have control of the gun of the state and are using it to impose their personal preferences onto everyone else. The 0.01% risk that the Grand Canyon will turn into a landfill or that Bill Gates will kill all the hobos isn't worth the 100% chance that people are unnecessarily locked up under horrific conditions every day for non violent victimless "crimes".


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Right, we should convince people (by any means necessary) that we must change our form of government. I thnk we are in agreement on that. We should then establish a form of government with whatever safegaurds we find reasonable.

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Safeguards don't work. There has never been a time when they have worked it is not logically possible for them to work. Any safeguard you try to implement will be twisted distorted or merely ignored within the first generation or usually much much quicker. Consider the US, the freest country in the world with a constitution with built in safeguards separation of powers and all that business and look what it's turned into. The only "safeguards" that work are those that are naturally built in and unchangeable. Not a piece of paper that says don't do X but a situation where doing X is massively -EV. A free market creates this situation in a way that a government system never could.

The state is a big gun telling people what to do. The fallacy is that if we just point the gun at the right people and tell them to do the right things everything will be ok but that's just not possible. Power always corrupts, if we learn one thing from history it has to be that. The gun can never be virtuous as it corrupts and makes evil everyone who touches it. Not only that but it attracts the very people that you want to protect against.