If I was the first person to desire exclusive ownership of Mars, every future human being would apparently be morally obligated to respect my claim. Even people who have never met me, never agreed to my ownership, and have absolutely no reason to recognize my authority.

Sure, but so what? What you’re missing here is the whole picture, which isn’t a knock on you. I never said this was simple, but it’s also not that complicated when you really get down to it.

Let’s say you do own Mars and everyone (or at least, the relative force monopoly) respect that and protect your rights over it. So what? Why should that even be a bad thing from a subjective perspective? Someone HAS to have exclusive authority over everything. There’s no such thing as a government - not really. A government is an idea, and ideas cannot own property. They can SAY they own property, but you can say anything you want. An agent of the government can just make a claim saying they can take your house and then the “government” owns it, all the while that single representative is the one who actually has exclusive authority over it.

The notion that you have some say over “public property” (a clear misnomer) is illusory. At least one person who represents “government” has the final say in what happens with that property. There’s no vote, and even if there is, there’s only a vote because that person or people let it happen. To argue that it’d be absurd to allow you to be the exclusive owner of Mars is nonsensical. Even if this weren’t the case, who exactly do you think is going to have exclusive authority over it if we ever do anything with the planet? Someone will. It will likely be divided up between owners, and many - if not the majority of those owners are going to be “government”.

Let’s assume you “own” a house. Do you, really? Do you hold EXCLUSIVE authority over that house? Can you do anything you want with it barring those actions do not violate the will of your neighbors? Well of course not. Hell, you can’t even finish your basement without the OK from the city. But there also is no OK from “the city”, is there? There’s always a PERSON who gives the OK. What does it matter who voted that person to have that authority? Who cares if that person has a badge, or a uniform, or claims to be “government”? Nothing changes that from just being a human being with the final say in what happens to a thing.

And what about property tax? You never stop paying taxes on the home you reportedly own.

So let’s go back to the Mars thing. So you own it, so what? What do you actually think you can do with Mars in a TRUE free society where we actually have freedom of both association and exclusive authority over our own property? Let’s say people ask to buy some land on Mars from you and you say no. OK, what if people want you to let them put hospitals on the planet, or power plants, or research facilities, or some such that might better mankind as a whole and you say no?

Well OK, so what stops your reputation from being tarnished due to an overwhelming feeling from people that you’re just a selfish asshole? If I own a place that sells food, I can just blacklist you from buying food from me. What happens if you can’t make purchases from a large portion of businesses because your reputation is so tarnished that everyone wants nothing to do with you?

What if your money becomes worthless because nobody will trade with you?

A true free society is one where someone can refuse to sell to black people and that’s “OK” because even if you and I disagree with that stance, we have freedom of association, so we can just refuse to associate with that individual.

If you like I can touch on your other points but I only had a few minutes to respond right now.

So you’ve declared your desire to hold exclusive authority over Mars, but that’s irrelevant because there’s nothing you can do with that. It doesn’t really create a conflict of wills of which need resolving in the first place.

Will it tomorrow? Maybe, but also maybe not. Let’s say it does. Well how do we resolve such a conflict? In addition, can you own something you’ve made up but don’t fundamentally know of what it is? For instance, what if I say I own your soul? Does your soul even exist? I would argue there’s no such thing and there’s simply no evidence to support that there’s such a thing as soul, so declaring that is kind of irrelevant. Can you own an entire planet? You know there’s apparently a planet out there and you know it has a name (likely, many), but do you have an actual context beyond that of that in which you’ve desired to own? It’s a good question I don’t have an immediate answer to but it doesn’t nullify anything I’ve said just because it’s complicated. Fundamentally, if you are the first person to ever desire exclusive authority with all of Mars, then Mars is your property.

I never said you needed to respect anyone’s will. I said it’s illogical not to. Logic is objective, and everything subjective is, at its core, arbitrary. There are ideas that are material and ideas that are ethereal - if those are the terms we’ll be using, anyway. In other words, you have ideas such as, which ship is the true ship of Theseus? But the truth there is neither, because there never was a ship of Theseus. We made the ship up. There are only simples arranged in particular patterns.

But that kind of thinking isn’t helpful for us to navigate the world. We know what fundamentally manifests the idea of “ship”, and that’s primarily material, but the idea for instance of “trans” is ethereal - it isn’t predicated on any kind of essence like ship is. We know what ship is not for instance, and we have enough cardinal attributes associated to ship to communicate the idea of ship, but trans is more abstract so as to not really mean anything - it fundamentally means whatever you want it to because that’s all anything without an essence can even mean.

So when you say, “this ship is mine” we can do something with that, but if you say, “I am trans”, there’s nothing we can do with that information that isn’t arbitrary. We can defend your property rights to your property being ship, but how do we defend your rights to being trans without it being wholly arbitrary?

I’m not picking at trans by the way, I’m just using it as an example since it’s so frequently in our discourse today.

To circle back and reiterate: I’m not saying that anyone has to respect property rights and clearly some people do not, but this is a philosophical proposition of logic that’s by far more rational than the arbitrary systems many use today to discern right and wrong. Saying you obtained your morals from god is nonsensical because it is patently clear that god-beings and “magic” just don’t exist. It is delusion to believe that they do, so predicating ones worldview around what doesn’t even exist can only lead to coincidence - it cannot lead to actual predictions of reality of which logic can - with certainty - accurately predict.

I’d be happy to go over more of this because I could write an entire book about it - not because it’s convolutedly complicated, but because most people don’t stop and think what the words they’re using even mean. Reductionism is how you get to truth, and reductionism requires logic to get there. We don’t know the difference between stool and chair, nor when something stops being something as you shave off atoms, or why we’re alive beings made of dead materials, but this is the stuff if ignorance, not of reality. Given enough time and reverse engineering, the answers are likely to come.

That being said, I believe the answers to a solid and just moral framework rely on logic and reason. If you’re not using logic and reason, you’re simply arbitrating. Everything else becomes an argument over justifying why you should hold exclusive authority over something because you feel a certain way about it. This is always just an argument over might makes right.

I would argue that the whole of human conflict does not come because two or more individuals have a different opinion per say, but because they see the same part of the world and believe it is construed in completely different ways. For instance, in Islam, the prophet Muhammed married a girl who was 6 years old and consummated the marriage when she was 9. Traditional Sunni Hadith outline this, and her name was Aisha bint Abi Bakr. Muslim scholars sometimes argue that she may have been older, but my point is that many millions of people believe the former, and if your worldview is such that the prophet of god was permitted to marry a 6 year old then your worldview is likely to accept that as simply a god-given moral construct.

It is not a matter of, “why can’t we all just get along” when you have someone who believes it should be OK to marry a 6 year old with a marriage consummation of 9. For many millions, that is simply rape and there is no way to reconcile this - do this and the answer must be violence. Full stop.

Or another example could be China or Russia’s believe that America and capitalism are sinister agents of the world while many Americans see Communism and the collectivist way as ultimately sinister and authoritarian. There are never any “good” arguments between the two, simply different justifications for why “I feel strongly, therefore fuck you”.

This stance I’m presenting is a philosophical neutral point (it’s more or less the NAP just described in more detail) that explains why it shouldn’t matter how you feel because everyone should be allowed to live their life the way they so choose so long as they are not initiating actions of which violate the will of others.

In short, do not murder, assault, rob, or defraud others.

And the thing here is: The moment you want to try to argue that there are justifications for murder, assault, theft, or fraud, why should anyone care to hear you out anymore? When you show up at my doorstep armed threatening to kill my children, there’s only one answer I have for you, there’s no alternative discussion there.

And I will be on the right side of morality, it doesn’t actually matter how you or I feel about it personally.

Try to use mental gymnastics to pour over justifying why you should be able to murder my children just doesn’t matter, and it shouldn’t matter, and my explanation for why is a hell of a lot more logical and rational than justifications predicated on, “I feel strongly, so fuck you”.

In fact, what I propose doesn’t even concern how I feel personally. You could live your life in ways I completely think are nonsensical, delusional, or down right self-destructive, and my stance is simply that you should be allowed. I might try to convince you otherwise, but never use violence to control how you live.

There is no other way for us to coexist in this world without a non-stop attempt at dominating one another unless we adhere to this kind of worldview. No other worldview comes even close.

Absolutely.

So you have objective and subjective morality. Morality simply meaning actions we should or should not take. If something is immoral, it is an action we should not take. What actions should we not take is predicated on logic.

The fundamental premise here is simple: You cannot desire the violation of your own will.

This is actually impossible. Let’s say for instance that you don’t want to be punched in the face, but then you want me to punch you in the face. You are not desiring the violation of your own will here, your will has simply changed to desiring that I strike you. Even if you changed your mind again, you are still not desiring the violating of your own will.

And since it is not possible to quantify value in an objective way, you also cannot create an objective hierarchy of value for will. Your will and mine are equal, for all intents and purposes. Any and all ideas we might have that seem to contradict that claim are merely our personal opinions.

So what this fundamentally means is that since you would never want me to initiate any actions of which violated your will - AND you cannot quantify an objective hierarchy of value for human will - then it leads that you as well should not initiate any actions of which violate my will.

Imagine the golden rule but edited in just the slightest. It’s not do unto others as you would want done to you but do unto others as they would want done to them.

In fact, majoritively this is how all human societies already engineer themselves - they just take a great many smaller caveats away from this in their own quest for greed and power.

Take murder, rape, assault, theft, or fraud for instance. ALL of those things are only made manifest when at least one party initiates an act against another in which the second party did not consent. If you hand me $20 and your will is aligned to do so (a gift, say), that does not manifest the idea of theft. But if I take that $20 from you without your permission, I have violated your will within a logical order of operations across time.

In short, we both held the same will as it pertained to that $20 - exclusive authority over it.

The reason why you are the owner of that $20 is because you fulfilled two primary fundamental criteria: 1. You desired exclusive authority over it. And 2. You did not violate the will of another as it pertains to that $20 in order to obtain exclsuive authority over it.

In other words, you wanted it and you didn’t steal it.

And these things predated my will to also hold exclusive authority over it. We have a conflict here though - a conflict of wills - where both of us desire an outcome that we both cannot have. There is only one $20 bill and both of us want exclusive authority over it, but only one of us can.

So morally, we back you, because logically neither of us can desire the violation of our own wills and also because your will predated mine. In short, in order for you to continue to hold exclusive authority over that $20, you need do nothing, whereas for me to hold exclusive authority over it, I must violate the second rule of ownership - I must violate your will in order to have it. I have to rob you.

This is why societies punish murderers, rapists, robbers, and fraudsters. They don’t punish all of them because of power and corruption, but as a whole, all societies always have done this, or desired to do this, given their resources and power.

Rape as another example does not manifest unless there’s at least one non-consenting party. Same thing for murder. If both of us went into an MMA match together for example and we both fully understand the risks therein - including but not limited to possible death - then so long as we both followed the rules then if one of us died in the ring, we didn’t commit murder. Would it be a tragedy? Well, sure, but it wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) be called murder.

Now if I laced my gloves with lead which wasn’t in the rules and you didn’t consent to that? Then I murdered you. Even if my intent wasn’t to kill you, that is still breaking your consent which lead to a highly negative outcome for you. In many societies across the world as well we wouldn’t even classify such an act as first degree murder, and the penalty wouldn’t be as severe, though it would still be severe.

Or if someone tries to enter my home to harm me and my family and I put them down - that too isn’t murder, even though the assailant didn’t want to die, the logic there is that my will predated theirs - I did not want someone to attack me and my family, or even enter my home without my consent - so the moment they did my act of violence was a reaction to their initiated act of which violated my will. It’d be akin to taking my $20 back if you stole it from me. I should be allowed to at that point even if you don’t want me to because it’s my $20.

In fact you already agree to this because you have no choice because of the two cardinal premises here. You would never want me for example to violate your will, so even if you were to tell me you would be OK if I took $20 from you that’s missing the point - that just means your will was aligned to give me $20. I again, never robbed you. You never ACTUALLY want to be robbed, you might just agree if someone takes something from you that you subjectively agree with their justification for doing so and thus, change your will so that you would be OK with them having what they took.

Your will was never violated then.

And I probably make exponentially more than you do.

Public schools should not exist, that is also correct.

Rich people don’t send their children to public schools because private schools are superior. The reason why I could not open my own private school for instance to compete against a local public school is because I am heavily regulated if I did so and I have to compete with an entity that does not need to make a profit to stay in business.

When a public school does so poorly that had they been a for-profit business, or even a non-profit business (but not “public”), they would have gone out of business, the government can just funnel more money into them because the government doesn’t make money by producing quality goods and services like the rest of the actual free market does, it just robs you and spends your money.

The USPS hemorrhages roughly 8 billion annually while both FedEx and UPS are fortune 500 companies, and on top of that, this is considering that USPS holds a monopoly on certain services, plus they lose millions of packages every year (or they get damaged), and the services themselves are horrible compared to businesses like FedEx, UPS, or even Amazon’s shipping.

I can pay almost nothing and have a package shipped from Walmart of Amazon same-day, but if I wanted to ship the same thing from the USPS - let’s say I wanted to ship a 5 lb turkey - that would cost me between a whopping $7.00 and $17.50 for standard domestic.

In addition, USPS has the worst on-time delivery performance.

Yes, lol. It isn’t for you to decide how someone else can use their property. The only thing you need to concern yourself with is if they are using it to violate the will of others per a logical order of operations.

For example, if Joe owns his bathroom, he absolutely can say black people can’t use it. It’s his bathroom. What he can’t do would be to shoot a black person with his gun. The reasons for each of these are logical and follow a very particular pattern of reasoning predicated on whether or not either is an initiated action against another’s preexisting will or not.

Public property is a misnomer. You are so very wrong and I hope you rethink your positions in light of how very inaccurate about the fundamental, logical aspects of reality that you’re so wrong about.

I don’t want to ban anything until you’re any age, I want to know what seems to be the most rational age that best quantifies the sentiment that you must be able to provide consent to interact morally in this world with your personhood. If you cannot reason properly, you cannot produce consent.

If you can - by way of sufficient evidence - show that a 21 year old can produce the fundamental same level of rationality as a 25 year old, then I would agree that a solid age is 21.

But the problem here isn’t age, it’s consent.

Sort of. I would probably say the best current descriptor would be voluntarist. Anarchist also works. I disagree with the notion that communists are anarchists.

A birth defect is a defect, it’s in the name. That isn’t the same as someone having a mental feeling that they don’t feel like something they couldn’t hope to define the essence of (because it hasn’t one.)

With respect, the argument you want to make is impossible. If a 12 year old for example can consent to irreversible treatments for a feeling of “trans”, then they can consent to having battery acid poured into their eyes so they go blind because they feel like they were supposed to be born blind.

Jewel Shuping (US) was diagnosed with Body Integrity Identity Disorder where she experienced an overwhelming desire to exist with a severe physical disability so she had numbing eyedrops and drain cleaner in her eyes at age 21.

Now it’s not for me to decide that it should be illegal for Jewel to have done this. At 21 she was - at least legally - able to make this choice herself. I would argue that she clearly was not of sound mind though, so anyone who assisted her should have been convicted of a felony offense. But I digress.

I’m not here to tell anyone what they can or cannot do with themselves and their life. I am 100% in favor of anyone living the life they so choose, trans or anything else. My problem isn’t even necessarily one of my own personal opinions or feelings on the matter, but on logic and reason for logic and reason’s sake.

If you cannot consent, you should not be allowed to make decisions such as to go blind. Of course you could consent (especially with your parents/guardians) to REPAIRING eyesight, even if you were born blind, because that is a fundamentally unnatural state.

We don’t have to have a 300 page dissertation to go over what a “natural state” is. Being born blind is not the intended state of a human being. Arguments past the self-evident like that are generally deluded and attached to some level of nefarious intent.

Note that I can be completely accepting of how an adult wants to live their life but not OK with asserting that a child can consent. Both things can be true. A child also cannot consent to sex with an adult, full stop. Anyone who claims otherwise is an enemy to rational justice and morality and doesn’t need a conversation in argument.

We don’t discuss pedophiles who act upon their feelings, we imprison or kill them. No discussion is necessary there.

Now can some of these conversations hold some level of nuance? Well of course they can, but I stand with what I said. IF you’re talking about endorsing certain mannerisms, dress, or presentation, so be it. If you’re talking about consenting to cutting off body parts at 12? No, full stop. A 12 year old cannot consent to that and their parents cannot either, and anyone who does cut off body parts to a 12 year old for such things should be seen as nefarious and tried to the fullest extent of the law.

There are no such things. Rights aren’t real. The only rational morality is objective morality, which is predicated on a logical order of operations across time.

What is moral is just that in which is not immoral, and that in which is immoral are those actions of which we should not engage, and those actions of which we should not engage are predicated on a foundational premise that you cannot desire the violation of your own will, and that it is not objectively possible to quantify value.

Thus, if our wills collide, creating a conflict, the proper (moral) way of resolving said conflict is to note which of us held a will that was already initiated, and which would require some level of action of which would violate that preexisting will in order to make it manifest into the world.

Take for example, theft. Theft is, at its most fundamental level, an act of which violates the will of another as it pertains to their property. If you have $10 and I want that $10, I am the one who would need to initiate an action (theft) to have that $10 without your consent (your will), ergo, we side with you in our contest because I would need to become a thief in order to manifest my will unto the world.

This is actually the logic that produces the ideas of murder, rape, theft, assault, fraud, slavery, etc. This is why in our languages we do not say someone was murdered if it was purely accidental and there was no amount of negligence (in which case, the negligence was the will violation which then lead to the result.)

It doesn’t matter what you look like, what color your skin is, how your eyes, nose, or mouth appears, what clothing you wear, how you talk, walk, or what features on a human being you find attractive - none of that has anything to do with human will (personhood.)

EVERYTHING else is nonsensical authoritarianism which is predicated entirely on arbitration.

The PROBLEM is that government exists and asserts that it can somehow “own” things. Public property is a misnomer. You cannot threaten your neighbor with violence unless they give you $500 to buy a lawn mower and then try to argue that the lawn mower is public property and thus, it isn’t theft. Ask someone if that would be OK sometime and after they say no, realize that the neighbor IS the state in this instance. Slapping a badge on something or putting someone in a uniform does not change the reality of what is or is not immoral, or even sane.

The whole world is quite brainwashed by statism because we were all indoctrinated into it from birth. The vast majority of people’s minds explode the moment you start talking about statelessness because they cannot fathom the idea that - for example - HAD the government previously been in charge of all of the food the argument would be that without government we would all starve to death - except of course the governments of the world are not in charge of all the food and we - in the US at least - have such an overabundance of food that we throw away billions of tons annually and have an obesity epidemic in the nation. That’s HOW GOOD WE DO FOOD without the state.

The problem isn’t “trans rights”, and it never was. The problem is this: If someone who claims they are “trans” wants to use my bathroom - IE: The bathroom in MY house that I own - then I consent to that. Come use my bathroom.

If you want to use a bathroom in a public building, the problem isn’t whether or not a group of wolves should be allowed to vote alongside the sheep to decide what’s for dinner. The problem is that neither the wolves nor the sheep should be allowed to manifest their wills in a manner of which is immoral, full fucking stop.

You can’t say you come from a system you were fucking BORN INTO that dictates you can vote in the oppression of your fellow man and then say that the removal of that system is too scary to fathom. That’s insane, cowardly, and sinister.

So again, the problem isn’t which rights trans individuals do or do not have or might not have in the future. The ACTUAL problem is that there is a system in place that lets some people vote in others who can make laws that can control what you can or cannot do on threat of violence that isn’t simply protecting the innocent from murder, theft, rape, enslavement, assault, and fraud.

I don’t care WHAT the law said: If a law was put in place saying the government would take my innocent child to have them put to death, I would kill every single government official that they sent my way until they physically stopped me. The bloodshed would either be very limited, or they would be calling it the new red sea. What is “legal” or not is of no consequence to good people. All that matters is what is MORAL, and law and morality have NOTHING to do with one another.

Ad hominem. Try a conversation.

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The government should not be allowed to “own” property or enforce victimless laws. The problem is always the government.

No that wouldn’t be possible. A slave is someone who is, for all intents and purposes, property of another against their will. If you consent to it, it wouldn’t be slavery.

It’s like theft. If you consent to give it to me I’m not stealing from you. In such an instance, you’re selling it to me, trading it to me, gifting it to me, or maybe just giving it to me as a gift. What manifests theft as theft from a fundamental idea of the essence of the idea itself is that I would need to be violating your consent - your will, as it were.

Theft is only theft when you violate will. Rape is only sex if everyone partaking consents. Even murder no longer becomes murder if there’s consent. In fact, you can kill someone who didn’t consent to dying and it still wouldn’t always be murder because the person may have consented to a risk that just so happened to end their life. Take for example if you consent to go skydiving and you fall to your death. The skydiving company didn’t murder you because you agreed to the risks of the situation that lead to your death.

Now had someone pushed you out of the airplane before you put your parachute on - which wasn’t something you agreed to have happen - then the person who pushed you out of the plane would have murdered you.

Slavery is the same thing. You’re not a slave if you’re OK with it. Now if you consented to be someone else’s property and you also consented for you to never be able to change your mind about it, well you’re an idiot. That’d be like agreeing to give your house away to someone and then being upset when you change your mind and ask for it back and they tell you no. You would never do that, so why would your own autonomy be any different?

The point here would be freedom, and what freedom logically means is that I cannot initiate actions - initiate is the key word here - that violate your will, and neither can you to me.

If you and 50 people got together and all consented to a village of debauchery, drugs, prostitution, and drunk driving, so long as you all consented, I would allow you to live that lifestyle without interruption.

I might try to convince you that there are better ways to live your life, but I wouldn’t use force against you to get you to stop.

But don’t forget that this only applies because there’s consent. If some of you enter our town where we do not agree to you doing drugs on my land or in my store, or driving drunk on the roads that our community all agreed to share ownership over, then we are justified if we not only ask you to stop or ask you to leave, but if we use violence against you to get to you if you refuse.

So to specifically answer your question, if you want to live the way you’ve described, you would absolutely be allowed to - by us, anyway.

In fact, we could even become allies whereas we agree to defend one another if another group were to come and try to use violence to force us into their ways.

The disconnect so many others face is only about freedom and nothing more. There is no such thing as a man so wise that he can make choices for other adults without their consent. Nobody knows better for me than I do and nobody knows better for my children than I do as their father (except an equal share, their mother.)

Even if you think you do, you don’t. Opinions aren’t facts, they’re opinions. Even if you THINK you have a better way of living, you don’t. The only time when you’re objectively wrong is when you’re utilizing violence for a victimless crime. Violence - legitimate, moral violence - is only for defense against things like murder, rape, theft, assault, and fraud.

When other people don’t get this it’s because psychologically they’re thinking at low levels. Low level thinking tends to be very isolated to the “me”. The higher up you go the more you begin thinking that others have wants and needs just like you do, and that your wants and needs may conflict with theirs. Many people today still think in terms of, “I want this and therefore so must you, so if you are protesting, you must be wrong, or sinister”. They cannot understand that someone else might have a want that differs from theirs, and that they aren’t wrong for having it.

I would argue that there are two forms of morals - subjective and objective. Objective morals are surrounded by the NAP while subjective morals are things like, “I don’t think you should smoke cigarettes because they could reduce your lifespan and that would cause pain to others around you, plus place additional burden on those providing healthcare and insurance.”

There’s no such thing as objective value, not even for human life, so to say your life holds value and thus, you shouldn’t smoke is just an opinion.

You don’t abide by any kind of government. You can’t. Your will cannot align to be violated. This is why you believe the purpose of voting is for, so when one person does something with your money that you don’t agree with, you believe you can get another person who won’t do those things.

I would argue that it isn’t that you’re in favor of government, it’s that you’re in favor of a justice system, school for your kids, roads, and other infrastructure. But to say you need the system of coercion we have in place else we can’t have those things is just nonsense. Would you not pay to have security if the government didn’t do police? Is your argument that other people wouldn’t? Who are these “barbarians” who wouldn’t? Do you know them? I don’t. I don’t surround myself with people like that, so it always diverts back to this idea that it’s the “others”, the “outsiders”, the “barbarians” who wouldn’t do this stuff if not coersed. Never us.

And even if you wanted to argue that you wouldn’t want to pay for police then you’re just arguing for less government, aren’t you? If you wouldn’t pay for police unless forced, then you don’t want police that badly. This isn’t a difficult concept. If I want something, I go and buy it. If I don’t buy it, I didn’t want it that badly. I fundamentally decided that I value my money more than the good or service itself, so I didn’t make the trade.

I simply take it one step further and understand that you shouldn’t be able to take my money to do anything with that I don’t agree with. If I agreed to it I would give you the money without the coercion. When I want something, I buy it from the store. When I don’t want something, you have to take money from me to get it if you won’t buy it yourself.

There is no such thing as governments, mind you. There are only people. If your neighbor were to come to your home and tell you they want $500 to do something with and you disagreed and they returned with a weapon and threatened you unless you gave it to them, you would immediately admit that such a scenario would be both immoral and crazy. The thing is, the propaganda you’ve been raised with is duping you into believing that this isn’t exactly what’s going on because they slapped a badge on your neighbor and convinced you that it’s not theft and authoritarianism.

If your neighbor made a nice looking badge and pinned it to their lapel, would that make it official? What if 10 of your neighbors all agreed that it was official and legit? Does it make it official and legit? What about 20 neighbors? What about 50? 500?

If not 1, then not 1 billion. No number of people agreeing to something warrants that it is legitimate. It used to be that millions of people agreed in slavery and slavery has never been legitimate. It was thought by many as legitimate, but so what?

There isn’t anything wrong with government if that government isn’t robbing you - that’s the rub. All a government really is is a relative force monopoly. If the government vanished tomorrow and your neighbors all gathered together with you and agreed to help one another and protect each other from outsiders who might seek to do harm to you or your properties, you would be a government, albeit a small one.

And I’m not saying we could or even should do away with current governments in the world tomorrow - even if we could. We would need 50-100 years or more to slowly wittle away these systems so that free people can take their place.

So to answer your question specifically, I don’t think it has anything to do with anarchists and everything to do with logic. If it is not OK for your neighbor John to do to you what I outlined above, then it isn’t OK for Tom to do it if Tom is a representative of the “government”. There is no such thing as saying you can rape someone because a group of people got together and decided what you decide is right is legitimate and therefore, it isn’t even rape.

The mere fact that your neighbor doing what the government does would be even legally classified as theft but when the government does it it’s not called by that same word should be a gargantuan red flag. Only the politicians and political manipulate language in that way. The honest of us just call it what it actually is - theft.

If I own something and you want it and I do not want to give it to you and you take it, that is theft. It doesn’t matter who does it or what “group” they are affiliated to. You don’t get to steal and then try and say it isn’t theft because your version is “legitimate”.

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The mere aspect of voting for a ruling class is sinister.

Gas prices should have nothing to do with governments, only markets. Gas prices being high is a byproduct of government interventions, or poor market choices, or both.