[Cathryn Crawford]

Brad Edmonds writes from Alabama.

[spoonfork2000]

Are you advocateing anarchy?

[Cathryn Crawford]

Ping...

[MegaSilver]

Hmm...

[MrFreedom]

Welcome to America

[You Dirty Rats]

"Market Governments".

Sounds like Chicago in the Twenties. A real utopia - not!

I hope the steel bars on whatever lunatic asylum this guy is writing from are good and strong. Anarchy as a series argument? C'mon.

[BlueLancer]

LEW ROCKWELL ALERT!!!
The Lunatics On-Line Broadcasting Network

[Anitius Severinus Boethius]

This assumes, like Communism, that people are basically good. Communism assumes that everybody will work hard to better society as a whole. This "idea" assumes that every one will behave themselves if there are no rules.

Balderdash on both ideas. Government is not what he is offended by, it's society. The very idea that we as humans need or desire to work with others is anathema to his proposal. He is the anti-Donne, where all men are islands and bridges are shackels.

[RightWhale]

in six months you’ll have a new library, a mountain of empirical evidence to refer to, and a conviction that forcible government must be abolished.

Might be just a teeny philosophical problem arriving at a general rule from a mountain of evidence.

[Cicero]

The only thing worse than government is no government. Then you are in the state of nature, where, as Thomas Hobbes said in Leviathan (or words to this effect), "Life is poor, nasty, brutal, and short."

[GRANGER]

Yeah real cool. Until a bunch of guys from across the river decide they want to come and take my stuff because it would be too much work to make their own stuff.

[William McKinley]

Actually, I couldn't resist.

"the US Constitution is an irrelevant, ineffective mistake" and "no, we shouldn’t be bombing villages in Iraq and Afghanistan." Readers sometimes accuse me of being a communist of one sort or another when I say something contrary to their Republican Party or neo-conservative assumptions.

While I agree with him that disagreeing with the statement "the US Constitution is an irrelevant, ineffective mistake" is a Republican position, and while it is probably true that neo-conservatives also would disagree with him on it, I don't think that disagreeing with that asinine comment by him makes one a Republican nor a neoconservative.

What a maroon.

[squidly]

Why link this utopian bleating?

[Voltage]

I do not see how we could safely exist in a dangerous world without a military, paid for by our taxes. I doubt that the military would be maintained by voluntary contributions.

[Jokelahoma]

The real opposite of communism is anarcho-capitalism, under which there is no forcible government, and no adult is ever forced to do anything he doesn’t agree to. This extends even to criminal justice.

So anarchy is the answer, eh? I've always wondered... if, in an anarchy, a person were to decide to burn down every single business in competition with his own, should that person be punished? And if so, how? For one, they've broken no laws, since we wouldn't have "forcible government". Second, all that person was doing was what they wanted, or more accurately, they don't have to do anything they DON'T want, and this person didn't want to compete with others, so they eliminated the competition. And if they were to be punished, who would punish them? No one has any authority over anyone else, right? So who can do the punishing?

What say we get Bradley here and a few of his friends, and let them establish their own little anarchy on a few acres somewhere. It would be interesting to see how long it would take before they had SOME form of "forcible government", SOMEone imposing their will on others to keep things flowing.

Brad Edmonds may not be a naive little college boy, deep in the midst of the "I know all the answers" phase of adolescence, but he sure writes like it.

[Ohioan]

Republican representative democracy is not the opposite of communism. Under our system of government in the US, everyone is encouraged to vote for what he wants. Then, government aims its guns at the minority who didn’t agree with the majority, and forces the minority to pay money (or do more) to support the outcome they didn’t want. ......Even in our early days, when senators to the US Congress were not popularly elected, but were appointed by state legislatures (therefore, ostensibly, appointed by the best and brightest), our form of government was just a dressed-up version of mob rule.

This is simply not true. The Constitution does not provide for mob rule, but only a limited exercise of Government for the "Common defence and general welfare," that is, giving words their ordinary meaning, Government for the whole people, not for the views or interests of factions. What the writer suggests is directly contrary to the intentions of the Founders. It might help if he had ever read any of the Federalist Papers--such as #10, where Madison specifically addresses the prevention of the very evil that the writer claims is possible under the Constitution.

The fault is not in our system, but in the usurpation of power by politicians, which a dumbed down electorate fails to really understand. But writers such as this only compound the public misunderstanding.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

[PISANO]

Lost me at "Minorities being persecuted". Minorities and minority OPINION run this damn country. For a good example LOOK at the US Senate or the Michigan Law school.

How about those Navtivity scenes?

Heard GOD mentioned in school lately?

[x]

Don't be taken in by these guys. "Anarcho-capitalism" would be a real mess. At a minimum one needs a tribunal to ajudicate disputes. If one is free to accept or reject the judgement the result would eventually be recourse to force on a large scale. When we look at societies given wholly over to private protection agencies in action, the picture isn't pretty. Here is a brief critique of anarcho-capitalism that I googled. I can't vouch for the opinions expressed on the rest of the site, but it indicates some of the problems.

[Blood of Tyrants]

Unfortunately anarchy leads to tiny, fractured communities who are seperately easily conquered and enslaved by larger, more organized city-states or countries.

His is just as unrealistic and unworkable as the pure communist utopia.

[Dr. Frank fan]

Well I'm convinced. Ok that's it everyone, government is hereby abolished. *waves hands* Hmm that didn't work. How to enforce this newfangled government-is-abolished policy of mine?

[Steel Wolf]

The authors misconception here is that since he doesn't like the current rules, he thinks getting rid of government is the solution.

Guess what, Sparky? If you get rid of the government, you're not getting rid of rules, you just reseting them to the factory defaults. Those rules are much more streamlined, but the learning curve is pretty steep.

(HELPFUL HINT: In the event of imminent anarchy, ensure that you start off heavily armed. Anarchy is no fun when you're defenseless.)