I have never been an anarchist. I find anarchists to be some of the most delusional (and generally harmless) people around. Humans have always adhered to some form of tribal authority, and work best in groups aligned on a common goal. An individual can survive, but it cannot thrive without the group and its greater than the sum of its parts compiled results. To suggest that we can simply do away with governments and tribal authority and replace it with nothing is to ignore reality; and the solutions offered by anarchists as a replacement don’t look any better to me than what we currently call government.
When you pull that trigger on a trespasser, just remember, you are a government doing violence on someone who has explicitly chosen to disregard your conceptualization of property and rights. You are applying force to someone who, specifically, has not agreed to be bound by your conceptualization of where your rights end and his begin. It is an application of your personal self-government on another person.
As far as the tax argument goes; utilizing services paid for in advance through taxes, without paying taxes, is also theft. Fire, police, emergency services, roads, etc. all require investment in advance in order for them to be available when needed. The populations of the various nations have clearly stated their desire for these services to be provided; and to the extent that the actual costs of these services are accurately levied as taxes, those taxes are not theft but the actual cost of living in the society that you were born into or chose to migrate to. It’s called the social contract; and no, you aren’t required to sign it in order for it to be in force.
Attempting to live in the society and not utilize the labor of others, not utilize the services paid for by others, is an exercise in futility. So many thousands of man-hours go into the computer systems that run the internet; are you certain that every person who contributed to this conversation’s ability to exist was voluntarily employed, fully compensated, and wants for nothing further that should be his right to ask? How then can you say that you owe nothing to society? That the bills government asks you to pay are completely unwarranted theft?
A BBS comment of mine harvested from somewhere on the internet.
