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Notes -
I feel like in a lot of ways the questions around tyranny and anarchy sort of dance around the actual issue which is what a government is actually for. Why do we have one, why do we want one, what is the government supposed to do. And really I think until you answer that question in a way that makes sense, asking whether or not something is dangerously tyrannical or anarchistic is simply booing a given government or government action.
To sort of answer my own question, I see government as a sort of political operating system— the point isn’t to directly solve most problems, but to provide the necessary stability and infrastructure that allow other institutions: churches, civic groups, businesses, and so on to provide services to society. Now that sort of changes the way you’d think about crime policing. You’d want the government to keep the crime rate as low as possible without unduly interfering with the ability of people to organize and solve problems or do things. Putting up huge roadblocks at every corner would probably solve crime, but it would absolutely destroy the ability of people living in the city to do pretty much anything useful. Having no police presence would allow people to do things in theory, however because there are no cops, the crime rate is too high for it to be safe to do things. You can kind of apply the same lenses to other problems like business law (if you don’t have any, social trust is impossible, too many laws mean that almost all people are too busy with compliance to actually do anything useful) or health and environmental laws. A good government would be stable, but mostly invisible and provide known safety and security measures and predictable laws enforced predictably such that it’s mostly just there but invisible to end users.
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