Comment by scudco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scudco | Hacker News Reader

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Am I leeching off the state or is the state leeching off its citizens? I did not go to public school, but the state still told my school what they must teach to be considered legitimate. I have been to a hospital. I have driven on a road in a car, on a motorcycle, on a moped, on a bicycle and I have even walked on roads. I am using the PG&E power grid as I type this. And, of course, I am using the internet to respond to your post.

I replied to this kind of thinking in another post in this comment thread, but I do not have a choice in the matter as to whose roads I use if I wish to go from place to another because they are monopolized by government. I would like it if the government did not have monopoly control over things, but I do not deny that they have control. It may be of some consolation to you that I pay and have paid taxes in the past. The government, in my mind, is simply "a gang of thieves writ large" as Murray Rothbard once said. They provide services but they can only do so by monopolizing the service they provide and _taking_ other peoples money to finance the administration of that service.

If you can rob a bank peacefully I would very much like to see that for the sake of argument.

The roads were not always a government monopoly, nor were the canals, nor the railroads. All had some government support but they were not run by the government. But at some point it became clear that this was a FAILURE. Without roads and rails and at one point, canals, this countries economy would not function. Sure you can make some high traffic routes private and run them better, I would love that. The fact that I-95 is under construction, and they only work 8 hours a day 5 days a week while inconveniencing me anytime of day is something that no private business would do because they would lose customers. But look at the inability to get broadband in rural areas - it is significantly cheaper to run fiber than to build a road, and you can't even get that done.

So yes, you could avoid paying taxes, but at the expense of losing more than 30% of your revenue as the economy crumbled. I can understand the principle, but pragmatically what you want to do is a pipe dream and economically it will be WORSE for you monetarily. I understand standing on principle on the 1st amendment or torture or policy, but when we start talking dollars and cents, your ideas just don't hold water.

Are you advocating anarchy then?

"They provide services but they can only do so by monopolizing the service they provide and _taking_ other peoples money to finance the administration of that service."

I just don't get this. How do you expect them to pay for services? And let's not forget that "the government" isn't some magic entity, it's made up of the citizens of the country itself. I'm pretty sure the US government employs more citizens than any other organization in the US.

I would say that many of the services and infrastructure the government typically provides are considered "natural monopolies". It doesn't make sense to have a bunch of parallel roads when you can have one. Same with water, electricity, etc. With the government providing a single "set" of infrastructure you may need X miles of road, pipe, power lines, or whatever, if you had 4 companies competing you would need 4 times as much, which would end up costing the end user 4 times more.

But in fact, the government doesn't have a complete monopoly on roads, since there are privately owned toll roads, which you have to pay to drive on. Would you prefer all roads were privately owned, and the owners could then charge arbitrarily high tolls?

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