American’s vote for the government and fund it with their taxes. To believe it’s a system with any other purpose than to serve it’s citizens is assenine.
Actually, citizens pay taxes to avoid going to jail or, in the olden days (perhaps soon to be reintroduced), to avoid being killed on the spot.
They vote because when you are locked in a room with no way out, you’ll push one of the buttons in front of you frantically - trying to figure out if, perhaps, they are pushed just like this, you’ll get out.
When you’re not paying taxes or voting, someone richer than Smaug from the Hobbit is cashing in on the rest of your life.
To call this a system that serves its citizens seems… I’m not sure what to call it. Naïve? Misguided? Uninformed?
better than what we had before the whole government thing, if you think this is bad, wait until the warlords come kill you, enslave your children and use your wife as a baby production machine
The warlords are also a government. However, the fact that warlords emerge when government fails shows that government is inevitable, so the best you can do is try to have a good one.
This is a bit of an old reply, but I thought I’d post something I stumbled upon here as it’s a response to your fear of warlords: https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/111290743792188200
From the post (it’s quite extensive with plenty of references):
“Once people are free of state violence and hierarchy, how can they just stop some bad actor from taking over?”
The assumption is that people who are free from coercive hierarchies are powerless to act in their own self defense, alone or in cooperation with each other.
(The question is usually accompanied by some invocation of the dreaded “war lord” whom the questioner assumes will inevitably overrun a nonstate or non-hierarchical community.)
So, I thought I would take a crack at answering this as comprehensively as I can!>>
The assumption is that people who are free from coercive hierarchies are powerless to act in their own self defense, alone or in cooperation with each other.
That’s the problem. Acting alone is not an option since an organized force will always defeat a disorganized one, and “cooperation” would mean forming the same kinds of hierarchies and governments that we already have, except they won’t have the centuries of stress-testing our present democratic systems have undergone and will therefore fall to corruption and authoritarianism much more easily.
This is why anarchism is such a bankrupt ideology. At best it consists of people willing to burn the world down to institute a system that would be the same but worse.