I think that people who feel "we need government" have a mistaken notion of reality. They seem to feel that individuals are prone to be selfish, brutal, dishonest, and base, but putting a lot of these same individuals together into a group cancels out these bad traits and makes them to do the right thing. They seem to think that the evil is canceled out by the large numbers of people involved.
I think the opposite: that putting all these people together only serves to concentrate the worst of our species in one organization while it allows them to pretend the evil they do or support isn't their fault. The problem lies in the fact that the types of people attracted to jobs that give them power over others have fewer of humanity's good qualities and a preponderance of the bad ones to begin with.
"If men are good, you don't need government; if men are evil or ambivalent,
you don't dare have one." ~Robert LeFevre
There are good people and there are bad people. Good people- those who rarely do anything to harm any innocent person, and who feel real remorse when they do- vastly outnumber the bad people. At least in the general population. However, when you set up a club which is allowed to have a monopoly of force, and where meaningful consequences for abusing that force are rare, you have set out a buffet that will attract people who wish to use force against others, but are scared to do so in a fair fight. And you end up with SWAT teams murdering children, the "PATRIOT Act", torture, the DEA, eminent domain, TSA thugs, Bush, Obama, Cheney, Pelosi, Stalin, Lincoln... the list goes on and on.
Bad people will always exist. It is foolish to allow them to establish, impose, and enforce rules on the rest of us. It is suicidal to allow them to claim legitimacy as they do so.
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An Albuquerque area homeowner faces hundreds of dollars in "fines" from his homeowners' association for putting a "for sale" sign in his yard. He claims the rule for not putting signs in his yard didn't exist until after he bought his home. Yet, he knew there was a homeowners' association when he bought his home, and these "mini-governments" are likely to do things of this sort.
I once ran into a situation like this. More than a year after I had bought a home, never being told there were any covenants involved, even after mentioning some of my plans for the property, I started getting anonymous notes, including a copy of the covenants with all my violations highlighted. I ignored them. Especially since, after reading the document, I saw that every other homeowner in the area was violating many different parts of the covenant as well.
Such is the folly of "majority rule".
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