blackshoe, on 2013-July-09, 07:00, said:
All I'm saying is that the government has no business telling free citizens what kind of contracts they can write between themselves, or taxing or "licensing" such contracts. And organized religion has no business influencing the government to do that which is what has happened in Western society over the past several hundred years.
This kind of inanity gets old very fast. Ideologues like BS seem to view 'government' as some sort of alien entity imposed upon us by utter strangers.
Reality 101: all human groupings develop a leadership structure. There is good reason to believe that humans are social animals. Our closest relatives, the great apes, are either solitary or, when they form groups, have well-defined social relationships, with varying degrees of status. This is true in other social animals as well: see wolf, or lion, or elephant, etc.
Thus in our pre-history, it appears clear that clans, then tribes always had some form of hierarchical leadership: some form of 'government'.
Once history began to exist, in the sense that records came into being that could be reviewed by later generations, we see the development of various forms of government, almost always authoritarian but with some experiments in limited democracy (see some of the Greek city-states and republican Rome).
As nations grew larger and more complex, larger and more complex governments also developed and only someone steeped in ignorance would argue that such was invariably 'wrong' in some manner.
As our societies grew ever more complex, the need for a framework of directions, controls, guidance and, most of all, dispute-resolution grew as well. One could argue that the need for dispute resolution grows exponentially in relation to population growth. We all have multiple contacts with people. As the number of people grows, and the density/speed of interaction grows, the possibility of disagreement multiplies.
Viewed in one light, laws are basically dispute resolution mechanisms.
Leaving aside autocratic governments, in which the popular will is often ignored for years (altho at the risk of generating an explosion in the long term), laws in 'democracies' generally reflect the societal consensus. Laws are often cumbersome to change and thus laws can lag behind rapidly evolving societal consensus, but that lag doesn't invalidate the argument. Nor does the reality that special or vested interests can often delay or even prevent the evolution of laws to reflect the societal consensus. Even more problematic is the effect of money on the manipulation of the consensus, but those are problems of implementation and don't affect the basic scheme of democratic government.
Society sees some conduct as detrimental. Stealing or murder are two easy examples of this.
When A steals from B, in a libertarian fantasy world, that is B's problem. In a more mainstream world, it is still B's problem but society has an interest in reducing the incidence of theft, since there are more potential 'B's in the world than there are thieves, and allowing theft to become a matter of private rights would lead to chaos. So the government, which is an arm of society, enacts laws prohibiting theft and employs people whose tasks involve arrest, prosecution and punishment.
Society may also see that there are situations in which it is in the best interests of society as a whole that certain relationships be made to conform with or gain prescribed benefits from rules enacted to impact those relationships. Some relationships are seen as beneficial to society and thus suitable for encouragement.
Most societies have seen that pure economic freedom results in the accumulation of power and wealth in a tiny segment of society, while many end up impoverished and with little or no access to basic needs such as education or health care. So most western societies have decided that society ought to make provision for the poor to gain access to such benefits. The motives felt by those in society who feel this way may vary, but the result is that in most democracies the government takes upon itself the role of providing this access. Since this, and all the other services that we feel ought not to be distributed only to the wealthy, means that the government has to spend money, it needs to raise money as well.
It also has to regulate and define who gets access to what. Familial dependents are seen as being entitled to certain benefits associated with their familial relationships. Survivor's benefits, visitation rights, community property division upon the breakup of the relationship, etc. Once again, it is generally seen by most that failing to afford government recognition to these rights effectively dispossesses all but the rich from being able to assert them in the event of any dispute.
So it is entirely appropriate, and essential to any societal fairness, that the government be the entity that defines these rules.
Can anyone argue, with a straight face, that in the southern US we wouldn't see even more racial prejudice and segregation than currently exists were the Federal Government to have taken a hands-off approach to the relationships between blacks and the rest of society? Would slavery still exist in the US were it not for the position taken by the US government in the 1860's? Would most of us not be smoking cigarettes were it not for the action of our governments to educate us on the perils of tobacco, while restricting the ability of cigarette manufacturers to advertise towards children?
Does BS really think that having millions of people dies slow, agonizing deaths from lung cancer and similar illnesses is a better outcome than allowing government to interfere with the tobacco industry? Does he really think that individual children or their parents can stand up to the brainwashing of massive advertising because it is a fair fight? That each of us can indeed see through the lies (the smoke) of the marketers of poison and, if we can't, too bad? That society has no vested interest in minimizing the harm?
These are just simple examples of areas in which we, as society, see it fit to act and we, as society, create a government to do for us collectively that which we, as individuals or small groups, can't do ourselves.
I could expand on this at length, but most here already understand the basics of what has been called the social contract, and those like BS who cling to their delusional notions about the very nature of society can't learn anyway. It's called cognitive dissonance and while most of us are subject to that in some aspects of our lives, libertarian and religious fundies seem to make it a fetish.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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