blatham wrote:We are the same creatures, biologically, that came down out of the steppes hacking for fun, or that pulled Irishmen apart with horses (hi george) to the cheers of the local townsfolk. All that keeps us as safe as we are are these fragile institutions of government. It wasn't Dow.
Point 1) Who told the English soldiers to pull those Irishmen apart? Were English kings, counts, mayors or other state institutions involved in any way?
Point 2) The question is, how much government? Medieval Iceland maintained a crime rate comparable to modern America's with a government consisting of just one part-time employee, the lawspeaker. (An online source on this topic is available
here. A book-sized reference is
Jesse L. Byock: Viking Age Iceland)
Government in the 19th century American West was somewhat larger than medieval Iceland's, but still much smaller than it is today. And contrary to Hollywood legends, the crime rate in the Wild West was no higher than it was in the eastern states of America at the same time. A good summary is Anderson and Hill:
The not so Wild Wild West (PDF here). It has the disadvantage of having been published in the
Journal of Libertarian Studies, so was probably peer-reviewed for ideological as much as factual correctness. But I have checked the cited facts against peer-reviewed scholarly publications by historians, notably Clyde A. Miller:
The Oxford History of the American West. The facts turn out to be consistent between the sources, though the interpretations turn out not to be.
The point I'm trying to make with these examples is that the good things we can expect from government can be gotten from governments much smaller than ours. And the bad things (changing regimes around the world, highjacking school systems for the teachers unions, selling out national forests to the lumber industry, selling out the airwaves to friendly broadcasters) are made much worse because governments are as big as they currently are. That's why I don't want to abolish governments alltogether, but want them much smaller and weaker than they currently are.
