| DarthVolod said: Which sounds better, having government force people at gunpoint to give money into welfare programs (most of this money doesn't actually go to the poor anyway as it is gobbled up by beurocrats), or people voluntarily giving their donations and time to the needy (charities are much more likely to actually help the needy with the exception of a few scam organizations here and there)? I don't think you can really shrink a government though or even change it in a meaningful way outside of a revolution. There is no incentive for governments to remain small, and there are tons of incentives for governments to grow in size until they eventually collapse. Small government doesn't work, and neither does big government. You can either try to build a voluntarist society without government, or you can keep going through the cycle of having a small government get bigger and bigger and then fall apart only to be replaced by a new one. The former option is much more stable in my opinion. |
And there is also the idea of having a prosperity machine that would magically give everyone what they want, and we wouldn't have to do with poverty or shortages. That sounds a lot better than looking at trying to figure out how to make sure that people don't get left so far behind they end up revolting and burning the place down. Ideally, a volunteerist society would be awesome, but people have ideals and feeling of how society should be, but don't have the will or resourced to commit it so. They do have elected officials that pander to these, and try to make do. End result is people want a strong man to come in and make it so. What you witnessed, for example with Occupy, is why volunteerists don't accomplish much at all. People have their own agendas and they don't work together. So, to get things solved, people want power somewhere sufficient to affect change, and make it happen, by force if need be. Then they rationalize this use of force they dislike, by a dozen of excuses.
