That’s very naive, there are plenty of peoplethat can cause you trouble, with or without the use of direct force. For example, an employee’s relationship with his employer isn’t equal at all. If the employer has 1000 employees, he can tell one of them “If you don’t like your work conditions, then quit.” If the employee quit, he loses 100% of his income, while the employer loses 0.1% of his productivity. Of course the employer has a LOT more leverage in this situation. Especially if you rip the social net to shreds in the name of lower taxes.

Sadly, the world we live in tends to accumulate power and wealth in the hands of the already powerful and wealthy. The role of the government should be to make the situation fairer (although it has failed doing so lately). Removing power from the government means that the powerful are free to use their power to rule over the weak. At least  we vote for the government.

[re: "... I am an anarchy-capitalist..."]

You mean ‘anarcho-capitalist’, but what you really mean is ‘pretentious tit’.

You are completely ideologically fixated and unable to think outside or about the narrow perception you’ve fallen in love with. You deride others for not falling in line with your arguments, and assume we lack your clarity. Alas, it is not clarity that you suffer an over-abundance of. It is obsession, arrogance, pride and zeal.

Ever wonder what goes on in the heads of conspiracy theorists, that keeps them spiraling around crazy loci of fruit-loopery? How they can be so clearly intelligent and foolish at the same time? Wonder harder.

The people on this thread arguing with you, and mocking you? Perhaps you should consider the possibility that they have a point. Perhaps you should consider that being constantly in attack mode renders you weak and inflexible. 

I hope that you’re young, because that means you have a chance to grow out of this phase and feel embarrassed about it later.

Also, there’s usually restrictions if you’re planning on working in another country. I think that’s the issue the border guards were concerned about when they asked this journalist not to write: He wasn’t entering on a work visa. Canada’s border guards are a subsidiary of the equivalent of America’s IRS. They were probably concerned with taxes more than anything.

The conclusion to this little interrogation was also interesting – they denied him a visa, but gave him a  3-day visitor’s pass. WTF?

Some things that might have alarmed them: 
He is toward the top of the masthead of a major left-wing magazine, a staff writer listed just below the real editors and above the “contributing editors”.

His profile on the magazine’s website says:  ” He blogs at Uprising, the magazine’s blog covering movements for social and economic justice.”

His last article before he went to Canada was a repost of Nate Lavey’s video  “Red Square Revolt: Quebec Students on Strike”.  Because this video has much more in-depth reporting than is published elsewhere, and  none of the fake balance in usual news stories, it would probably seem like a promotional video to the border guards.

His last real article was titled: “Can Labor Strike Back? / America’s unions must find a way to circumvent restrictive federal laws”, and it concludes: “…the return of mass demonstrations offers a new climate for labor. Now is the perfect time to remember how to fight.”

The only thing I can figure that would make sense of the  border guards’ decision to let him through for a limited time would be that they passed on his phone number and perhaps other information from his phone such as call lists and contacts to a law-enforcement or intelligence agency so that that agency could monitor his contacts in Canada. They may also be hoping he commits an immigration violation which would give them clear cover for denying him entry in the future.

public transportation has been a trainw reck in the US mainly because once upon a time much of the country decided that cars were the best possible method of transport and everything should be designed around them.

The safety of the state only required aggressive border patrols if your foraign policy means acting like the biggest asshole around to everybody. Belgium is safe as anywhere. I assume they must have an army, but getting detained at the border is usually no worse than getting detained at a toll booth.

I’d rather have heavy taxes and know that if I want education, I have it, if I need surgery I have it, and so forth. The US is the only first world country where that’s not the case.

No cost my ass!  As for “freedoms and prosperity of the individual” – double BS.  Bill gates didn’t get rich on his own chops, he got rich in a country that financed the university he borrowed computer time on in high school and the teachers that almost certainly got financial aid in college and almost certainly had reasonable job prospects because of government mandated primary and secondary education.

The researchers that developed the computer, the phone lines and the protocol stack he used to communicate with it were all funded by government research dollars.  

Microsoft succeeded because of the government and judicial system that that enforced the laws and contracts that made it possible for his innovations to make him a fortune and turn into a defacto monopoly in the 90′s.  Without those things, he would have been ( with apologies to Malcolm Gladwell ) a lone genius, working in obscurity.

Government is not an instrument of violence until the electorate allows it to become such.  We have allowed our governments to become unaccountable nests of vipers and we are paying the price BUT thrice ignorant statements like yours – and the world they would lead to – would be every inch as bad… the thieves would just wear different suits, and their right to manipulate, abuse and steal would be enshrined as “economic freedom”

Hm, dunno… the European country I’m from originally has much less than half the unemployment rate of the US. And that’s official figures, which are distorted since the US sends unemployed people out of the unemployment statistics right into poverty after a while. What is the situation in the US right now, 1 in 6 people are on food stamps? (I guess for you food stamps are signs of eeevil socialism, too.)

(Also, no, currency devaluation isn’t a problem for the Euro, it started out much, much lower vs. the US dollar than it is right now. Quite the opposite, in fact: the clusterfuck a few countries are in right now is due to the fact that they _can’t_ devalue easily — which would be the usual response to a crisis like the one we’re seeing right now — because they don’t have a currency of their own.)

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/19/bastardised-libertarianism-makes-freedom-oppression

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/sealand-and-havenco/

They don’t seem to understand the benefit of us, as a community, looking out for each other. When we band together to pay for education, our community becomes better able to support high paying jobs and children have a way to rise out of poverty. (Which lead to a more prosperous, more free life.) When we work together to pay for public transportation, we have less congestion on our streets. (Which gives us more freedom because  we aren’t stuck in traffic as long.) When we each chip in to pay for our elderly and our sick, it makes us more free because we don’t have to worry as much about our future and the future of those we love.

Sure, the system is far from perfect. Sure, we lose some income to support that system. But I say the price is worth it.

BT Wintersebb, you sound as is you have thought a lot about the problems of government, but have you REALLY thought about what would happen if you dismantled the system? Have you thought about the repercussions of abandoning the poor, the sick and the elderly? You think crime is bad now. What happens when people need to resort to theft to feed their families? What happens to the children of families too poor to pay for education? We have government because together we are stronger. The calls to dismantle government will only make us poorer and weaker.

Since you asked, the fallacies committed in this thread so far are as follows:

1) Begging the Question
2) Shifting the burden of proof
3) False dilemma
4) Guilt by association
5) Generalization
6) False choices
7) Red herring
8) Slippery Slope
9) Special pleading
10) Straw Man

There may be more…I lost track.

More semantics.  What’s a right?  There are no objective rights.  You have no right to speak or breath or even think.  You pay for those with the food you eat to provide you with the energy you expend doing those tasks.  The physical law of energy conservation breaks your childish definition of “right.”

There is the freedom to and the freedom from.  They are interconnected and codependent.  I can’t be free to start a business so long as others are free to attack it and loot my spoils.  While I am free from their attacks, I am free to do as I wish.  The balance is to allow man to do as they wish so long as they do not cause undue duress on others without just cause.  Again, note the balance, and I’d hope you recognize the source, although I somehow doubt you will without google.

Life is an instrument of violence who’s only tool to do as it will is to force action on the environment it inhabits.  Welcome to the universe.

Don’t be so naive as to think that rights are free.  They are free neither in their acquisition nor in their exercise.

You proposed how you would  defend property. I refuted it with 10000years of historical precedent that whoever is the strongest wins. Everyone else loses (unless you are king). You really really can’t beat an army. The Police may turn up late (I’ll choose to ignore pre-emptive action on their part including walking the beat, criminal intelligence etc which mitigates even that) but they will get the perpetrators and their continued presence and action over the last 100-200 years has acted as an enormous deterrent to such marauders with the result that such things are now incredibly rare. Historically we’ve never been safer than now (at least in most western civilised societies).

When your property rights are infringed by a marauding gang, are you going to duke it out yourself and die valiantly defending your land or are you going to do the sensible thing like everyone else and call the Police?Your right to bear arms is not at no cost to others it brings risk to everyone around you which is why the first step of civilisation is always to control weapons. When everyone has the right to bear arms and I have the ability to obtain better arms than you (my tank beats your shotgun and dogs), you lose. Worse, you die; your “property” is taken and your family raped and forced into slavery. This is what the Romans did to most of Europe and this cycle of violence only slowly petered out recently. Without the strength of civilisation to defend everyone equally and persue disputes through courts and law you will simply return to the last ten thousand years of barbarism when might makes right and the strongest is the rightest.