It should be clear to anyone who has given careful thought to the notion of "government", that it is not the correct solution to the issue and challenges of general governance. This is most especially true of the governmental architectures of the so-called "nation states" of what we may call the relatively modern era of, say, the past 300 or so years. By their very architectures, "governments" thwart the natural propensities of men in ways the outcomes of which have shown to be detrimental to humanity as a whole. Perhaps the greatest ways in which such thwarting has damaged the fabric of human civilization lies in the invalid prohibitions on behavior that are consensual, and therefore not criminal.
Take dueling, for example. One's initial response to the notion tends to be that of revulsion and a feeling that we speak of a self-evident absurdity. Even if we were all to agree that it is in fact so, that we agree on the matter, it does not follow that we are within our rights to prohibit such activities so long as the participants engage in it with informed consent, and bring no others to harm in the process. This may be difficult for many to accept, and yet it is clearly true once one gets past the initial, conditioned response that was spoon fed them by the culture in which they came up.
We humans have an overwhelming propensity for falsely criminalizing non-criminal behavior that we find objectionable. Some might chafe at homosexuality and wish it criminalized, which once it was and remains so in many jurisdictions around the world. Others support the false criminalization of illicit drug possession, use, manufacture, and distribution. The list of criminalized non-crimes is rather long, the prohibitions of which have served no demonstrable good, but have in fact rather damaged the social fabric.
Bear in mind also that just because we acknowledge the validity of public governance (v. "private"), it does not follow that we condone the notion of "government". The general belief of many self-professed lovers of liberty is that anything non-private is "statist", the single gravest insult such people can hurl at another human being, in their eyes. This amounts to presenting a false dichotomy that hog-ties the mind, thereby eliminating avenues of alternate solutions. There are few hazards so grave as cutting off valid solution spaces, especially for some of the more serious problems, yet this is precisely what many self-described "anarchists", "voluntarists", and "agorists" do when they rail and rave at anyone who fails to toe their line of across-the-board privatization of the entirety of human existence.
What such people have failed to properly dope out is that the essential problem is not that of the evils of public governance, but rather the evil that is the very concept of government. Governance is an activity, whereas conceptually speaking government is a thing, an object unto itself with an existence separate and independent from humanity itself. The idea of government may not have originated with the intention of becoming this monobloc object in the minds of people, but it has largely become precisely that. This is how many people view "government", along with the attendant and often tacit assumptions of its vast inherent powers and authority, not so much to govern, but to rule. Consider the old saw, "you can't fight city hall", as just one example of how the notion of objectively real government has distorted human perception so wildly out of sound shape that we now as matters of average behavior tend to obey with great and timid compliance any any all edicts issued therefrom, regardless of how wildly idiotic, dangerous, and criminally violative of our rights as Freemen.
As I have written elsewhere, remove all people from the earth, and with them "government" vanishes without a trace. Government is the root of the problem, along with the darker side of human nature, regardless whether public or private. Private government, in fact, poses at least an equal threat to liberty, and make no mistake about it, whatever you call it, when people become unaccountable for their actions as agents of "government", a people are already well on their ways to being lost.
Therefore, it is imperative that human beings utterly reject the concept of the object: government. Rather, they must embrace the notion of governance which, properly defined and administered, can but only produce far improved results where liberty is preserved and tyranny stamped out with brutal and cold indifference. When we see people we now view as Merecogs in the machinery of "government", we tend to see them as unassailable because we tend to see "government" in the same way. They become sacrosanct by extension and association, and why? Because "government" says so. A prime example of this is the fact that in most US jurisdictions, if you so much as place a friendly hand on the shoulder of a police officer, he is falsely authorized to arrest you and have you charged with a felony. It is absurd, and yet it is a reality as common as dirt.
In this way have we built our own prisons of thought and perception with indomitable walls that cannot be gotten over, under, around, through, or be sapped.
Also be clear on the fact that in a truly free land, governance is the first responsibility of the individual, the duty which he discharges primarily by governing himself in accord with the principles of proper human relations. This is key, because the purpose of having agents of public governance is mainly to deal with those cases where self-governance has failed to meet the standard. Murders, robberies, rapes, beatings, and other real and actual crimes are the purview of governing authority, and not the valid praxeological prerogatives of Freemen. Without the proper comportment of what I will conversationally term the "vast majority" of a people, governing agents become necessarily either overwhelmed wherein they quit their now-precarious positions, or they turn to responses that seem uncomfortably close to those of tyrants. Even this latter may be valid when grave circumstance leaves no choice in what we may call an existential crisis, but such powers may validly hold only for the shortest of periods until such time as people recover proper possession of themselves and return to the ways of proper behavior in the company of others. History shows, as we are living through this very circumstance as of this writing, that once such emergency powers have been assumed, those who have taken those reins are often loathe to relinquish them. But this is a problem more of human nature than of the architecture and implementation of proper governance in a free land.
The moment we strip away the false facade of "government", exposing it as nothing more than a collection of fellow human beings with no greater authority to act than your own, the pictures in our minds suddenly, radically, and somewhat indelicately change. When you see the police officer in this way, he no longer stands as an irresistible monument of state-sponsored force against those over whom he lords. Rather, he is at best a public servant beholden to serve you in all the theoretically proper ways, and at worst a murdering coward and felon. This alteration of one's perrceptions, of course, does nothing to alter the behavior of cops. Resist their predations and other felonies against you, and you stand to be violated in ways up to an including being murdered outright. But this change in perception, while impotent to alter third-party behavior overnight, at least leads to the possibility of better times to come,. If a critical mass of public awareness is reached, hand in hand with the necessary attitudinal changes by those same people such that public tolerance of tyranny wanes to a point where people become willing to put their lives, their honors, and their fortunes to risk for the sake of their own liberty, as well as that of all those for whom they hold love and affection, a deep transformational improvement cannot be far off.
With the right change in the perceptions of enough people, the tyrant and his agents are backed into a corner wherein the choice is foisted upon them: cease all malversation, or pay with your lives. This is a reasonable path to change, and I daresay it is the only one precisely because so many people in positions of power tend to wander from the path of reason such that no message other than that of the threat of imminent personal destruction gets through to them. Their positions lead them to behave as petulant, spoiled, well-armed children prone to pitching tantrums that know few limits when the proles fail to toe their lines.
Privatizing government does nothing to ameliorate this situation precisely because the minds of the governed remain saddled with the same baggage with respect to the ways in which government is perceived, and therefore regarded. Furthermore, privatization invariably leads to diverse definitions of "proper governance", with nothing in principle to assure that any given jurisdiction will indeed govern properly with respect to the principles of proper human relations, which is what governance is supposed to be all about. Furthermore, there is nothing in principle to stop such a private jurisdiction from running off the rails, especially when they have at their disposal a body of armed, able, and willing enforcers, a commodity syndicate all too easily obtained and bent to one's will, especially when imbued with the imprimatur of "authority", whether valid or false. In most cases, as may be readily seen, it is the latter.
The advantage of public governance is that in the minds of people there tends to be the trend toward seeing the propriety and necessity of a uniformly architected code of guidance and control (when needed) that is to be uniformly administered such that justice is fair and equitable across all social lines, regardless of status, purport to authority, or any other phony baloney exception or claim to immunity from being held accountable.
You might now wish to point out that this is what we currently have as you read these words, and I would be forced to agree. You might then point out that despite this standard, we are awash in corruption, political falderal, deceit, lies, injustice, and outright tyranny. Once again, I would be obliged to acknowledge the truth of the fact. And finally, you might then ask, "if this be the case, then your theory of the benefit of public governance is disproved", to which I would have to respond by saying "not so fast!"
The problem is not public governance per sé, but rather the fact that we the people fail to hold accountable those who commit gross and criminal violations upon the people to whom they are in principle beholden by virtue of their sworn oaths of office. I have attempted to offer a fair swag at a remedy for this most grievous and dolorous circumstance with my idea for Amendment XXVIII (28) to the Constitution of the United States of America. Therein I set forth the notion and basic architecture for holding sternly to account every human being who has sworn their oath of good faith and competent service to the people of America. To my knowledge, no modern nation-state has ever yet saddled their governing administrators with such requirements, threats, risks, and grave punishments. As in the Amendment, I maintain that when those vested in the Public Trust quake in nauseated, sweating apprehension at the very thought of committing a violation against those to whom they swore service, malversation will for all practical purposes become a relic all but forgotten. Those few cases that would on occasion arise to the attention of the public would be punished with extreme prejudice, thus serving as good reminders to the rest of what awaits them when they misbehave as agents of governance, sworn to uphold and protect the very rights upon which they had trespassed without cause or authority.
I have asserted and I maintain that the solutions to tyranny are simple: hold the criminals who transgress against the Public Trust accountable in such a manner that none but the most severely insane criminals would dare engage. The small handful of psychopaths failing to comport themselves to the reasonable standard may be fed to the flames with a clear conscience as the elimination of the most grave of threats to humanity's inherent freedoms and the rights that issue therefrom stands as a vlid response to such threats, just as shooting the ghost from a rapist's carcass is a most appropriate response by the intended victim. Nail their wicked hides to the church door in the town square that all may bear witness to the condign fate of tyrants and their minions. In the matters of governance under the specifications of Special Trust, only the most brutally non-equivocating responses will keep the wolves at bay. Anything less invites and encourages the disaster that is today's human world. This reality is harsh and in many ways ugly, but ask yourself this: is it any uglier than the results of seventy five years of Soviet-style communism? It is uglier than the ongoing tyranny that is the Red Chinese "government"? Is it uglier than the Khmer Rouge picnic in Cambodia? Idi Amin? Hitler? Any of the other grand butchers of human history who served only to sow death, disease, poverty, and misery unto all whose lives they touched?
What would you prefer, given there are no other practically effective alternatives: millions murdered in wars and under the various tyrannical purges of murdering lunatics, or a world that holds the tiny minorities of such people to account for their crimes in a manner that leaves the rest of us not just with reasonable feelings of assurance that we are protected from such people as a general rule, but that we are all give something about which to think as the hangman's rope snaps tight upon the neck of the man who would see your children relegated and reduced to abject servitude, and perhaps even extinction?
I, for one, am fully in favor of killing off smaller numbers of tyrannical administrators of governance, rather than allowing those same people to murder innocents by the boxcar load on trains that stretch for miles into the vanishing horizon. It is not that I wish to see people brought to great harm. It is precisely that I wish nobody to suffer such fates, while recognizing the irremediable nature of the tyrannical personality type. I am willing to see evil for what it is, meet it head-on, and remove it as a threat to good and decent, and peaceable people who wish nothing more than to live their lives as they see fit while bringing no harm to their fellows. This is not an ill-reasoned desire, but is the very essence of the lives of Freemen. Do what thou wilt, but bring no unjust harm.
Thanks once again, and as always please accept my best wishes.
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