I’m only aware of private clinics, with laws varying across provinces. Provincial laws here prohibit staying overnight in a private clinic, for example, limiting access to healthcare. Meanwhile public emergency rooms are shutting their doors, unable to hire nurses and doctors, pushing back surgeries, and so on, putting entire communities at risk.

I think abolishing the state is a bad idea so long so long as people believe the state is required to govern their affairs.

We have private healthcare where I live. Meanwhile, our public healthcare system is collapsing.

Authority of any kind has to prove its legitimacy, especially state authority. It hasn’t. So I don’t think it has a legitimate role, nor do I think they can be improved. I do think we should stop thinking in statist terms.

I don't think you're particularly well informed on the issue, then.

It’s a point of fact that government was not required for healthcare, only that it has developed a monopoly on it.

Are you claiming that without the state these things would not occur?

No, I’m just wondering if you developed ideas, principles, and corresponding behaviors in a state that promotes war, slavery, bigotry, imperialism, you name it.

I just told you it is. Without Medicare, most US hospitals would have to close their doors.

And I just disagreed with you for the reasons I stated.

American healthcare, as we know it today, wouldn't be possible without Medicare funding.

You want to go back to 1960s funding, but keep the same level of care? I don't think that's going to work.

I didn’t say I want to go back to any sort of funding, only pointing out government funding isn’t required for healthcare.

I did, but did so within a state that promoted equality and the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is evident that not everyone in this state abides by these principles, at least when it comes to how they treat others.

And there is not one single value the that it hasn’t violated. It also promotes war, racism, brigandage, robbery, you name it.

So is that that you are not opposed to statism but rather to particular practices of the state?

I’m opposed to both, though I have always admitted my own statism.

I have not stated a position. I recognize that we enjoy certain benefits being citizens of a state, but do not accept your view that citizens are slaves.

Slaves had certain benefits. Their master would feed and house them, for example.

You didn’t develop any ideas, principles, and corresponding behaviors as you grew up? How do you survive?

I was speaking of funding, not practices. I assume that had you worked in one of those places you wouldn’t require a public authority to govern your day-to-day.

I’m not convinced we should do without the state. I’m only convinced the state should not operate like a criminal organization.

Your position reminds me of the happy slave myth.

Historically, hospitals have been funded from many sources, much of which were not from the government.

Sure. If you have a better idea I’m all ears.

I’m not so sure about that. The Catholic Church, once the most dominant influence in the west, has no such power. Centuries of “reformation” is all it took.

If you lost your faith in religion would you still go to church?

How so?

You follow their rules for funding, not because you require an authority to govern your life. Presumably you would follow the rules according to any source of funding, not just state funding?

Yes. You can operate in your day-to-day without some authority telling you what to do.

So they are not actually present or involved in your day-to-day.

Do you require their presence?

I think the founders of the US would have agreed for the most part. Their goal was to leave government some distance from the average person's life.

Their vision didn't work in the end though, due to the massive immorality of slavery. As I said, as a species, we're not ready to live without states.

How much is the state involved in your day-to-day?

I think you’re right on that one, and well said. It might be feasible if there is some degree of voluntary participation. But wherever Engels and Lenin proposed that the state would whither away has proven the opposite. It has only grown in power, and in inverse proportion to social power.

Lenin was right about the state as an apparatus of coercion, and noted it’s evil and exploitation; he was right that a state is unnecessary in a moral man; but his socialism as a necessary state of transition between capitalism and communism has proven worse than what came before it. People cannot be coerced towards a moral code, especially if you elect your revolution upon the skeleton of authoritarian institutions, where its essential functions of exploitation, control, and confiscation remain.

The communists of today still see the state as the apparatus that will emancipate the proletariat and help usher in communism, a la Lenin. We can call it state socialism or state capitalism, but it’s always state intervention on a totalitarian scale. In a way, it is what they imagined.

The prevalence and ubiquity of an institution is due to the state of mind that prevails towards it, the set of ideas in which men tend think about it. We only need to stop thinking in statist terms and the rest will follow.

I think Marx felt the same way.

So did many great thinkers. But he proposed achieving such ends through statist means. That’s why it has never worked, and we see that communist states are some of the most totalitarian in history.

I would prefer a government that doesn’t operate as a criminal organization, a monopoly, and an anti-social institution.

Here’s how it works. You write a long clarification of misrepresented views like this:

That’s an odd projection, especially since I have already admitted that I do not believe people actually need or want to be governed, that they wish only for others to be governed. The answers to the question have confirmed my suspicions. You keep mentioning the violence of aboriginals and Vikings, for instance, which serves as a good reminder that people need states to protect them the barbarians at the gates. It’s invariably someone else who needs to be governed.

I have also explicitly assumed people here are adults, that they have fully developed moralities, so much so that I wager their professed hostility to another’s property is fake.

You find a clause—not even a full sentence or argument—quote it out of context and shift focus so people like praxis and Xtrix have something to play with because they cannot offer much else. Sophistry doesn’t work on everyone, unfortunately.

Questions answered twice. You didn’t answer the questions. Now let us talk about you as if you weren’t here. Cringe.

This isn’t an interview. I’ve expressed my views and you can shit on them all you want. If you wish to speak in the topic I’m all ears.

I wish. There's not even that. So far, utterly devoid of arguments. Says stuff, doesn't know what he's saying, can't back it up. Two-dimensionally political from every angle. That's why his threads are generally a waste of time.

And here you both are, wasting your time, in everyone of my threads. I just want to talk about this stuff. Why are you both here?

A fully developed morality is a set of principles of conduct and behavior. It develops as one ages. Yes.

I assume that adults have some semblance of right and wrong which they develop as they age.

It is interesting though to poke at this sentiment: Why must you be governed? I have manners and conscience, which are constant and impregnable, you clearly do not. Isn't this self-righteous "I", reflected in the social, the kernel of all "us" vs "them" mentalities? No doubt many of the rioters that attacked the Capitol believe they don't need to be governed, that they have manners and consciences, and were doing only what was necessary to protect themselves from the corrupt "other" and its "state morality". Sweep them back in time and they are a tribe of Plains Indians or Vikings, fully equipped with manners, consciences, and compassion (for their own), securing and protecting their interests; the torture, rape, and terror only a different level of necessity. We may even turn NOS's thesis on its head and say those who say they don't need to be governed, demonstrate the need for governance most as their projection on themselves of a false exception proves most pointedly the need for common rules. Of course, I don't need to be governed, I am of divine moral purity and have no need for state morality; it is you, the plebs, the evil ones, who require external constraints...

That’s an odd projection, especially since I have already admitted that I do not believe people actually need or want to be governed, that they wish only for others to be governed. The answers to the question have confirmed my suspicions. You keep mentioning the violence of aboriginals and Vikings, for instance, which serves as a good reminder that people need states to protect them the barbarians at the gates. It’s invariably someone else who needs to be governed.

I have also explicitly assumed people here are adults, that they have fully developed moralities, so much so that I wager their professed hostility to another’s property is fake.

Where do you think conscience and manners arise from? Do you think they're magic universals breathed into our beings by sole virtue of us being human? Isn't it obvious they're socially contextualized with part of that context being that we live in highly structured states? The Plains Indians were about as close to stateless as described by your delusional utopia. As it happens, they tortured their enemies to death as a matter of routine. Yes, they had consciences and manners, just not any that someone like yourself, riddled with state morality, would recognize.

And there we have it. “State morality”.

Personally, I wasn’t raised by the state, nor did I socialize with bureaucrats and politicians in my formative years. We have tried law, compulsion, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and statism of various kinds, but the result is nothing to be proud of.

I don’t think you need to be governed. I think you’re an adult. I think your unreasonableness and propensity towards destroying another’s property is a silly ruse. Even your “system of representatives” would laugh in your face about your claims to my property.

You know I would choose peaceful resolutions because I suggested peaceful resolutions, but you wouldn’t accept and would run to authorities, like “most people”. You would prefer a third party, the monopoly on violence, to fill in where your own morals and conscience and deliberation wouldn’t. You need other men to do what you are unable.

The conquest theory of state, as I believe it anyways, is wholly influenced by Franz Oppenheimer’s The State. It’s a refreshing deviation from the social contract theory. Anyways, thanks for the input and non-hostile discussion.

No, I thought it was the superior man's property, you thought it was the property of the one who tilled it. Thus we disagreed as to whose property it was.

You were about to enlighten me as to how we resolve that dispute between you, me, and the 7 million other people who have a legitimate say in what you (or I) do with our piece of rainforest without any formal system of representation.

Only a formal system of representation could come up with something like the Enclosure acts or the Decree on Land. Someone mentioned the Amazon earlier, and one can watch the formal system of representation sell the rainforest to the highest bidder, while all traditional and tribal claims are disregarded.

The resolution to the dispute between you and I is inevitably violence. Your claims to my garden are unreasonable; you seek to destroy what I have built and use to sustain myself; you refuse any peaceful resolutions. You’ll just have to come and take it.

I don’t view the state as an ideology. I view statism as an ideology. Also, I do not nor have not called for a change in the future world order. I suppose my defense of basic human rights could be boiled down to the promotion of manners, in a Nietzschean sort of way. The state is the coldest of all monsters, and all that.

I just thought it was an interesting question. I think it is extremely rare that people think they need to be governed, as if they had no conscience, manners, or instinct. This so-called social contract is where all the egoism begins. It’s a compact made with oneself, after all: “I will be governed so that you will be governed”. Like Rousseau said, it involves the complete alienation of the individual, together with all his rights, to the whole community. If he has already submitted to this idea, signed the social contract so to speak, he goes too far in believing everyone else has done the same.

Since you mentioned Gasset, how he portrays the attitude of the mass-man towards the state implies a more self-seeking and egoist view than I could ever endure.

“He sees it, admires it, knows that there it is, safeguarding his existence; but he is not conscious of the fact that it is a human creation invented by certain men and upheld by certain virtues and fundamental qualities which the men of yesterday had and which may vanish into air to-morrow. Furthermore, the mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own”

…

“The mass says to itself, “L’ État, c’est moi,” which is a complete mistake. The state is the mass only in the sense in which it can be said of two men that they are identical because neither of them is named John. The contemporary State and the mass coincide only in being anonymous. But the mass-man does in fact believe that he is the State, and he will tend more and more to set its machinery working on whatsoever pretext, to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it—disturbs it in any order of things: in politics, in ideas, in industry.”

I’ve never read Ayn Rand. That’s the hilarious part of the accusation.