Where “no government at all” is not an option, I’d rather see government as transparent as possible, and a giant step in the right direction would be the elimination of the fraud by which the central banks permit their governments to continue spending, unhampered by budgetary constraints, by devaluing currency. One goldbug argument is that the elimination of debt-based money forces governments to finance things “the old fashioned way,” that is, through taxes. This much is true, but it’s certainly not a panacea, and should be viewed only as a pit-stop on the road to freedom.

I have to agree with Rad Geek’s assessment of this Lew Rockwell article: it’s certainly curious that Lew ends the argument in the manner that he does, as if to say, “the old fashioned way is just fine!” No, it’s fucking not! Don’t you remember Lew, that taxation is theft?

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Jim Davies has been writing a series of post-government essays from an anarchist perspective, over at Strike-the-Root.com. The most recent installment explains the virtues of a free-market justice system in greater detail and clarity than I could ever attempt.

Apprehension is efficient. That large but one-time problem having been solved, aggression is an uncommon event, and when it does take place, if the aggressor is at first unknown, any of several competing detective companies can be engaged to locate him or her. Since they get paid for results, they work with an efficiency that no government police department would have recognized–and they almost all belong to a trade association, which maintains a common database to help the work.

So whereas in the Government Era it was commonplace to find a large minority even of murders that were never solved, today already the apprehension rate is well over 95%.

There is ample reason to believe that apprehension would be efficient. I’ve heard it postulated that without private apprehension (i.e., bounty hunters) the current system would immediately collapse. Also, when you eliminate the monumental waste of resources devoted to fighting vices, not crimes, and incarcerating people for those vices, and destroying families, and so on and so forth, what we need in justice (as in every other sphere) is less government, not more.

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Francois Tremblay has written a primer, Eight ways you can personally help to smash the state. I’m more and more enamored with number 8, the practice of agorism or counter-economics. I will have a full-length post devoted to agorism in the near future.

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Marcel Votlucka is an anarchist, but he doesn’t hate the troops.

[H]ow can I hate the troops when they are victims of tatist oppression and callousness just as much as the people they are ordered to boss around and even kill?

“Love the sinner, hate the sin.”

Votlucka pretty much sums up my sentiments, exactly. Two years ago, contemplating the situations faced by several of my friends, I wrote:

Do I hate the choices that they have made? The sacrifices that they have paid? No.

Let me clarify: I hate the fact that in many instances, they no longer have a choice. I hate the fact that they’re 5,000 miles away, in a fucking desert somewhere. I hate the fact that they’ve been hoodwinked into believing they’re making us safer. I hate the fact that they’re dying for nothing, and if they’re not dying, they’re wasting years of their lives, rotting in some desert hell hole.

Although a number of “bad apples” are probably attracted to the power, many of the people in uniform honestly believe (however erroneously) that they are protecting people, they don’t want to be warlords and murderers, they want to fulfill some hero-myth that’s been drilled into their psyche since childhood. They’ve been told their entire lives that what they do is not only worthwhile, but necessary and righteous.

I can’t fault them for believing something that we’ve all more-or-less believed at some point in our lives. Some of us get over it sooner than others, some never do. Votlucka says,

It’s easy to condemn the government when it screws up, pursues a policy that hurts people, prosecutes a murderous war for oil or land or bragging rights. It’s easy to damn the paper-pushers and gun-fondlers who represent this entity. Too easy, in fact. That doesn’t strike the root of the problem with the State – the institution itself, and how it works on people’s minds. That’s the larger picture that we need to focus on.

Indeed.