Why are people so affraid of anarchy?

[paulpablo]

Yeh there's lots of questions to be asked.  But if we pretend we were starting a society from scratch you can ask the same question about a government.  America has a stable government, relatively speaking.  But you have situations in places with a less stable government where they do just take off with citizens money.

And they often do -- without the "taking off" part sometimes (cf. plenty of Third-World governments). But the fact is that removing government after millennia of cultural adaptation to it is simply not realistic. Starting from scratch is indeed only a pretense.

You could say ok so why should we trust a government? Even when talking about America, why should we trust a government?  They (governments in general) have a history of genocide, colonization, enslavement.  What if we give all our tax dollars to a government leader and they decide to take off, they decide to use the money on wars that make no sense, they decide to bomb the worlds poorest countries, they decide to use intelligence agencies to fund future terrorists.

I never said I trusted governments; I don't. Indeed, I've said enough here at this site that powers granted to government are almost never abused. But without governments, what's to prevent those depredations? At least in a republic one may vote against such assholes.

When said asshole is pointing a gun in your face, what recourse do you have other than shooting first? Is that a good model for a stable society? I don't think it is.

That's not to say I think anarchy is a cure for this, I can't answer every "what if" question there is in relation to anarchy or a government.  I'm pretty happy living under a government that's all I know.

I'm in the same boat. I dislike government overreach, which happens all too often. I'm also like you accustomed to what I know, "a bird in the hand" and all that.

What I disagree with is the insistence there can be no laws in anarchy, and no one would pay for firemen or soldiers.  I think the system might be worse, possibly, but it's not impossible that law systems or that some sort of emergency service couldn't exist.

Without a government, how would you pass laws, much less enforce them? I think this is where your thinking breaks down. Laws are laws because someone will do the dirty work of apprehending those who violate the social contract.

Without those guys, the social contract doesn't even have the paper on which it isn't written.

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http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/p...rchy-works
Yet more defenses of an anarchist view of social order

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/t...-faq-15-17
More

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/s...of-anarchy
More

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/p...of-society
More

Argument by linkage. Summarize your point intelligibly, if you can.

I imagine it depends on what type of society it is that has no government as to how they form laws and enforce them.

For the creation of them all it takes is for them to be written down and taken seriously/agreed upon.  Take for example sharia, obviously not all Muslims agree on what laws Islam dictates but there are communities who are all in agreement about what is written down.  And that's what makes it the law to them.

To enforce the law successfully obviously it would take some kind of monopoly on violence other than a government monopoly.