>You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.

Hardly non-sensical. You just have a different default.

Government has control by virtue of existing.

If you say government control is bad in general you are just saying there shouldn't be government.

This is impossible as the things the government does will happen it would just be under a different label.

That is all I meant by non-sensical, you need to be more specific to have a real point.

>This is impossible as the things the government does will happen it would just be under a different label.

Nope, we could just do 1/10th of the things "the government does".

Not all them are needed, and a lot of them are actively harmful.

You can reverse it. "If the government gets involved" doesn't work unless you presume government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of no government anyway).

> unless you presume government is beneficial

That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore.

The alternative is worse. No government at all implies anarchy which is worse that all but the very worst governments, and from which IMO some form of government will emerge anyway.

>No government at all implies anarchy*

No government at all can just imply anarchism, ie. a kind of self-governing that doesn't ascribe to our conventional ideas about government, presidents, pms, members of parliament, senators, etc.

That is what I meant by anarchy - the state anarchism wants to achieve. Collins dictionary says anarchy is "4. the theory or practice of political anarchism" but it seems it might be a British usage.

I do not think it is something that will work in practice, nor do I think it would be stable if it did.

There are two common uses of the term anarchy (and likely more, your definition appears to be the fourth in that dictionary).

Anarchy as in chaos and anarchy where "everything goes" Mad Max style, and anarchy as in a volunteer governance system of direct democracy with no coercive authority.

The way you wrote it "which is worse than all but the very worst governments, and from which IMO some form of government will emerge anyway.", implied to me the former.

If you meant the latter, I'd call it no worse than the "very worst governments" and likely better than even the best traditional governments. Whether it can be long term stable is debatable, but a different claim. In any case, what we have is neither that well working, nor that stable.

Fair enough. I am just a lot more sceptical than you are about firstly, how well anarchy would work (I do not think it would scale up to the size of modern societies), and secondly how quickly it would be replaced by else and how bad that something else would be.

For the first, I'd say modern societies didn't scale well themselves, which is what causes many of our issues. We need to scale them down, split them into thousands of smaller communities, with more autonomy.

For the other, that's up for debate. They might just be replaced by misery on the current trajectory too.

I agree with you insofar as modern societies are over centralised. In my view the cure for this has to be more than just political - the economic structure (domination of the economy by big businesses) and technology and other things would also need to change.

Why is highly organized/systematized violence preferable?

Organized violence is self regulating if it wants to sustain itself.

Why are you under the impression that you have a choice?

Those that are violent will always exist, and will always attempt to leverage their willingness for violence, and those that are able to - through luck or circumstance - gain leverage will be able to use that leverage to consolidate more until they have a hegemony on violence.

That's simply an observational fact of human history.

Governments are a way of occupying that opportunity space with some structure that _organizes_ that otherwise disorganized "cut people's faces up and flay them alive" sort of violence, and replaces it with "you get to grumble about the taxman every year" sort of violence. The averager person loses more freedom when there isn't a government around. The average violent psychopath gains more freedom (to become the government) when there isn't a government around.

That's why. Because I, and most people, prefer the paying taxes to getting flayed alive for insulting the duke. The government is a _binding_ of the monarchy and the warlord class to rules. If you look at the history of western democracy, it's extremely obvious.

I highly suspect that one of the reasons that Americans speak in this way.. that government as an idea is inherently some nonsensical or flawed concept - is compensation for their own sense of futility and inability to effect change on their own government.

It's hard for them to reconcile their self-image as "free thinking exemplars for the rest of the world" with the idea that they don't actually have control over their society. So they default to the idea that "all government is bad". If government by definition is bad, then obviously you can't accuse Americans and American culture of being particularly poor at creating a government that serves its people: it's just a fundamental structural problem, not a cultural problem.

To use internet slang: it's a cope.

Americans have exerted control over their society before, of course. It's usually through embarrassment of the people in power, with an implied capacity for violence waiting in the wings.

"So, why not now?" I dunno. Something about temporarily embarrassed trillionaires. Everyone seems afraid to dole out the kind of humiliation that would change elite behaviors, under the mistaken impression that what we're dealing with is not just "a tough job market" or "adulthood" or whatever, but our own measure of unnecessary (but politically effective) humiliation, drizzling down from on high.

The earnest answer is that it's more predictable than random violence, and its predictability makes it somewhat more preventable.

That said, there is a tendency for a system to drift away from this predictability as it's subjected to "review" by people who really, really want a particular outcome, regardless of the systemically-proscribed conclusion. "Bespoke" judgments for edge cases undermines the principle of predictability, which makes a return to "random" "coercion" desirable for some (as those who coerce in anarchy generally have less absolute power than a large system does).

But then, how do you show mercy (people are driven to do so) in a zero-tolerance environment?

This is the tension.

A government that cannot commit violence is toothless.

How do you enforce court rulings?

We shouldn't be ignorant of how the violence is committed and restrictions should be numerous and enforced for sure.

But presuming a meaningful government that cannot commit violence can exist is unrealistic.

>That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore.

Sure you do. You just don't have a society that looks like ours does. And that doesn't necessarily mean monarchy or fascism or chaos as the only alternative.

The society you do get, might still even have a government too! Thinking government is not beneficial doesn't mean you dispense altogether with one. It can mean you have very difference tolerance and guardrails for it, as opposed to when defaulting to "government is beneficial".

What's more "government is not beneficial" might not even mean "any and all government is not beneficial". It might mean government of the type that's the "constitutional bedrock of our societies", and the mockery they call "democratic rule" is not.

> Sure you do. You just don't have a society that looks like ours does.

You've skipped a few steps, until you overthrow the government all you have a broken society with a system of governance that's deemed to be illegitimate, therefore its rules and actions are illegitimate.

If you want to tear up the constitution and implement a new system of governance with "less government" then you're effectively advocating for a revolution. Just be honest and don't try to sell this as an incremental policy change.

>You've skipped a few steps, until you overthrow the government all you have a broken society with a system of governance that's deemed to be illegitimate, therefore its rules and actions are illegitimate.

Sure, so? We did that quite a few times in the past, that's how we dont' still have Pharaohs.

>If you want to tear up the constitution and implement a new system of governance with "less government" then you're effectively advocating for a revolution. Just be honest and don't try to sell this as an incremental policy change.

Who said it has to be an incremental policy change? The claim I responded to was:

"That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore."

You still get one. It's just not something you get while conveniently sitting on your ass and voting once every few years.

> Sure, so? We did that quite a few times in the past, that's how we dont' still have Pharaohs.

I'm not sure I'd agree. Mostly those in power in the past were overthrown by outside actors or failed gradually without an active "overthrow". The ones we think of as relatively successful are mostly those that are "stop being ruled by someone not local", rather than "change the form of government in place".

Is it? Don't know about other countries, but I am pretty sure the constitutional bedrock of the United States is to limit the federal government's ability to be malignant, even at the cost of some benefit. Whether that has been achieved is a separate question.

The idea that government could _not_ be involved is nonsense. You simply don't perceive some government involvement as involvement because you take it for granted. The only question is where do you personally want to draw the line, and by what principles do we organise government involvement.

You probably don't want the government to stop being involved in securing your property or maintaining roads. None of the tech firms want the government to stop being involved in securing IP rights. Etc. etc. etc...

> Reductionist "if only the government didn't get involved" doesn't work unless you presume no government is beneficial

One can believe a government shouldn't get involved in *some* things without subscribing to the belief that "no government is beneficial".

I agree and that was my criticism specifically.

Don't say "government involvement is bad" specify what exactly you mean.

The problem is not a presumption that government can't ever be good. The problem is that the team you personally think is "good" won't be in charge forever.

Everyone loves enabling broad government authority when people they like happen to be in charge.

Sooner or later, a government that is "bad" (for any possible definition of "bad" that you personally approve of) will someday be in charge. Then, suddenly, enabling all that broad government authority seems like not such a great idea.

I don't think this hypocrisy is as common as you believe it to be. I think the current government is extraordinarily bad - I'm on record calling them fascists and murderers quite a lot - and nevertheless it must be allowed to have this authority. There's no better option.

Your analysis presumes that the government is controlled by a single group which hasn't historically been the case.

This weird hyper politicization is young in terms of the US.

And again you don't acknowledge that "government control" is too vague a metric to be useful.

The government has some form of control by virtue of existing so if you want to be critical of it you need to be more specific.