It’s amazing how some people really believe that it is virtuous and noble to abdicate one’s free will in to order to blindly obey authority. One must either listen to one’s conscience or obey authority. They are mutually exclusive concepts like love and rape. The definition of obedience to authority is to obey without exception. If there is an order you will not do then you have already broken that agreement and recognize that there you do have a conscience and free will. This is not a weakness, rather it is your strength. It is what distinguishes you as being a rational thinking individual as oppose to a mindless automaton. It is free will that defines the humanity of the individual. It is obedience that defines the subjugation of the slave.
I draw a very clear distinction between the parasitic wealthy ruling elite that survive by feasting off the productivity of the industrious by means of taxation and the rich people that attained their wealth by providing goods/services of value for which other people have willingly traded their hard earned currency. By vilifying and lumping all the wealthy into one big category without regard to how they obtained their wealth you commit the grave error of inciting Marxist type class warfare. This is both dangerous and societally damaging. The minimum wage worker who punches a few buttons at McDonald’s scarcely has the skills to run a McDonald’s franchise. He is earning precisely what his skills merit and no more. If he could find a higher paying job I don’t think he would continue to work at McDonald’s. If he makes a mistake he may jeopardize only his job and a negligible amount of currency to the company. If a McDonald’s CEO makes a mistake he jeopardizes thousands of jobs and a vastly greater sum of currency.
“How do you combat the claim that without government there would be no regulation and companies would have people working for slave wages, long hours, etc?”
Your question assumes a few things, which must be addressed; that regulations function to protect workers, the existence of “slave wages” for those willing to work for them, and the historical reason regulations exist at all. Regulations protect no one other than the special interest groups who already have political ties to “government”. Through regulatory capture they are able to not only remain practically immune from the regulatory agency. This is known as sovereign immunity of the corporation. Moreover they are also able to virtually write the laws themselves to ensure their continued benefit from them in terms of squashing small business competition and erecting gargantuan barriers to entry for their particular field. Regulations function only to strangulate employers and entrepreneurs by preventing them from running their business efficiently and smoothly. Due to the existence of such laws they must now divert precious time, energy, and resources to complying with “government” regulations, which necessarily destroys in proportionate manner their business. The fact that businesses are still able to function at all, even with the massive number of regulations on the books today, is testament to the hardy resilience of man’s desire to produce wealth amidst such stultifying forces. With more and more regulations made as time passes the clear trajectory taken by the US is towards complete control over the means of production AKA blatant Communism/Socialism. This would be the death knell to our comatose economy.
The term “slave wages” is a nebulous term that is often used by Socialists/Communists to describe what is equally as nebulous a term, the “living wage”. They both are meaningless since we all have different conceptions of what a suitable wage is for which to sell our labor. Our labor and time is a product like any other and when we sell it to an employer he gives us monetary compensation, which is known as a salary or wage. To a man who is unemployed and makes $0/hour, making $2/hour is significant improvement; however under the current minimum wage laws this voluntary arrangement would be an illegal agreement and punishable by State penalties. Nobody can tell you what is an appropriate price for your time and labor. We must all as individuals, make that decision for ourselves. It is immoral and violent for “government” to forcefully compel an involuntary agreement or prevent a voluntary agreement from taking place between employer and employee. That is a personal agreement that must be decided by employer and employee alone.
Even the “sweatshops” that pay “slave wages” in distant lands must be employed by people who have concluded those wages, long hours, and work environment to be superior to their other options. Therefore these “slave wages” are not slave wages to them but rather the best of all possible options. Such free market capitalism is the best method for a region to lift itself out of abject poverty and raise it’s standard of living. We all must start somewhere.
Historically it was not “government” regulations that protected the workers from the evil Capitalist pigs, improved worker environments, or minimum wage laws that increased wages. This is the skewed history that “government school” would have you believe. Rather the increased efficiency of machinery, technological innovation, and improvements in production and distribution is what did these things. Worker environments and wages were all steadily improving already, before “government” rode in on its white horse with its violent mandates to cruelly shackle such a magnificently functioning organism as the Free Market. Institutionalized violence can never claim the manifold victories and accomplishments of peaceful people engaging in voluntary relationships.
Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their governmental schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations! And now that the legislator and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty.
Statism is more a mental illness that enslaves people by means of self-imposed intellectual barriers than a steel cage from which they must physically escape. The illusion of freedom is a more powerful tool to manipulate and subjugate a populace than any gun or stick can ever be. Guns can run out of ammunition and sticks can be broken, but mental enslavement to authority endures the ages. By this method the people will submit because they have been bred and programmed to do so since before they could talk or reason. They know of no other relationship than that of master and slave or ruler and subject. They grow to adore their servitude and reproach anyone who would seek to criticize their master just as a dog jumps with excitement when his master fills his food bowl and faithfully guards him against invaders.
The main difference is that we far outnumber our oppressors and yet we tolerate their abuses because we cannot conceive of a world without their arbitrary restrictions and sundry taxes. We genuinely believe that it is necessary and moral for a society to rob its brothers and sisters to fund projects that are neither wanted nor useful. To deny the people the freedom to do with their currency what they will is the foundation for tyranny of the most egregious form, for with that currency “government” may fund it’s own expansion and thereby continually justify it’s own existence through the Hegelian Dialectic. Never doubt the ability of parasitic sociopaths to extort and spend other people’s currency.
The theft of taxation and the belief in the myth of authority form the two legs by which “government” derives its power. It is not that the legs need to be repaired, reformed, or reshaped. The legs must be destroyed with self-knowledge and awareness so that we may realize that social progress and intellectual advancement occur not when we exalt some people to the level of untouchable deity but rather when we place our trust and respect in our fellow man. For it is he alone who toils day and night to honestly earn his keep by providing valuable goods and services for which other people are willing to trade their hard earned currency. This is how peaceful people have been improving their lives for time immemorial. It is not that some classes are unfit to rule. All classes are unfit to rule!
Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations! And now that the legislators and the do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty.”
“It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where foreign powers come in and loot our country worse than the globalists do today.”
This is known as Agoraphobia or fear of the outside or foreign places. The logic to retain a violent monopoly of aggression over our lives that retains the ability to extort, assault, rape, or murder us in order to prevent a foreign violent monopoly of aggression over our lives that retains the ability to extort, assault, rape, or murder us does not compute. This is similar to the physician refusing to treat his patient for hypertension because the patient may develop hypertension again in the future or the trainer who refuses to help a client tone up lest he become fat and flabby again in the future. One must not condone any violation of individual rights at any time. To do so is to accept being owned by master. To do so is to accept, to a certain extent, being a slave.
“Anarchism, like other idealistic belief systems, is a Utopian model.”
Any “government” or “ism” is the utopian ideal for some groups of people. The difference is all of these “governments” must exist by violence and coercion. They must force their edicts, laws, and mandates onto the people against their will and for their own good. This is the beginning of every oppressive totalitarian, communist, or socialist regime and the collapse of every great empire. Good ideas do not require force.
“Humanity has a long way to evolve before we are ready.”
Who determines this? You? I think you give far too much credit to the monopoly on initiated aggression known as “government”. It has done nothing for humanity. It has only brought bloodshed, suffering, violence, and war.
“As we have seen with Civil Rights, Gay Rights, cannabis legalization, and other mass movements – real change is possible and inevitable when people band together for common cause.”
It is my goal to educate people that these are but minor infinitesimal issues when compared with the over-arching notion of “government”. They are tilling the soil with a teaspoon when what they need is a metaphysical excavator.
