Article by Ben Doolin on Nov. 12, 2015
(just eliminate the monopoly)
I can often see the panic in the responses I get from people that hear me suggest that The State should not exist.
No doubt they have visions of Mad Max (one of The State’s best propaganda pieces ever)… with all of their property taken and their family members raped and / or killed.
The reality is that ‘private crime’ represents only a few percentage points of the total crime, The State responsible for almost all of it. Additionally, a free society would ‘correctly align incentives’ so violating person or property would be VERY expensive and ‘cooperating’ (even with that jerk you’d rather punch in the face) would be VERY profitable.
Those points though, are almost never heard, as the intense cognitive dissonance felt by individuals that hear ‘The State should end’, prevents them from considering anything supporting that position… as it’s rejected before considered.
Here’s the thing, if you want ‘your system’, you can have it. The only thing that you need to do, is quit using violence to impose it on others. Seems pretty reasonable from that perspective… no? That is not to suggest that you would not be able to use force to protect person and property, in fact, a free society exists TO protect person and property, something that is not done under Statism (The State can take any of your property and do anything to you without consequence or limit).
A free society… by definition would not impose anything on anyone. It would allow anyone to interact with anyone else with the simple caveat that if you violate person or property, you will be held accountable.
So, you will be free to form any form of social order or keep what is in place today… by simply allowing people to ‘opt out’.
For anyone wandering down that ‘thought path’, you might realize that if everyone could opt out, there would be two groups, those that are ‘net takers’ and those that are ‘net contributors’. Few ‘net contributors’ would stay in that system, for being a bad ‘value’ (if you could choose to keep the 50% of your income that The State takes… would you?) Similarly, ‘net takers’ would want to stay, for ‘getting free stuff’. This would of course, speed up the collapse (which is already under way) as all the ‘takers’ would have no one left to pillage. That result though, is unavoidable, even if we change nothing, because eventually… socialism runs out of other people’s money.
Still, that thought exercise is valuable in bringing a person to the conclusion that we live in a broken (evil) system that has already started to crumble and that given the choice, most would leave as even the takers would leave… when all the contributors are gone. After all, who would subject themselves to the evil of The State… if they didn’t even get free stuff?
So, don’t freak out. If you like ‘your system’, you can keep it. When you realize your system isn’t so great… you’ll be able to switch to freedom.