It is claimed that people never follow links. If that is true, I hope this one will be an exception.
Video: The Government
A regular reader sent me the link to this video and asked my opinion. It is an interesting, if tortured, attempt to justify a republican form of government. If you are not aware of the way the video warps the truth and manipulates your thinking, you might even agree with the conclusion it reaches. Fortunately you are smarter than that.
This video inadvertently destroys any idea that there can ever be a government based upon anything other than self-government that will work for the "regular people" (the individuals), as opposed to the Rulers (and we should always be opposed to the Rulers).
The narrator incorrectly defines "anarchy" as "without government" instead of "without Rulers". Anarchists self-govern; our government is internalized where it can actually work. The only way he can discount anarchism is by misrepresenting it by using nihilists as the example. His examples only want the current government gone so they can install their own Rulers in place of the ones they don't like. They want to invert the power structure, rather than dismantle it, in the hopes that they will wind up on top when things settle down. This is what the Molotov cocktail-tossing, business-looting false anarchists invariably want to do. In every case, he even points out that his "anarchist" examples lie between the forms of government he discusses, instead of on the free end of his graph that he studiously ignores and misrepresents. He contradicts himself constantly.
The author of the video seems to feel that there is some magical "optimal level" of coercive government, and never even thinks about the possibility that the optimal level is to be found only in self-government. Some people cling to denial so tightly. His main point illustrates this with crystal clarity.
The only two available examples of a republic, Rome and America, both failed completely- following the same pattern. Obviously, the American Republic absolutely failed in the lofty goals he ascribes to it. Utterly, completely failed. I wonder how he can manage to ignore that glaringly obvious fact. You can't allow any coercive external government to have the power to decide if it is obeying its "user's manual", or it will always find in favor of itself in the long run. Maybe not in every single conflict, but in the general trend. This leads only from republic, to mob rule ("democracy"), to chaos (what he incorrectly calls "anarchy"), to oligarchy. He drives the nails in his own coffin and doesn't see that he has done so. I would declare "case: closed".