I'm sorry but I maybe feeling "off" today, but we should all be beyond kindergarten political philosophy. Anarchy is what it sounds like - awful and not some middle class libertarian utopia.
Yes we need government. And these days we need government to roll up its sleeves and be government. We know you cannot arrange the bread delivery for London through one department but you can force privatised water companies to invest before dividends over periods of decades.
You're not feeling off. You simply don't understand that basic morality means that you cannot force others to do what you think is right for them to do. You want to find a way to get others to do what you want. This is immoral - you do not want others to have or exercise their freewill. And you want to use other people to force your opinions via police, legal system, etc on others.
Put simply you think anarchy is a political philosophy. Whereas anarchy is a moral position - it advocates for free association with others - ie no force.
The fact is that it is not morally acceptable to force others to do what you would like them to do, if they are not harming you. You wouldn't force your neighbour/friends/family to do what you say, if they are not harming you. But you consent to government using immoral force to get others to do what you want (steal money, enforce certain behaviour, etc, etc). In fact you think we need something like a dictatorship to wield even more force even more overtly. I think you will get your desire, unfortunately, as most people agree with you.
> The fact is that it is not morally acceptable to force others to do what you would like them to do,
Plainly, most people disagree with you. They find it perfectly acceptable to force others to (not) do things.
> if they are not harming you.
The fact is that people do not agree what "harm" is.
To pick an obvious argument, many people oppose abortion under _all_ circumstances because they claim it harms the offspring and the mother, while many people support abortion under _all_ circumstances because they claim forcing a woman to carry to term harms the woman.
How do we handle situations where people disagree on the definition of "harm"?
Nah. I want to rule the world of course. But I would far rather setup a system of democracy to rule the world with everyone else than let some other bugger be king instead of me.
And I believe in actual government - government that builds roads to deliver food on, government that agrees ways to make researchers to discover medicines and hospitals and nurses to inject them, and governments that force companies to label their food with their ingredients (or their ISP adverts with their fees). I call this real government. not the arguing fools on TV. We can argue how much much of it is too much. We are. But I refuse utterly that "doing real government" is immoral, that any attempt to agree common standards is tyranny.
I believe that the real moral failing is to chip away at real government so
much that services collapse and harm is done to real people. We can look at failed states like Niger or Haiti in horror, but we can also look at the mismatched life expectancy across our own rich countries and ask why?
I reject the idea that we can roll back government so much we can lose driving licenses and just be more careful out there, that we can ignore food safety standards and just look at the restaurant kitchen carefully. I reject libertarianism because it knows as much about the real world as central command economics.
I want government run on empirical data with justice and equality at its heart.
I am happy to accept the grey areas, will stand up for democracy will argue we can always do better. But buggered if it's because I secretly yearn to control your life.
> I want government run on empirical data with justice and equality at its heart.
You're asking for technocracy, and this is what is lined up already - you might wonder whether you are being engineered. All those cameras, smart phones, smart meters, legislation, facial recognition, etc - this is to allow micro-management at the most granular level. It's all quite far from freedom indeed, which is where this conversation started. The global governance structure is already fascistic (corporation and the state work together). I'm not a fan of the forced tyranny that's in store for us - once we've got it, I suspect you'll change your mind too.
I am asking for science. That before we decide if we want to teach phonics at school we guinea pig a few thousand to see if it meets some p-value.
Is that technocracy? Maybe. Is it something easy to explain - yes. Is it something for some reason is not explained fully and at length? Yes oddly it's not.
Oh for heavens sake. There are 192 different governments (at least) on this globe and they lie along a spectrum. what we have now (I kinda assume USA) is up and to the right on this spectrum (ie some definition of good, free, whatever is up and right). my utopian government is further up and right but anyone living in any of those 192 places will benefit from their government going more up and right, freer, better, more open whatever.
So yeah i think there are things a real government does and does not do. That is not utopian, it's not naive. it's here and now and rooted in practical real world examples.
Whatever you or I dislike about the governments we live under, we are incredibly fortunate to live in democracies- where we can force the buggers up and to the right. Make them more utopian more free more open.
> Whatever you or I dislike about the governments we live under, we are incredibly fortunate to live in democracies
We don't live in democracies. At best we live in a 'representative democracy'. These are not the same thing, at all.
Representative democracy is where (if we vote) we choose 1 person every 5 years to represent tens or hundreds of thousands of people, for thousands of votes. If the person you vote for does get in, but doesn't do what he said in their campaign, there is no negative outcome for them. The worst is that they will receive less votes next time, but even that unlikely to be based on their voting record, but on whether more people prefer blue or red this time.
But all that is itself moot, imo. I think we live in a not very covert fascist (corporate and state) regime - voting is simply a pressure release valve, when both red and blue are merely wings of the same bird.
Yes we need government. And these days we need government to roll up its sleeves and be government. We know you cannot arrange the bread delivery for London through one department but you can force privatised water companies to invest before dividends over periods of decades.