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I have a hard time reconciling this opinion with the horror stories friends who grew up in Mogadishu (and subsequently fled to Minneapolis) tell me. I'm not su

• wonder_er 10y ago
  Somalia is bad. _Somaliland_ [0] has carved out a nice spot of land for itself. It's got plenty of problems, but it's not Mogadishu. Most of the world functions just fine without government oversight. Also, consider that in the absence of government, our lives (and cities) would be full of thousands of tiny corrections, back and forth, as people responded to the new information available to them. Governments let problems build, and eventually spend a few years trying to deal with the problem, only to arrive at a good solution a few years after everyone else has arrived there. The problem is they cause massive harm in the process. Reference: - War on drugs - Imperialism - History of who was allowed to marry who [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somaliland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somaliland
  • lhopki01 10y ago
    Somaliland has a government. It's the bits without government that have issues. Only someone who's lived their life in a place with semi effective government will think that without government things will function.
    • wonder_er 10y ago
      Couldn't you also say "someone who's only known living under government will not easily be able to imagine any alternative"? I.E. that which is uncomfortable isn't necessarily wrong. It's just uncomfortable. If I have an idea that is wrong, it doesn't threaten you, if it's just an idea. It would be safe to evaluate it, consider it, try to understand what weakness in my thinking has led me to that conclusion.
  • dmoy 10y ago
    I've never met anyone from somaliland. But, aforementioned friends from Mogadishu say that the situation is completely different there. The crux of the issue in Mogadishu, as they describe it, is that many basic things which we rely upon in the US just don't exist. E.g. when something gets set on fire, it literally just burns to the ground because there's no fire department to come save yo shit. My guess is that in the absence of government, large cities would be terrifying. I've not heard of a large city without government before though.
• dmix 10y ago
  The "Somalia is a comparable form of anarchy" argument is even worse than the "roads would not have been built" argument the OP was dismissing. This hardly needs a rebuttal because it's based on a false pretense that the goal is some form of stateless 'anarchy' without rule of law/courts rather than a minimalist government, particularly in the economic sense.
  • mikeash 10y ago
    The original comment literally presented "without government, the world would be in complete anarchy" as a false belief. If "without government" is a false pretense and the actual case being explored is "minimalist government" then maybe they should have said so, but it hardly seems fair to blame the responder for replying to what was written.
    • aminok 10y ago
      Those places have governments, just ones that, relative to the governments of advanced economies, are extremely small and barbaric. If we define a government as a party with a localized monopoly on force, even an armed robber is a government. And if one doesn't define government this broadly, that still doesn't invalidate the libertarian argument, since it hinges on opposition to the initiation of force (aggression), as opposed to initiation of strictly government force.
  • rayiner 10y ago
    Anarchy is at least morally defensible. "Minimal government" yokes people under government, while taking away their self-determination. It replaces democracy with rule by a self-selected intellectual elite that decides what is and is not a proper function of "minimal government."
    • likeclockwork 10y ago
      Which always seems to come down to "police to keep the poors in line" because they expect to be able to buy everything else.