My guess is that he will continue to pound the strawman argument against pacifism while ignoring what it is that I'm actually advocating... I do hope I'm wrong but I'm not wrong very often.
I'm going to paste what I said before since you clearly aren't paying attention. This has nothing to do with pacifism, you seem to love throwing phrases around as if they are self-evident and somehow release you from having to use logic in your argument. So here goes. Why Capitalism doesn't work without force:
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Capitalism does not work without a set of rules in place that people HAVE to follow; according to you, we would have a police force that merely defends, that merely exists to punish those who have used force against others. Fine, but here's a couple of things that couldn't happen under your system:
-the ability to collect any taxes whatsoever from anyone for any reason.
-the ability to regulate any commerce; I don't mean over-regulate, I mean ANY regulations. At all.
let's just stop with those two. So we remove the ability to collect taxes. That means, governments, both federal and local, have no money to run their operations. So you say good-bye to building and maintaining roads. A traffic light blows out, it doesn't get fixed. Bridges break, they stay broken. A natural disaster happens, tough luck for the victims. We can pass the hat around and hopefully folks will donate some money every time things need to be fixed, but with all the things that need maintenance, people will be chipping in on a daily basis- and who's going to go around asking for donations? Who's going to manage that cash? Oh, we can do a lot of the management work online? Who's going to repair the phone lines that keeps the internet going? Wait a minute- there wouldn't even be an internet since the whole thing only came about through government research and development! Seed money collected from taxes that allowed scientists and engineers to tinker with an idea that at the time seemed improbable and useless. In our ideal free market state, silly liberal programs like that one would never occur. So who foots the bills to keep our towns running? People who are independently wealthy and don't need to work? In every neighborhood of every town of every state? When you start to think about all the millions of things we take for granted as being part of our daily life, you realize that, wait a minute, creating an organized body to take care of our many, many needs is a hell of a lot more efficient that starting from scratch every time a new problem arises. But running that organized body costs money, and for it to work, just hoping people will keep sending money to you out of the goodness of their hearts, well, that's a little risky, not to mention unfair if the same few people end up shouldering the cost while everyone else decides they don't want to contribute. So eventually you end up where we are now, just out of a need to survive as a nation- making laws that are followed because you have the muscle (i.e. guns, cops, soldiers) to back you up.
I'm not saying I am a fan of this system or that this is my ideal; I'm saying it exists for a reason, and we all accept it because it has a lot more pros than cons when you get down to it. I hear a lot of libertarians bitch about government this and that, but when it comes down to it, they don't actually want a TRULY free country. They just want the convenient freedom to do the things they want to do, and then they want the police muscle to force people to do the bits they're not willing to leave to chance. I'll respect someone who is willing to put their money where their mouth is, someone who wants the anarchy system I described- true freedom, and let the chips fall where they may. But I'm not hearing any takers in these parts.
Other things you'd be giving up with your form of government- rules and regulations that protect workers from abuse. Work 80 hour weeks at $2 an hour? Sorry, times are tough, take it or leave it. I don't care if you're 12 years old. Quit school and get to work. Now, the feeble-minded liberal mind would say, a country where its youth is being used to work rather than educate themselves is a country that's doomed, because in the long run, we'll have a nation of ignorant people. We should create a society where people can't exploit an economic situation to their benefit and get cheap labor from kids in poor areas. We should create a society that makes sure everyone gets at least a basic education, which can only be paid for by money collected from everyone. The wiser capitalist, of course, sees the moral folly here and says "hey, don't you dare be regulating my life, Uncle Sam. If the laws of supply and demand dictate an underage labor force, so be it. It's immoral for you to get in the way."
How many other examples would you like? How about, if you come up with an idea for an invention, and I hear about it and get my rich friend to sponsor me, I can market the invention before you and you can't do anything about it. I get rich, you stay broke, and tough luck because any law regulating that would be immoral and illegal. I assume you're okay with that scenario, too? Sure would be great to live in a country where innovation is stifled because you have no incentive to invent anything. The minute you invent something, a hundred people will put you out of business. But hey, that's the free market, pal.
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okay, there are several examples for you of why you would need force to make your system work. In all these examples, no one has used force against you, so it would be the government initiating force, which goes against your principle. Let's not even get into the flaws of capitalism; just sticking to your words, it doesn't work.
