An ordered society with a stable government is a necessary precondition to building a business like say Facebook. (In the absence of a State, your best bet as a nerd is to try to make yourself as useful as possible to the most powerful warlord who will have you.) In that sense, Facebook's shareholders and employees receive a lot more benefits from the existence of government than say a day laborer.

Exactly. The tax rates in Somalia are very low, but there's a reason that rich tech geeks are not rushing to set up shop there.

I urge you to look at spending, you can have a stable government at 1/4 the cost or less. That's kind of my point.

heydenberk was talking about benefits--rich people, whose wealth is built on large-scale organization and sophisticated transactions, benefit more (in absolute terms) from government than poor people. You're talking about costs--can we decrease costs dramatically and still get the benefits of a stable government? The answer to that is probably "yes."

That gets us into the realm of political philosophy. What is the purpose of government? Achieving stability at the lowest cost? My view is that, once you yoke people under the boot of the State, you're morally obligated to give them Democracy. And in a Democracy, people will tend to vote for policies that maximize the benefit to the middle 50% or so, which is going to lead to a larger government than the minimum necessary to ensure stability. (In my view, thus, an anarchist libertarian society is not possible, while a statist libertarian society is fundamentally immoral.)

As for statist libertarian, I only partly agree. I think you can both have a democracy and a political system that is fairly libertarian. I depends what you call a democracy, a pure 51% majority rule, then its true, but in my opinion that is equally as immoral as a libertarian state.

However, I do think that a combination of democracy and a founding system, constitution or whatever can be better.

Switzerland is a example of a country that is very democratic but its more libertarian in many ways then most other democracies. That has probably to do with the way the system is set up outside of the pure democracy idea.

Not sure why you claim anarchist libertarian society is not possible, seems that has little to do with your post.

US Government spending as a % of GDP: 37.6%

Switzerland government spending as a % of GDP: 34%

https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-spending.htm

Strip out the military (where the US spends quite a bit maintaining global hegemony), and the Swiss have a bigger government than the US.

Yes, and Switzerland and US both are pretty small. Compare Switzerland to the countries around it.

My point was not that Switzerland is a libertarian paradise but rather that it is not true that more democracy makes the government larger.

> Not sure why you claim anarchist libertarian society is not possible, seems that has little to do with your post.

Anarchist libertarianism solves the moral quandry of statist libertarianism, which is imposing a state on people but restricting the ability of people to use their vote to create a big government. I just don’t think it’s possible and would inevitably degenerate into feudalism. Central to anarchist libertarianism is the idea that coercion through violence is wrongful. True or not, violence is one of the most basic interactions that exists between oeganisms. You can’t wish it away, just control it by e.g. consolidating it into a State that has greater power to exercise violence than any group of individuals.

I didn't really want to into argument about libertarian anarchism but I just didn't see your point directly relating to the rest of your post.

But your argument, inherent bias toward centralisation is the old and traditional argument that statist libertarian also use. Nozick is most well known for that argument.

I don't want to really argue for it to much, just want to make clear that, its not about 'wishing' anything away. Violence is reduced if some level of balance of power exists and conflict resumption is available and the believe is that this could exist without government.

As this is Hacker News its not the place for this argument, I would just recommend 'Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice' as a great book on this. It includes chapters by different people arguing the two positions, and some other nice content about the subject.

How many of Capital One's customers do you think benefit from social services like Medicare, Medicaid & Social Security?

Just because the checks aren't going straight into your bank account doesn't mean you don't benefit from these things.

100% of the funds for those come from taxes... Meaning, Capital One would likely make more money if those customers weren’t using those welfare services.

Think for an instances, where their hospital bills would go?

More than that, there’s the loss value due to the overhead of redistribution. Imo again if we are just looking at my salary, I’d be better off without the payroll taxes from both angles.