spend a bit of time the other day good-naturedly chuffing at one another about gummint.

At one point, she sugests that I’m a “Big government” type, just because I’m a “Government” type.

To suggest either is to display a lack of comprehension of my political views that can only be described as herculean. It made me giggle, a lot.

All that aside, Tam suggest gummint is like being pregnant, which is an analogy that breaks down on any kind of inspection. On some reflection, the better analogy is being fat.

All humans need some fat to survive; it helps us to metabolize hormones, create vitamin d, protects our organs from damage. It’s necesary and vital, the human body cannot survive long without it.

Too much, though, is dangerous.

Similarly, systems of government bloat and get fat- this is evidenced by the fact that the very language used to describe government waste is loaded with terms like “Fat” “Pork” “bloat” etc.

So the analogy of government to fat is, in my opinion, a reliable and accurate one, and certainly seems to be true for any value of “Government”

When government is slim and trim it allows freedom, and is capable of energetic movement. Such was the case where our own government was young.

Government, unlike humans, does not have an independant existence, it is in fact made up of- well, us.

The government becomes fat and bloated, not because it chooses to do so on it’s own, but because we allow it, and in fact make it so. This is always the case. No matter what the form of government there will be people to fuck it up.

Bloat is caused by us- or allowed to happen, by us. In a representative republic, the bloat grows slowly and inexorably as more and more people figure out more and more ways to squeeze a few more shekels from taxpayers. None of this ever moves backwards, none of it ever slows down, and the idea of putting the idiots on the dole on a diet will never happen. So we arrive where we are now.

It’s time for the anarchists to stop by and say their thing, like “Humans don’t need government like humans need fat! It’s a bad analogy”

yep. Humans don’t need government. That’s why government was never created, nor ever existed, until the aliens came down from the skies and forced humans to group together and form systems of government- monarchies, democracies, republics, etc. Humans will form governments the way nascent oxygen will recombine, it always has been and always will be inevitable.

There are a few people who are decent, moral, sane, and capable of getting by on their own without any trouble, people who need nor take nothing from the government. In a city the size of, say, detroit, the number of those people can be counted on your fingers and toes. Everyone else is an idiot.

Yes, I said that. And if you dealt with the general public at the level I do, you’d realize it’s true. Witness:

The existence of the ‘green” movement.
Heaven’s Gate.
The Transportation Safety Authority
Moonies.
The House of Windsor.
People who drive cars made by Renault.
Rosie O’Donnell
Democrats.
Republicans
Libertarians
Anarchists
Nihilists
etc.

The problem with governments- all of them- in fact, the problem with human beings as a whole, are the idiots.

The idiots cause every form of government to turn into a clusterfuck, especially the complex and impossible forms of government like anarchy or anarcho-whatever. A “Conventional” form of government has one set of rules and behavior; by very definition, any anarchist system has as many different systems of rules and behavior as individuals, and because the vast majority of individuals are mind-numbed morons, most of those systems of rules and behaviors will be stupid.

In the post in question, Tam quotes Peter Moskos, who opines (Among other things) “At some point, in a rich and civilized society, don’t we just have to be compassionate… even to people who don’t “deserve” it?”

This isn’t my problem, because I don’t give a shit. No, here’s my question- to all the ‘Alternative” types- about the whole thing:

The morons that have fucked up the current system of government will fuckup your system of governent. And do it faster than they did the one we have now, because they’ve learned how to game every system. What do you intend to do to stop it?

Why the fuck arent’ you doing it now? or is it just easier to say “Governement itself is the problem” and claim moral high ground because you claim your system is better, knowing nobody will ever have the balls to try it, and prove it isn’t? I really, really, really would like to see someone try something like anarcho capitalism. I understand enough about human nature to know that it will fail. Pitiably, even having it fail can’t convince a true believer, though history has proven that the one constant in human nature and in governments of all types is failure.