r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/The_Egalitarian Moderator • Apr 05 '24

Megathread | Official Casual Questions Thread

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u/MaterialSign1347 Aug 04 '26

My co-worker and I regularly get into the same debate every other day where he'll suggest that government "shouldn't exist" and that everyone in America should just simultaneously stop paying taxes and live for themselves.

Every time they bring it up, I try to ask questions as to 1) how that would actually work and 2) how would it not end up just being another government and every time it seems like the conversation just goes in a circle where neither of us are understanding each other and I don't even know how to respond to them at this point.

They insist that when a community works for itself, it doesn't need governing because everyone would assign a role to everyone else to take care of each other. But this just seems like another form of government to me. Also, how would everyone just magically get along by being ok with the roles they're assigned?

This is a topic of debate that when someone proposes the idea to me, I want to support them because ideally, we should all be able to take care of each other and build our communities ourselves. But humans are also an extremely selfish species and I really doubt that getting rid of government as a concept would fix anything.

This topic might seem silly to some, but it's been on my mind and I'd like to educate myself on how to better participate in these kinds of discussions because I genuinely don't know how to even approach this type of worldview without sounding completely inept.

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u/IntelligentDepth8206 Aug 05 '26

I'd like to educate myself on how to better participate in these kinds of discussions

You can't. That guy is operating on abstract concepts. No matter what you say, someone operating ideologically (anti-tax) instead of empirically will always find an excuse to counter you. He's starting from "I'm right and this dialogue can ONLY end with me being more right." His views aren't falsifiable. If they were, he would care that 0 libertarian societies exist because they are failures and can't solve any problem that governments exist to solve like public health or sewage systems.

Been there, done that. The libertarian conversation is a waste of time. It crescendos into them finally admitting "I don't care about poor people or future generations." If that's your attitude then your politics is pointless. The unspoken foundation of politics is that you have to care about leaving a better world than you were born into. If you reject that, you reject politics. And that's not a serious person worth engaging.

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u/NoDig3444 Aug 04 '26

Sounds like anarcho-communism, or maybe voluntaryism. Both similar, both silly ideologies, but one is more leftist in flavor and the other is more libertarian.

Ask your coworker how they think global supply chains would work. You cellphone is made with components from a dozen different countries, and assembled separately in a dozen more. How is your community of ~500 people going to organize that?

If they respond that large corporations would still exist, just governments have been disbanded, then what you're talking to is an anarcho-capitalist. In that case I would recommend you give it a swift kick to the crotch, then a 2:1 ammonia/bleach mixture.

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u/MaterialSign1347 Aug 05 '26

I already know how they would respond and that is that global supply chains wouldn't exist on that scale because material items like cellphones wouldn't exist because people's values are different and we would all depend on each other locally for only the core necessities.

I try to combat this by saying that not everyone's core necessities are the same but I get nowhere.

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u/NoDig3444 Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26

Yeah I was afraid of that.  You can ask the same question about artificial fertilizers, tractors, insulin, antibiotics and vaccines.  Ask them to ballpark how many people would die from the collapse of the modern medical industry and industrialized farming.  

But it won't matter.  They decided how the world should be and everyone else is wrong because they're not as smart.  Any problems you point out are not because they're wrong, it's because all of humanity has the wrong values.  Like they say, you can't logic someone out of a position that they didn't logic themselves into.  

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u/BluesSuedeClues Aug 07 '26

Jesus. Don't ask about vaccines, that's really not a place you want to go with this kind of personality...

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u/bl1y Aug 09 '26

This is like asking how to engage with a conspiracy theorist. You just don't. Your coworker isn't rational and there's no point in letting them vent their nonsense at you.

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u/Primeboot7782 Aug 20 '26

That sounds a lot like making a commune, or at least a starting step.