> You can't have peace without the threat of force.

No, You or someone else would only come to my house and start claiming all my stuff if you believed it was in your best interests to do so. It might get you killed is indeed one reason that it might not be in your best interests to do so, but firstly there are many ways to implement the "it might get you killed" condition, and none of them necessarily rely upon a westphalian nation state as supporting infrastructure. In addition, if you believed it was not in your best interests for other reasons than "it might get you killed" it wouldn't matter, the end result would be the same.

People act in accordance with their best interests, it doesn't all have to be stick, it can be carrot, too. If you do not respect the property rights of others, it is only logical to assume that in turn, they will not respect your property rights. This makes it not in your best interests to do that.

Also, this response was directed at something that has nothing to do with the compulsion against the appropriation of private property by random people, it was a statement that it is wrong to extort people to finance your personal pet projects. If I set up a protection racket in my neighbourhood and enforce it with violence, it doesn't make it alright as long as I donate a portion of that to charity.

> The government is enormously wasteful for all the reasons you list.

So whilst acknowledging that the current system is completely broken, you still can't see the value in exploring alternative avenues for the cases where currently government acts as the sole service provider? Even in a case like education where they do a terrible job of it to boot? You really don't see a problem with that perspective?

It strikes me as someone living in a feudal system arguing for the necessity of landed nobility to protect them from roaming bandits despite the fact that they spend the majority of their time scraping together a subsistence existence to feed a parasite class. Or someone that has convinced themselves that an embedded baroque thrown together regex parser for html processing is better than an open source alternative because they're not familiar with it and it wasn't invented here.

> The issue is that there are circumstances where the market fails and society benefits from government intervention.

I see no evidence for this claim, the provision of any product or service allocated to government invariably ends up rated by political rather than performance metrics, it is necessarily inferior to alternatives where the performance can be directly rewarded or punished by the customer.

> So what are the private sector options for funding the education of poor children?

Or you radically overhaul the entire educational process to drastically reduce the investment necessary for attaining a superior quality education, the process as to how this is done is best decided by market forces, which as previously established drive costs as low as possible and quality as high as possible. Reducing costs results in the risk for loans going down and the ease of paying them back going up, as well as the coverage of scholarship / charitably funds for education going up.

Taking the entire sub performing public education infrastructure which has been sucking at the extortionate government teat for the majority of modern history and instead simply hooking it up to a directly user pays system will simply result in the vast majority of people refusing to patronise it due to its ineffectiveness and the cost relative to that ineffectiveness.

If "Let the market figure it out" with regards to educational means is too hand-wavy for you, consider Khan Academy or the vast crop of humans who have managed to self educate from the growing amount of information freely available on the internet for anyone with a desire to do so. There is enormous room in the machinery of education for improvement, and like everything else in history, there is no evidence that this is best managed by central planning and bureaucratic committees.

And it's still no justification for sticking a gun in the face of everyone in the world to finance the system, even if it actually wasn't as poorly performing as it is.

> See, this is why nobody takes you guys seriously.

Actually, it implies that the owners of any given location are responsible for the contaminants in that location. It implies that there is a market for the responsible disposal of hazardous environmental waste, and when people are held to account by their neighbours for the negative externalities of their own environments who are incentivised to do so they will be eager to make sure that they are not contaminating their surrounding environments. For the full details, see;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_environmentalism

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Future_Imperfect/Chapter22.htm...

Alternatively, your system is what led to CFC Ozone depletion, Chernobyl and all other associated nuclear incidents, Water board contamination from fracking, Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon, the Bhopal disaster, the epidemic of rising lead levels in the air and all the knock on negative externalities from that even though at the time of the creation of leaded fuel lead poisoning was extremely well understood and there were alternatives, Ethyl corp actually used the blunt force of the government to stop its competitors from even questioning their practices in this area.

And who is the biggest polluter in the world? I'll give you a hint, it's not a private enterprise. So you'll excuse me if I actually think it's more reasonable to have a problem taking your approach seriously.

> That being the exclusive means of enforcing contracts would create insurmountable barriers to entry for new market participants with no reputations

Because no new entrants in the bespoke software development ever start up and gain traction from clients when there is no local framework to hold them to the delivery of their promised goods and services like say outsourced arrangements with businesses from other countries where the direct application of the legal machinery of the local state is off the table, right? Alright, maybe that happens sometimes, but it's at least extremely uncommon right?

Markets are extremely well tested methods for the dispersion and management of risk, and that's all this particular issue is.

> Aren't you now refuting your whole philosophy?

I certainly would be if your assumption about the nature of my existence as a normal every day citizen moored to a typical nation state and all the infrastructure thereof were true. However, it is not. Also, we were discussing the results of behaving in a way counter to the rules set by an alternate society that at this point in time does not exist, and in that context I was pointing out that it would be easy to predict the results of your proposed behaviour.

> It is ridiculous, because neither is voluntary

It is voluntary, in the system under discussion you are free to choose not to engage in transactions with your fellow human beings. Yes, this might mean you starve or freeze to death, but that is the consequence of your voluntary inaction that nobody is forcing upon you. If you want to bring a case for that one, you'll have to take it up with entropy and nature itself I'm afraid.

> You pay your taxes under the threat of incarceration

You pay your taxes under threat of death, which will be actively imposed on you by a thinking entity which believes that it has the right to do so.

> you work for the owners of capital under the threat of death by starvation.

You engage in a free market because you want to gain the things that it has to offer you, like food and shelter, if you do not want these things you are not forced to engage in that market. No thinking entity will actively hunt you down for your refusal to participate in the system in question. In fact it is more likely that a thinking entity will offer you charity in sympathy for your position to protect you from the natural consequences of your own inaction.

That is why the two could not be more different, one is parasitism and slavery, the other one is symbiotism and trade.

> How can this be foreign to you?

Actually Africa has no shortage of government and the one area in which it does have a shortage of the form of government with which most of the modern world is familiar is actually outperforming all of its similar peers.

African governments are typically extremely corrupt and inefficient even by the standards of other world governments, which are as previously discussed corrupt and inefficient by nature. The charitable donations that are funnelled here are often parasitically controlled by the governments in question and doled out to the parties whom it is politically useful to do so, that you would use this as justification for the necessity of the state once again defies belief.

As for what "complete lack of government looks like" there is no place on the face of the planet that does not have some self important blowhard or committee thereof who believes that they have the right to parasitically impose their personal brand of law upon a static geographical area. Even Somalia which is the oft cited go to example for "without government" is simply a patchwork coalition of warring factions who claim sovereignty over a given territory. So citing examples is not really possible, people of the earth are still too addicted to the drug of the state for now.

With the growing discontent with that status quo all over the world though coupled with advances in technology that make it practical to choose to adopt systems like anarcho capitalism I have hopes that this might not always be the case. Back to the original question, I see this as one of the more promising ways to throw off that yoke.