Stephan responds briefly to a common objection to anarchism:
I get people who tell me “Yes, the government is bad, but look at it this way, things could be worse”. It’s true that I could be living in some other country under conditions that are even worse, but that’s not the point.
Practically none of us desire to see a world that’s a worse place to live in, in fact many of us routinely dig deep, even during tough times, to help out those less fortunate, so why presume that we’d let it become something worse?
This is an objection raised on propaganda: People imagine “things could be worse” because they imagine a world without any of the “good” things which governments provide*. The government builds roads, maintains the police, provides for law and order, ensures the quality of our foods, etc., so without government there would be neither roads, nor police, nor law nor order and we’d all eat naught but poison until we die.
It’s clearly stupid to believe this, but many people do because they’ve been conditioned to believe it, and they’ve never been taught to think for themselves (a reflection on the sorry state of public education, I might add).
They are afraid that things would be worse, without a government to control and influence nearly every aspect of their personal lives**. But this is a very untenable assumption unless one unconditionally supports everything the government has ever done and will ever do. And for the record, “everything” includes “Don’t ask, don’t tell”, housing projects, rent control, restrictions on your rights to peacefully assemble, to bear arms, to speak freely, to love who you want to love, to drive an SUV, whether and what to smoke, to eat organic foods, etc. “Everything” also includes internment camps, apartheid, chattel slavery, civilian massacres, corporate welfare, Agent Orange, trashing the environment, destroying our cities, etc.
People are so preoccupied with the how-bad-things-might-become in the worst-case scenario, that they’ve entirely neglected how bad things actually are.
If you say, “Things could be worse,” I challenge you to instead imagine how things could be better.
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* In the real world, all of the “good things” come at a the expense of something worse: Either these “good things” rely on violence (in order to pay Peter, the government must first rob from Paul) or, due to the law of unintended consequences, inadvertently cause something else undesirable.
** Every intereference in the market, whether tax, subsidy, regulation, or prohibition, ultimately has an effect on the other tradeoffs and decisions we make.