And what would happen if the entire gov't closed down tomorrow? Take your thinking to the next step, and stop swallowing the Fox News line that the abuse of power originates w/ the "government". How would the big bankers and international mega-corporatists behave once there were no laws at all? Do you know what they do to the meager resources of peasants in countries w/ weak governments? They simply run those people off their tiny plots and amass them into plantations or drill into them for oil or uranium without the slightest effort to control the deadly pollution that results. The elite don't need to steal taxes there when they can steal the wealth directly. And in order to get enough to starve slowly, rather than immediately, the former peasants work for those companies under unimaginably brutal conditions for the sorts of hours we haven't experienced in the U.S. since the 1920s.
Why do you think the most rapacious capitalists, like the Kochs, keep funding foundations that advocate "shrinking government"? Because they want to reduce their power over the rest of us and suddenly steal and poison less?
No, it's because the only force that can interfere w/ their pathological need to own everything like a Mafia don in a small Sicilian town, with the rest of us forced to beg from them for our existence, is a functional representative democracy, with built-in restrictions on economic activities to protect our interests.
And you want to give up any possibility of getting responsive government because we've been asleep at the wheel and stopped learning history or even looking at whom a candidate has on his campaign team. It's not the fault of the system that college age people in 2008 preferred to listen to hype on social networking sites rather than seeking out the lowdown about Obama from the best activists in Chicago.
Do you think there would be fewer wars for resources if there was no nation to sign treaties and the entire military was run privately instead of only a fraction of it? What used to be the U.S. would become a battleground between Ford and GM over coal for electricity or whatever with ordinary citizens becoming collateral damage. Yeah, that would be real peaceful.
How is that result better than what we'd get if we begin by striving to reverse the most disempowering structural changes of the last 12 years?
What is sometimes hard for people to grasp is that due to the realities of human nature there is no way to set things right once and for all. No lesson is learned w/ finality. New people are forever making the same mistakes that others rectified in the past or conspiring and striving and achieving unsustainable levels of dominance and hoarding. And each time, to create countermeasures to relieve the resultant misery of the many, a kind of collective wisdom eventually emerges. So things get better for a while. If we use our heads, learn from previous generations, and organize and work real hard, that while lasts a little longer, and the bad times are a little shorter.
The world is at close to apocalyptic levels of overpopulation. Under these circumstances people's behavior gets more extreme and irrational. Instead of trying to control our fertility to extend our existence as a species, each self-identified group tries to outbreed what it sees as rival groups in order to win the contest for resources, while those very resources become more and more inadequate for the burgeoning population. We start thinking w/ the more primitive, reptilian parts of our brains, then rationalize our dysfunctional uncooperative behavior w/ our higher faculties.
So life, and especially human life, is an evanescent and precious thing. To my mind it's worth doing the little we can for our own and the next generation to keep it reasonably harmonious and the right side of tolerable for as many of us as we can for as long as we can. (It's really beyond our power to affect conditions much for the generation after that except indirectly, by teaching our children to make constructive decisions.)
What kind of existence is packing it in before we have to?
