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"You are overly cynical;"
But right? This smells like you're only going to come up with bullshit excuses, like an apologist for a religion would.

"governments do solve a problem."
No they don't, just claim to.

"Or, at least, they are supposed to solve a problem."
Yes, we've heard many fairy tales on this.

"The primary purpose of a government is to promulgate and enforce rules on personal interactions;"
Wow that's extreme. Would that include these comments? Or must it be an interaction irl. Even though western governments totally agree with you they've thrown thousands of people in jail for saying things online that those governments didn't like. Usually it's people complaining about the consequensed of government policy.
You probably don't mean it that extreme, but governments don't care about intentions, they will do what they can get away with.

"these are the laws"
Laws are commandments people respect. But they would not respect such commandments from normal people. Meaning you view government as above normal people. It's fine for them to command people around and it's for the 'normal' people to obey these commands. This allows those in governments to do anything they want. And in reality we've seen government commit the most horrific atrocities, only slowed down by how much the people resist them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"The secondary purpose is to provide the citizens a means of acting collectively"
That's a terrible idea. People totally agree on what to do, even when they have the same information.
Here's a list of some difference in principles progressives and conservatives tend to value the most (left and right are historical accidents):
creativity - tradition
personal freedom - security
equality - economic freedom
Of course these people can't agree on what to do!

Then there is the economic issue. Economical actors have all kinds of transactions they would like to engage in and that would benefit them. But very ofthen those transactions are detrimental to other in the transaction. In the free market it would be far too costly to force others to engage in such transactions. Anyone who tried would also be shunned by anyone else in the market. However with government this changes. It's realitively cheap to influence politicians to force those other parties to engage in the transactions, compared to the massive benefits.
This is called public choice theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
People can organize without government just fine: business (not a corporation, that's a government protection from consequence), sports clubs, mutual aid societies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lReWpkn0dU), etc
Organizing within government is the opposite to cooperating because it always includes initiating violence (or the threat of) against peaceful people.

"for example, to hire police to enforce those laws."
What justifies stealing in order to get what you want? Boing developed a new Airbus, it cost a lot, would it be okay for them to steal that money? It's really very selfish to support government stealing stuff for you to get what you want.

"In a free-wheeling anarchy (which is the libertarian utopia), there is no state, there is only private power. The dream is that the good folk will outnumber the bad folk"
Which is what happens. After China mass murdered their own population because the government had so much power, they started allowing their own people some private property again and hundreds of millions escaped poverty because of it.
Even in a country like Somalia thing improved between 1990 and 2005, when they didn't have government: http://www.peterleeson.com/Bet...

"and be able to dominate the society."
Would you allow that? I would not, I would buy a gun and defe

Because government destroys those aspects of life?
http://www.investopedia.com/ar...
http://www.peterleeson.com/Bet...
http://mensenrechten.org/wp-co...
Government forces people to do things, which is the opposite of cooperation.
Governments that provide health care to their people have the worst quality health care of all.
In Canada pets get better health care than humans, because gov hasn't destroyed the health care system for pets.

Why downvote?
Life got better for the people in the period of 1990 to 2005 when Somalia didn't have a government:
http://www.peterleeson.com/Bet...

Are you talking about socialism? Yes that has been a utter disaster every time it's tried.
From about 1990 to about 2005 Somalia had no government and life improved for them:
http://www.peterleeson.com/Bet...

Without government holding them down people can buy guns and defend against bandits and maffia just fine.
Note that the countries with the most crime have the most intrusive and anti-freedom governments.
Yes we had rulers before, like kings, they're no better, just another form of having rulers.
The problem with government is that they have the right to initiate violence against peaceful people, same applies to a king.

Yes some people are very bad, are you saying the political process selects the good people?
The last US election just had the worst two possible options in their history, the political process seduces the worst criminals to seek power.

Yes, the recent church shooting is the perfect example of why good people need to have guns.
1. The guy was able to murder 26 people (not 46) because none of them had a gun, it was a gun free zone.
2. Gun free zones only affect good people, the bad people will still have guns when they want to do bad things.
3. According to gun regulations the guy should not have been allowed to buy a gun on three accounts. So your solution has been tried and it failed utterly. The government can't do anything good, that's the fairy tale people like you believe in.
4. Even though government is such an abysmal failure you want to entrust it with your safety. Even though far more people die in mass shootings where they can keep going until the police stop them compared to when a citizen stops them: http://www.freerepublic.com/fo....
More reasons:
5. Kids used to bring their guns to school for shooting practice, no school shootings then.
6. Regular crime also gets worse when people aren't allowed to defend themselves, here are the stats specifically for murder in the UK, where they have almost no guns: https://crimeresearch.org/2013...
7. The lie on the australian gun buyback program is that things first got worse and then after they de-regulated guns a bit, and people got more guns, things got better again https://crimeresearch.org/wp-c...
8. States in the US have a relative high amount of freedom and have a wide variety of gun regulations. This allows different solutions to gun regulation to be tried out. And it hasn't worked, note that you never hear democrats talk about the stats on gun regulation. Even they know such a lie would be too blatant. In the US there is a strong correlation between gun ownership and crime, that's why the Democrats only argument is emotional.
9. Mass shooters shoot themselves when they're being shot at by cops or citizens. If you're going to wait until they're done murdering, you're going to be waiting a very long time.

Somalia is just a collection of weak, ineffective governments on top of each other. It's not quite an anarchy, but it's interestingly done much better since the collapse of the government (as of 2009), suggesting that in markets where the free market has been able to enter, life has improved. It's not a great place to live by any standards but has done relatively well compared to its neighbors. Of course, it looks like people are trying to ruin it by strengthening the state.

On a side note, the government is not here to "protect you" from the wealthy. It's here to extract resources from you to stay in power. If pretending to be against the wealthy (while transferring money to them through lucrative contracts and favors) helps achieve that end, it will be done.

You should read this paper very carefully:

http://www.peterleeson.com/Bet...

Also, Somalia currently has the cheapest and best cell phone service in Africa.

The "move to Somalia" argument is a pretty standard trope when having conversations about the proper size and scope of government. Of course, there are lots of reasons why overweight white software engineers from America wouldn't necessarily thrive in Somalia irrespective of what kind of government it did or didn't have, but that doesn't really seem to diminish how often the trope is pulled out, so let's try something else -- you know, actual data.

Rather than repeating an unsubstantiated bias, I encourage you to read the paper I linked.

I'll spoil it a little bit: The conclusion, of course, isn't that all governments are bad (that's a philosophical conjecture, not a testable hypothesis). It is, however, quite apparent that some governments are so bad that no government is actually preferable.

This is actually the case in Somalia.

Somalia may at some point transition to a government that is objectively better than their current situation, but their current arrangement is, as the paper argues, objectively better than their previously governed condition.

I love it when someone mentions Somalia and gives entirely uninformed opinions. This gives me the opportunity to debunk your statement with a single link: http://www.peterleeson.com/better_off_stateless.pdf

2007. 2013 now and 1/3rd of somalians suffer from depression and the common cure is to chain them up.

Actually, do you know which country in Africa has the cheapest cell phone providers?

Somalia.

(ref: http://www.economist.com/node/5328015)

Somalia fascinates me from a free-society perspective. Usually Somalia is the punchline of some attempt to troll a libertarian, but if you actually look at what's happening there, it's quite fascinating.

This paper is one of my favorites. Take a look, you may be surprised:

http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf

Actually, if you take a hell-hole and remove the government, its economy gets better. Governments have surely created some hellholes, and may be the most deadly invention humans have ever created, but when those people throw off their government and start to improve the hellhole, that's no time to cry, "see, lack of government creates a hellhole!" That's just poor logic.

If human sacrifice on the order of 1% of the planet's population per year is required to keep "the peace" then the definition of "peace" is very broken.

Meanwhile, the pro-government elites love to sit in their Starbucks showing everybody the big Apple on the back of their iPads, so it's good for a chuckle at least.

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahaha. I cannot believe you just trumpeted warlord-run Somalia, where there is no longer infrastructure to support food distribution or medical provisions or ANYTHING, as an example to promote your idea of anarchy! What a complete joke!

Time for a bit of epistemology - where do you get your information? Fox News? Some other corporation with a pro-State agenda?

Try a scholarly paper, if your world view will permit the challenge. (citations available on SSRN or Google Scholar, but the PDF is $$$ there).

Well, I get trolled with this often enough that I decided to do a little reading, and was actually fascinated by what I found.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeer

and more interestingly:

http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf

(sorry for PDF link)

Note that there is a spectrum of viewpoints between libertarian and voluntaryist-anarchist.

The main point is that say, voluntaryists seek to acheive a stateless society by persuasion and education. Hopping over to somalia where you've got a non-trivial portion of the population beleiving that killing non-muslim-enough folks is just dandy doesn't seem like fertile soil for that kind of experiment.

Somalia is actually divided up into several regions, with much of the nasty fighting happening towards the south. Further north you get the less "exciting" stuff and there's been a fair bit of prosperity (read the PDF).

After a bit of reading, I have to admit that I was intrigued at the idea. The Xeer "system" sounds quite interesting and unlike anything I've ever heard discussed in poly sci classes. The main problem is that to the extent these systems work, they do so, IMO, in large part due to ideological homogenity. For that matter, much of what made the original USA work was the larger degree of ideological homogenity present then than now.

I cannot imagine that if I walked into Somalia and said "hey! I think your ancient system of non-state justice is great!" they'd say anything other than "sod off, imperialist" (first in my language, then in 4 of their own that I have no hope of ever understanding)

So, circling back to the original troll.. the PDF link is the real interesting point here. Given an identical society with and without government, in a people group that has had a history of relative anarchism.. the individual (and the society ) actually prospers after a corrupt government is removed and anarchy is restored.

The paper does't claim that anarchy is categorically better than government, but it does claim (and demonstrates) that _some_ governments are worse than some anarchies. I think that's an interesting and promising result.

The PDF results really are interesting. Somalia has the cheapest and highest quality cell phone calls in Africa. There are at least 4 different electricity providers available in one city, with pricing models like "per light bulb".

Without data on what a group of canonical American libertarians & voluntaryists might do if they actually had a wide-spread state-free society to play in, it's hard to credibly suggest that it would instantly be somalia. For one thing, the average web developer has no business trying to do subsistence farming, doesn't have a strong extended family, etc.

I think the cheif problem with an American-libertarian breakaway society would be the urge of its members to seek huge profits doing things Uncle Sam gets mad over... off-shore gambling, drug production, copyright violation, etc.

A group of people that attempt to break away from the US really don't have a viable shot at succeeding until they can credibly threaten to detonate a nuclear weapon in the US mainland -- in DC or NYC or someplace like that.

Once that capability is beleived (by uncle sam) to exist, such a break-away non-state can actually say "leave us alone" and have it stick.

Somalia is no longer stateless so your example isn't valid. However life in Somalia was steadily improving after the government collapsed until foreign governments came along and propped up a new one.

if you look at pre anarchy and post anarchy Somalia you will see that the people there were much, much, much, much better off without the central authority.

In case anyone is wondering about the source for such a counter-intuitive claim, he's talking about Peter Leeson's paper Better Off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse.

On the flip side, some of Leeson's conclusions are in dispute.

Actually conditions in Somalia are improving faster under anarchy than then did under a government. Sometimes less really is more.

Look at Somalia before (socialist dictatorship) and after (near total anarchy) and you will see that Somalia is better off stateless. (look at this paper http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf). Lets see, comparing the last 1985 to 1990 (last 5 years of the Somali government) and 2000-2005 (5 years under near total anarchy), life expectancy has gone up 3 years, over half Somalia's population has access to health care compared to just a bit more than 25% under their government, technology has increased with many more people owning phones, TVs and radios, infant mortality has gone down, and the only two things that have really decreased since anarchy is adult literacy (down 5% points) and school enrollment. This of course is to be expected (even today about 43% of people in Somalia live on less than $1 per day, though it is much better than 60% with their government) with no body to subsidize school and little to no demand for skilled labor.

Free trade has flourished also, (see http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/AFRICAEXT/SOMALIAEXTN/0,,contentMDK:20398872~menuPK:367671~pagePK:141137~piPK:141127~theSitePK:367665,00.html) airlines increased dramatically, as have telecoms, media, and many other businesses. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy_in_Somalia for an overview)

While Somalia is still a dangerous country, and still a poor country. There have been numerous improvements in their conditions from pre-1990 to post 1990. And while Somalia is an extreme incident, it just shows the explosive growth possible with a truly free economy.

Peter Leeson makes the argument that Somalis are Better Off Stateless, and it's an interesting argument. Life under "Scientific Socialism" was not a salutary experience for Somalians. The Islamic Courts Union and its successors seem to be intent on establishing an Islamic state, so it's not as if all the violence in Somalia is the result of "statelessness"--a lot of the conflict arises precisely from those who wish to establish a powerful, unified government.

On the other hand, suh, when you impugn fans of the great Lynyrd Sknyrd by likening them to fools who think any government is better than no government, you negligently insult a broad mass of the populace. Just a month ago I myself was at an Angry Samoans show shouting "FREE BIRD!" and maintaining to those around me that if only they would hold their lighters aloft and shout "FREE BIRD!" for 30 minutes, the Samoans would surely come out for an encore!

Technically, anarchy is the absence of the state. You could still have mutually agreed upon restrictions and sanctions without a state. Pirate ships in the Carribean are a good example because they explicitly operated outside the law of states.

Better Off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse -- looks interesting.