Yet people are uniformly healthier in “socialist democracies” like Canada (which includes the native peoples of the North, who consume astonishing amounts of health care) and the Scandinavian countries. Why do you think this is so?

“nor does it facilitate the private sector making people healthier. It only takes and destroys, it doesn’t produce or create.”

So I’m curious. Do you ever drive on roads? Most roads were created by governments. Do you fly in a plane? The whole air traffic control system is a function of government.

Go to a public school? I understand that they’re pretty bad in the US but in the countries I grew up in, I got an excellent education and never paid a penny for it because it was organized by the government, and astonishingly, it’s quite economically efficient (what they lose by paying teachers more than they’re economically worth in your Scroogean world, they make by keeping all the operations in-house and not out-sourcing them to a chain of middle men).

I challenge you: walk into the poorest school in Canada, then walk into an average school around here (Brooklyn). I think you’d be shocked how much better the Canadian school was in every case.

Universal vaccination; the fragment of “government by laws, not men” which we still have left; the very existence of money itself; these are all things created by and sustained by government. Bridges. Safe food and water. I could go on and on.

Governments create many useful things. By simply digging your head in the sand and refusing to see this, you make your philosophy completely unbelievable to the common man.

“How do you feel about the fact that, whereas libertarians want to fight for a world where we would be unable to impose our will upon you (and you upon us), the very basis of your entire Statist system is that we are unable to even defend ourselves against you and your agents, much less opt out entirely? What do you think about that difference in goals and moralities?”

Well, I feel that you’re living in a dream world.

I believe your “world without a state” about as much as I believe that the Communist Party will just wither away at the right moment.

It’s not just that government is a necessary evil; it’s that an awful lot of good things have been accomplished by effective government; and if you look at the places that either have no government or ineffective government (e.g. Africa, much of Asia) you see places where no man can flourish except for criminals.

Believing that “the market will fix it” hasn’t been working for you, has it? It seems pretty clear that people aren’t in fact economicaly rational beings for any definition of “rational”.

You should give up your sophomoric ideas, realize that there’s always going to be a government, and instead work on creating the most rational, responsive, open, competent, efficient government you can.

As for wanting to opt out, sorry, you don’t get to do that. It’s a game theoretical thing; if a few people opt out, they get a huge advantage, so no one gets to.

It works out for you, though. You give up a lot of raw profit, but you get a lot of advantages: the advantages of a healthier and better educated populace who make a better consumer for your products, a better worker for your factories, and a better and further-seeing manager for your industry; fewer unemployed, embittered young males wandering around causing mayhem; no need to have an able-bodied man with guns accompany your aged mother when she goes to the store; that sort of thing.

And you know, people still become incredibly wealthy, more wealth in real terms than any human ever had before a couple of generations ago, even in your Social Democracy “slave states” you’re always going on about.

“I am a rock, I am an island” is not true. The world gets smaller every day. You cannot simply declare that you are a force unto yourself and refuse the participate in the social contract. Frankly, the rest of us will not let you, because we quite accurately perceive that you are taking the fruits of our labour (a stable government, services and utilities provided by our taxes) without contributing to the general good.

So have fun with your Libertarian world, but don’t believe that you’ll ever get more than a small fraction of people to follow you in your mad quest to tear down civilization and destroy the complex systems we’ve created that sustain you at each moment. Most people intrinsically understand that life in an anarchy is crude, brutish and short. They might complain about government, but what they want is good government, not none at all.

I suggest you’d have much better luck pitching for rational, optimized government. This is where I think you and I have a common concern – the massive wastage, patronage and looting that characterizes US government under the falsely self-identified “conservatives.”

I have written rather a lot about this if you’re interested in reading it…