The State (government) is more evil than good.

P1: Taxes No, I don’t assume that it’s only spent on that. I’m well aware that isn’t the case, and I apologize if I gave Pro that impression. However, if the causes of welfare/healthcare are sufficiently advanced by the collection of taxes, we might well conclude that the collection of taxes is worth the advancement of welfare/healthcare. As far as why the government wouldn’t make you donate directly to the poor, they have a national infrastructure and a vast bureaucracy. It isn’t very unreasonable to suppose they might be well-equipped to deal with the duty. Nor does the government ‘hold people at gunpoint.’ There are penalties to not paying taxes, to be sure, but not anything as serious as being shot. And given that the taxes you aren’t paying are going to the vital functions of providing sanitation, streets, et cetera, you are basically stealing from everybody by not paying your fair share when in fact you are perfectly capable of paying it. That’s the reasoning behind my hermit argument. The vast majority of people not only want government services like food inspection, public transportation, water sanitation, streets, police, fire fighters, and Medicare, they experience a great degree of benefit from using them. Can’t do that without money, so we need taxes. The only way, realistically, to not use these government services, is by living in the middle of nowhere. And even then the argument could be made that you’re benefiting from environmental regulations. Otherwise, you are blatantly using them and not paying for them—and if someone perfectly capable of paying the taxes isn’t, why should anybody? To answer Pro’s argument relating to Norway and Sweden: You can’t add percentages like that. If I take fifty percent of something I’ve already taken fifty percent of, I haven’t taken it all. I’ve taken seventy-five percent of it. Unless Norway uses an income tax that isn’t based off of what people actually take home, that isn’t the maximum/minimum tax rate. And Pro’s argument for Sweden’s tax rate (that it is higher than the income earned) utterly fails because of this fact. I might also add that not all of the money someone in Sweden will be taking home will be taxed due to the sales tax; some of it may be invested, or saved. In exchange for the high tax rates, you get some of the best public health care[1], public transportation [2], a good social safety net[3], among other services. Not all that bad a deal. Logically, if the poor were being turned middle class and the middle class were being made poor, that would mean every single year social stratification would reverse itself. I would very much like to see any evidence of this; my conversations with people from Sweden have given me no sign of this, and thus it would bring a whole new perspective onto the lives of some of my friends. P2: Education That’s not necessarily a lie so much as the United States sticking its collective fingers in its collective ears and not wanting to admit that the Soviets were better at something than we were. And in any event, does Pro have any evidence that that is still what is being taught, or that it is due to the government at any high level and not the local school board, or that it was due to anything but incompetence? M-theory, cycle theory, and the multiverse theory are all either fairly new and theoretical or variants on the Big Bang theory (for instance, the cycle theory is often described as a ‘Big Bounce’). M-theory was developed in the early 1990s. ’s not entirely unreasonable to suppose that many schools wouldn’t have editions where these competing theories were mentioned, or that certain courses (especially lower levels) would simply make mention of the most prominent theory for the origin of the universe. Regarding history: Pro just admitted that we acquired Florida from Spain peacefully. The fact that we had troops ready to invade doesn’t necessarily mean the actual transfer wasn’t marked with a war or invasion to get it. My AP United States history textbook says otherwise. I forget the name, but will post it in the comments section tomorrow. I find Pro’s assertion that the world only has rules because of the state baseless. For instance, tribal societies are often given as examples of stateless societies, but they nevertheless have rules—for example, several have laws pertaining to contact with menstruating women. The fact is, it is a good idea to get used to the idea that the world has rules that it’s a good idea to follow. That doesn’t necessarily mean questioning decisions is bad—and if I may use my personal experience as a source, I have been able to question decisions made by school faculty. P3: War As far as organized war… well, it would definitely look different, but what would keep two corporations from declaring war on each other in an attempt to seize each other’s private property? And even without a formal declaration of war, there’s still a lot of room for one group of people to be fighting another group of people. An organizational structure there helps, but that isn’t necessarily government as anarchists usually define it, and it isn’t actually necessary if you’ve got sufficient ethnic tensions. There were clan wars even without actual states to help them[4]. Relating to the fact that the cause is not in favor of the people that the government was formed to serve: What of it? Pro just argued that the United States has an obligation to assist people worldwide. Why should that not include something like stopping a few genocidal madmen who would systematically exterminate large numbers of people and oppress the rest? Unpleasant as World War II was, I would argue that it was worth fighting against Hitler, Mussolini, and whoever the guy in Japan was. Yes, these people did use governments to carry out such acts. But the existence of pogroms and the Rwandan genocide (where the government was controlled by the people being killed) suggests that it isn’t actually necessary. P4: Censorship I’ll buy that some TV is censored, as is some radio, but the state (at least, the states that we’ve been discussing) is doing it out of a rather misguided attempt to ‘preserve public sensibility,’ which apparently means that Michael Savage can launch into homophobic tirades but we can’t see sex on TV. Odd, to be sure, but it seems a bit of a stretch to call it evil for having some stupid priorities. I suppose one could make the argument that not censoring Michael Savage leads to a detrimental effect on society, but a homophobic environment in schools is a far more a danger than a single git on a radio station, even if he has a fanbase. And censoring sex on certain television stations at certain times hardly has a clear harmful effect on society. Indeed, it could be even argued that given the sheer amount of hand-wringing that would happen over it—since the censorship is popular (can you imagine a politician running on a platform of ‘Let’s allow explicit sex scenes on TNT at three in the afternoon’ being elected?)—it saves us having to deal with all our so-called ‘moral guardians’ acting like chickens with their heads cut off. Which would, in my opinion, be a giant headache. C1: The State versus a specific State The resolution is ‘The State.’ It is not ‘some states.’ Few sane people would disagree with the idea that some states are evil (by the stated definition of evil, since some people deny evil exists). Sure, you get states like Nazi Germany, and that’s obviously an evil state. Then you get states like Sweden, and these appear to be, all things considered, pretty good states. <Pro never specified which state. This means that the debate will either be: about the abstract nature of governments (usually anarchist thought seems to focus around this idea) about the actual effect of governments If it’s going to be option two, since we’re judging moral balance by the concept of utility (more or less), Pro has to show that the situation without a government would be better.