Minarchists Are Stupid

I liked this post on Anarchy in Your Head making fun of minarchists. However, he wasn't critical enough.

I also liked this post, where he says that a good solution is to try to convince one person at a time "The State is evil!" That post has one big error:

I am not proposing an alternative to your minarchist system.

There is an alternative to a minarchist system. This is agorism. All services currently provided monopolistically by government would be more efficiently provided by multiple competing vendors in a true free market.

If you ask a socialist "Should there be a government?", they will answer "Yes!" If you ask a minarchist "Should there be a government?", they will answer "Yes!" On the only political question that matters, socialists and minarchists give the same answer.

Who is more dangerous, a socialist or a minarchist? Socialism is obviously stupid, especially if you're a skilled intelligent worker. Why should a skilled intelligent worker let everyone else leech their productivity? That makes socialism and communism obviously stupid. The net effect would be that skilled workers lower their productivity to match the average of everyone, a net loss for society as a whole.

Minarchism represents an intellectual trap. A minarchist argues that government is necessary. What is needed is precautions to keep government small.

The fallacy is that a government always includes taxation power and a violence monopoly. A government must have a violence monopoly; otherwise, people would refuse to pay taxes. With a violence monopoly and a taxation/economic monopoly, then the evil power of the State will grow over time. Even if State employees are initially all saints, eventually someone evil will work their way into a position of authority and the descent begins.

Further, power without accountability is very corrupting. Suppose you place someone in a position of influence but there's no accountability if they steal or fail. That will turn someone into a parasite, even if they weren't beforehand.

The insiders who controlled the original US Federal government were not saints. They were concerned that people were getting too free. Under the Articles of Confederation, individuals had too much freedom because the government was too weak. Insiders formed the Federal government to consolidate and expand their power. As a concession to the Anti-Federalist faction, they put a lot of restrictions on State power in the Constitution. Over time, all the provisions that protect personal freedom have been eroded. The net result is the current mess.

Even if it were possible to return to a sharply limited government, it would rapidly degenerate into the current mess again. Minarchism is failed and discredited. It's time to try something else.

If you evaluate the (L)libertarian/minarchist movement as a for-profit business trying to reduce the size of the government, it's been a complete failure.

The danger of minarchist propaganda is that it doesn't challenge your pro-State brainwashing. There are many false beliefs that a minarchist can have, but not a true anarchist/agorist.

1. There's a valid social contract that requires everyone to obey it. Individuals are obligated based on where they are born. They don't have the right to withdraw their consent for the State.
2. Taxes aren't theft.
3. A State violence monopoly isn't evil.
4. People are intrinsically evil. Therefore, a government is needed.
5. The most evil people are magically prevented from working for the government. Government workers are blessed with goodness, while everyone else is evil.
   
6. Government would work, if only the people in charge weren't so evil. A fundamentally corrupt system is legitimate.

Minarchism is attractive to people who realize "Big government is evil!", but don't want to challenge their pro-State brainwashing.

If I were the Supreme Leader of Humanity and had evil intentions, I would invent something like Libertarianism and minarchism. Minarchism is an intellectual distraction. People cling to minarchism, instead of realizing the truth, which is "Who needs a government anyway?" Once you understand "Taxation is theft!", you realize that all forms of monopolistic government are immoral.

It's easy to convince an intelligent person that socialism is stupid. Official State propaganda in the USA includes "Socialism is stupid! Free markets are good!", without mentioning that the USA is a nearly perfect Communist dicatorship.

It's much harder to convince someone that minarchism is stupid. You can't accomplish that without also cracking their pro-State brainwashing. Most people get hostile when confronted with ideas that challenge their pro-State brainwashing. People move towards minarchism and away from really free markets, because they don't want to admit that they've been conned.

Minarchism is evil because it's an intellectual distraction. If the philosophy of minarchism did not exist, then it would be easier to convince people "Who needs a government anyway?" Minarchism holds out the false hope that the State can be reformed. Minarchism distracts people from "The State is evil!"

Parasites probably intentionally invented minarchism as a distraction from agorism. The Libertarian party was originally an anarchist movement, but it was corrupted into a minarchist movement.