Seeing Dan_Burfoot's comment from four years ago, I felt compelled to join the discussion.
I've participated in dozens of conversations which go like this:
Me: "Government is based on the principle of coercive violence. Coercive violence is bad. Therefore government is bad." Person: "Yeah, but we can't get rid of government, because we need it for roads, police, etc." Me: " $%&*@#!! Of course we can't get rid of it entirely, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth reducing!"
I would put it like this
Libertarian: "Government is based on the principle of coercive violence. Coercive violence is bad. Therefore government is bad."
Me: "Coercive violence is dissuading me from killing you. So maybe coercive violence is not so bad, after all."
Seriously, what some people call "government" is the ground upon which civilization, and ultimately all rationality, rests. "Government" is not "coercive violence", it is the agreement between rational people that they will allow their
I am embarrassed that I accidentally clicked "close" before I was done writing my comment. While I was off composing it in the sandbox, you saw the first draft and commented on it. And you are correct, I think. Is my face red, or what? I have retracted my original comment. My browser shows it as struck out, anyway.
So, yeah, saying that government is "coercive violence" is a straw argument. I think we agree.
I think we agree. What are "actual rational agents"? I am new here, so maybe I should do some more reading. I'm sure Eliezer has published extensively on defining that term. My prejudice would be that "actual rational agents" are entities which "rationally" would want to protect their own existence. I mean, they may be "rational", but they still have self-interest.
So what I'm saying is that "government" is a system for settling claims between competing rational agents. It's a set of game rules. Game rules enshrined by rational agents, for the purpose of protecting their own rational self-interests, are rational.
Rational debate, without the existence of these game rules, which is what government is, is impossible. That's what I'm saying.
Here's another way to look at it. The Laws of Logic (A is A, etc.) are also game rules. We don't think of them that way because we don't accept the Laws of Logic voluntarily. We are forced to accept them because they are necessarily true. Additional rules, which we call government, are also necessary. We write our own Constitution, but we still need to have one.