A question of value

Sarah asks: my qualm with this is that *if* the government doesn’t (I know it doesn’t sound too libertarian but…) ask/demand(?) for some money from the populace, then you have a potential for anarchy? How could we pay for police officers, judges, politicians? I know that we should not have *big* government, that is not what I mean..but if we have basic laws established that demand we not murder or steal, how can we pay for those laws to be enforced.

There is always potential for anarchy, contraintuitively it is usually when government becomes most repressive, although I note that anarchy is much better than democidal government, which, by the way, is far more common than anarchy. There is no need to pay for police officers, judges or politicians. There are already ten times the number of individuals working in private security than work for all the police forces of America combined. There are already many professional adjudicators despite the existence of public judges, who almost to a man ignore the written law in favor of their own manufactured case law. And politicians were unpaid for most of American history.

There will always be a market for those protecting property rights, public or private. The only reason that people expect the protection of property rights to be “free” is that they are used to the government promising such protection, which it not only does not provide but does not even claim to provide when push comes to shove. See the several lawsuits where federal courts have ruled that individuals have no expectation of protection from the police, thereby freeing the police of all liability for failure to provide it. Divine and natural law aside, laws are only as real as the individuals of a society deems them to be, and the reality tends to rest on a much slimmer thread than most people like to think.

Question deeper. Think harder.