This is a really important post. For some of us perhaps the most important post, from a life-transforming perspective, we will see this year ... or perhaps this decade. But I would expect it to take some time, perhaps a long time, to seep in. I've been asking myself for some time what could POSSIBLY be an improved government, given how our Limited Republic model has utterly been subverted and, as history shows, was largely subverted within mere years of its inception (even if the formation of the present police state -- which would kill you if you tried to quit the gang & the gang was headed by an kleptocracy -- wasn't so evident until the Civil War...or later). I previously asked the question "what is government" and suggested we look at the root word "govern" .. which means, literally, THAT WHICH REMOVES FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION. Certainly that is what a governor does in a mechanical system. You may argue "but freedom of expression must be forcibly removed!" The word of the day is teleology.
This essay takes that question and runs with it. It is a thinking persons' essay. Those who can't think, or won't think, should stop reading right now and go find some bubble gum to chew. Where this essay goest goes will likely make you very uncomfortable (especially those of you who were clamoring for a NEW law -- to remove more freedom from you and make the government even bigger and more powerful -- just a few days ago). But why? I mean, WHY does it make you uncomfortable? It is, after all, just a thinking experiment. If if makes you uncomfortable to think of a world which has obsoleted governing people as we know it, shouldn't that make you even more uncomfortable in asking "why?"
I think the world of even a few decades ahead is going to look pretty crazy. And I suggest we have reached, or are about to experience what some have called "peak government". The future, I hope and expect, isn't LESS government but NO government ... not as we know it. The internet, imo, makes this almost inevitable as it makes government increasingly unnecessary ... except to those who want to be king and rule you. Some of you WANT to be ruled. I can't help you pitiful creatures with that....
-F
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http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest-post-governance-free-society
The Governance of a Free Society
That government is best which governs not at all. – Henry David Thoreau
Because the state is inherently antisocial, we make a distinction between government and governance. We distinguish, that is, between an overarching entity on the one hand and an underlying process on the other, answering Thoreau’s question by asserting that the next step “towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man” will be taken via the latter, i.e., via the self-organization that is but another term for the spontaneous order by which human society came to be in the first place and has evolved ever since, concomitantly evolving the rules necessary for its governance. And the fact is, all one really need do to know that this is true is to look around:
Those of us residing in the United States or any of the British Commonwealth countries live under an extremely sophisticated and subtle scheme of rules, very few of which were created by government. Since almost none of the rules that bring peace and order to our existence were created by government, little argument should be required to establish that government is not necessary to create such rules. On the contrary, it is precisely the rules that were created by government that tend to undermine peace and order.
If looking around does not suffice, of course, one can explore the matter in depth, mindful, however, that to whatever extent rational argument and empirical analysis fail to persuade, the fact remains that actual experimentation is prohibited. That is, the state does not allow free societies to be attempted for the simple reason that the state depends on the legalized theft of taxation for its existence. And simply put, a successful experiment in a free society would therefore threaten the state’s chokehold (for that is what it is) on humanity.
But as its chokehold is already being threatened (again, look around), we assert that the time is not far off when the state will be unable to prevent the necessary experimentation, including that which is based on the implementation of an actual social contract. For while “persons’ moral and/or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or agreement between them to form society,” the fact is that no such contract exists, nor has it ever existed, at least not in the sense that any of us in the Western world would understand and accept in the way that we normally do. Thus is the question raised as to whether a legal contract – i.e., one based on “an exchange of promises for the breach of which the law will provide a remedy – might provide the means for genuine consent to prevail and thus for the process of civilization to unfold without the endless intervention of the state. That is, rooted in the negative golden rule, and thus the non-aggression principle, the question arises as to whether the signing of such a contract, being required of every would-be citizen, could adequately serve as the legal underpinning of a free society.
I have come to realize that men are not born to be free. Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men. -Napoleon
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