BookPerson wrote:
I respectfully disagree with some of the opinions here.
Freedom is something that we all possess, but may not be able to exercise, due to the monopoly of force and coercive nature of government. We all possess natural rights to liberty (acting as one pleases, as long as there is no violating the non-aggression axiom), property, and life (i.e. self-ownership). We could debate the left-right model and other models for some time, but it may still ignore the fundamental issue of coercion. In my view, one may be a left-wing democratic socialist or a right-wing authoritarian capitalist, yet both still fail to address the questions of government (i.e. questioning if it should exist, if it is right to exist, etc.). In my opinion, as an Austrian School Libertarian, government operates off a monopoly of force and land (i.e. delcaring its territory and forcing itself involuntarily upon those living there), committing wholesale robbery against the populace (i.e. taxation), violating natural rights, and often possessing a central banking system, enabling it to manipulate economic cycles.
Government is inevitable, as we can see from tribal communities and our close relatives in the animal kingdom. They live in groups run by whoever is top of the hierarchy as well as claim and defend territory in order to utilise its resources. In the event of a government ceasing to function in any given area, those who chose to live alone would be either conquered or killed by those who had formed a group for the same purposes as the above.