Is humanity too corruptable for democracy? What about for self-government? And how do memes mirror the stale arguments in politics?

A Hackneyed Meme for a Hackneyed Idea
By Christopher Cook
There is nothing wrong, per se, with Willy Wonka, Kermit, and the Salad-Eating Cat. They’re classics. But they have been done to death…just like the statist argument the meme addresses.

No, for the love of crumbcake, this is not an argument to “elect better people.”

Nor is it an argument that if only we could have men like the American Founders in charge, everything would be fine.

John Adams was a genuine hero of the Revolution, and as soon as he got into power, he passed the Sedition Acts. Alexander Hamilton was a genuine hero of the Revolution, and he intentionally lied in the Federalist Papers to trick us into ditching the Articles of Confederation so he and his rich buddies could centralize power ([link removed]) .

The Revolution was a good idea. The solution was not.

But Chris, without some sort of government, everything would be chaos.

Yes, if all you do is collapse a government without anything to replace it, then chaos is the likely outcome. But that is not what anarcho-libertarians are talking about.

Etymologically, the term “anarchy” just means “without rulers.” That does not have to mean “without rules.”

Anarchists—specifically market anarchists (a.k.a. anarcho-capitalists)—are saying this:

Instead of a single entity claiming a monopoly to forcibly impose security and justice within a given territory and upon a captive people, private agencies can peacefully compete in a free and open market to provide security and justice to willing customers.

There is a broad body of literature on how this would work. But most of the time, the discussion never gets to interesting questions like…

How would the free-rider problem get solved?

or

How would the various legal practices of competing agencies be reconciled into a common law?

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Read the rest of this article and others like it on our website ([link removed]) .

Christopher Cook writes at The Freedom Scale ([link removed]) and guest writes at Underthrow ([link removed]) .
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