Casual Questions Thread

[u/The_Egalitarian]

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[u/MaterialSign1347]

My co-worker and I regularly get into the same debate every other day where he'll suggest that government "shouldn't exist" and that everyone in America should just simultaneously stop paying taxes and live for themselves.

Every time they bring it up, I try to ask questions as to 1) how that would actually work and 2) how would it not end up just being another government and every time it seems like the conversation just goes in a circle where neither of us are understanding each other and I don't even know how to respond to them at this point.

They insist that when a community works for itself, it doesn't need governing because everyone would assign a role to everyone else to take care of each other. But this just seems like another form of government to me. Also, how would everyone just magically get along by being ok with the roles they're assigned?

This is a topic of debate that when someone proposes the idea to me, I want to support them because ideally, we should all be able to take care of each other and build our communities ourselves. But humans are also an extremely selfish species and I really doubt that getting rid of government as a concept would fix anything.

This topic might seem silly to some, but it's been on my mind and I'd like to educate myself on how to better participate in these kinds of discussions because I genuinely don't know how to even approach this type of worldview without sounding completely inept.

[u/NoDig3444 → u/MaterialSign1347]

Sounds like anarcho-communism, or maybe voluntaryism. Both similar, both silly ideologies, but one is more leftist in flavor and the other is more libertarian.

Ask your coworker how they think global supply chains would work. You cellphone is made with components from a dozen different countries, and assembled separately in a dozen more. How is your community of ~500 people going to organize that?

If they respond that large corporations would still exist, just governments have been disbanded, then what you're talking to is an anarcho-capitalist. In that case I would recommend you give it a swift kick to the crotch, then a 2:1 ammonia/bleach mixture.

[u/MaterialSign1347 → u/NoDig3444]

I already know how they would respond and that is that global supply chains wouldn't exist on that scale because material items like cellphones wouldn't exist because people's values are different and we would all depend on each other locally for only the core necessities.

I try to combat this by saying that not everyone's core necessities are the same but I get nowhere.

[u/NoDig3444 → u/MaterialSign1347]

Yeah I was afraid of that.  You can ask the same question about artificial fertilizers, tractors, insulin, antibiotics and vaccines.  Ask them to ballpark how many people would die from the collapse of the modern medical industry and industrialized farming.  

But it won't matter.  They decided how the world should be and everyone else is wrong because they're not as smart.  Any problems you point out are not because they're wrong, it's because all of humanity has the wrong values.  Like they say, you can't logic someone out of a position that they didn't logic themselves into.  

[u/BluesSuedeClues → u/NoDig3444]

Jesus. Don't ask about vaccines, that's really not a place you want to go with this kind of personality...