Voluntaryism is Morally, Economically, and Socially Better for Society than Statism

Authority, let us take a minute to define a couple of variations that word stands for. Here is Dictionary.com: 1. the power to determine, adjudicate, or otherwise settle issues or disputes; jurisdiction; the right to control, command, or determine. 2. a power or right delegated or given; authorization: Who has the authority to grant permission? 3. a person or body of persons in whom authority is vested, as a governmental agency. 4. Usually, authorities. persons having the legal power to make and enforce the law; government: They finally persuaded the authorities that they were not involved in espionage. 5. an accepted source of information, advice, etc. The part you are fighting derives from the first 4 definitions. But all of their power derives from #5. And here is the part you cannot fight. An accepted source of information, advice, etc, is the part that is necessary and operationally critical to today's life. The rest is a framework to channel that power. All of it has the opportunity to be misused, or improved/changed to the benefit of the constituency. The drink of water you had today came through pipes put in by plumbers and pipe fitters with specialized knowledge you have no access to unless you choose to follow that path. The cleanliness and clarity of that water depends on specialists on chemical processes. Another piece of information you have no ability to learn, unless you make that your life's work. Specialists, experts, veterans, our very lives depend on those who have that kind of information and power. Pretending that you can replace them with a Google search is the height of folly, and when you dismiss them, especially in cases where health or security are at stake, you put peoples lives at risk. Your sources outline the lives lost or affected due to misuses of power, but ignores the lives saved by the beneficial aspects of that power. It ignores the lives that exist as a result of the beneficial aspects of that power. In effect you suffer from something called "Confirmation Bias"; searching for sources that confirm your already held beliefs. . You look at the news, but what is news? News is a reporting of stuff that hardly ever happens. Stuff that is normal never makes the news. And frankly, in today's first world countries, prosperity is normal. Not newsworthy, certainly, but normal. Suppose that a news organization gave the same level of coverage to every successful flight that happened. Suppose it gave the same coverage to a successful flight as they do to MH370, the lost Malaysian flight. How many times would they have to trumpet "The flight made it! Yay! How quickly would you tune out? One of the other difficulties you suffer from is that of scale. There are many aspects of society that would never warrant further study due to rarity. You mentioned raw milk. The Center for Disease Control, a government agency, says that Raw Milk caused "From 1998 through 2011, 148 outbreaks due to consumption of raw milk or raw milk products were reported to CDC. These resulted in 2,384 illnesses, 284 hospitalizations, and 2 deaths. Most of these illnesses were caused by Escherichia coli, Campylobacter, Salmonella, or Listeria. " http://www.cdc.gov... Scientific Method includes all of the available data, not just cherry picking preferred outcomes. In your world, the CDC, one of the many public goods, cannot exist. So let's do some math. Raw Milk is not available everywhere and is a minuscule portion of the total milk consumption in the U.S. Just to put a made up number on it, because I cannot find figures, let's say that 5 million gallons of raw milk is sold and consumed each year. (if you have different figures, I will happily oblige) there are approximately 20520 million gallons of milk consumed each year in the U.S. http://chartsbin.com... If we all had raw milk, your scheme would cause about 8,200 deaths, 1,165,558 hospitalizations, in about a 13 year period. Going back the other way, 2 deaths from 1998 to 2011 is hardly worth investigating. 2,384 illnesses divided by 50 states, divided by 13 years = 3.66 illnesses per year per state. Those are numbers that are easy to ignore when you look at a state, and you could never hire someone to do the investigations without some sort of super-fund. So this is an example of the size of the hole in your arguments. Ignore the prosperity, focus on the heartache. This typifies and defines most of your arguments, and is why they are so easy to discredit. You never look at the whole picture, and your sources, by not mentioning the whole picture, are not just suspect, but most certainly biased and occasionally diabolical. If you concede this point, I will forgo thrashing every single one of your references beyond all recognition. I have already done most of the work so the death of each of your data points will be swift and painless. I will grant you this, today's society is so different than that of the most recent generation before you, that radical re-thinking of distribution of power is needed. So much of how power was distributed was due to bottlenecks of information that simply do not exist to a great extent anymore. You are following some of the paths that will lead to that, and I commend you for it. I simply believe your research would be better served attacking the real problems rather than the framework that virtually all of our society is built upon. Tilting at windmills hurts you more than it hurts the windmills. http://www.phrases.org.uk...