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Your position is laughable. Statistics on murder rates are knowable for many countries. Studying the murder rate for those countries will at least provide a range against which deaths due to government-caused wars can be compared.

Only meaningful if you can compare with murder rates in a human society without a government...but of course, in fact the only time this happens is when society breaks down entirely.

This is all away from the main point, I have a large dislike of arguments which rest entirely on practical grounds, anarchic societies may be more violent, this does not offer any reason why they should not be the correct type of societies from an idealogical and moral point of view.

And I am fascinated with the way you make the "government" into a bogeyman that is responsible for all the evils that beset the human race. No consideration of other factors -- racial and tribal hatred, religious conflicts, class conflicts, etc etc. A wonderful simplification.

This argument does have certain substance but it does have flaws: Firstly, all religion which has caused conflict in the past has been one which wielded power in a governmental fashion. I`m no historian, but I cannot recall one incident where a religion which had no executive power caused violence against other groups of people for religious, or indeed any other reason. For example, the catholic church in the middle ages had a massive amount of power and used it to eliminate elements of society which threatened it`s position, it acted effectively as a government, which is, after all, merely a set of people who adhere to a rough set of beliefs and commonly held principals, the root of government is in religion, they are two sides of the same coin. Racial and tribal hatred is a more convincing argument but is still rooted in religion, a lot of the violent overthrowings of governments around the world have resulted from that government taking a racist position, most anti-government protests and indeed even riots in the western world are caused by racism or opposition to it. Class conflicts can be similarly dismissed as another facet of government, where the government favours one group of citizens over another in terms of the way in which it governs the anger of the repressed or badly treated group of people is often directed towards those in a better position than them rather than at the government which caused their position to become as bad as it did. This is merely the jealous nature of humans overcoming their logical side. Beyond all of this, the argument isn`t really very interesting, I`m not interested whether the government murders and kills or not, any infringement of the rights of citizens is sufficient in my mind to make them criminal, and necessitate their removal from power, murder is merely an extreme form of this.

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Second, such cases of civil breakdown aside, all humans, for now and for the conceivable future, live within the context of some kind of government. The option of non-government simply doesn't exist.

That's precisely what the governments and their agents want us to believe. Minarchism is certainly possible,

Oh boy. A wonderful dream, minarchism, that everybody *must* secretly want, except that some evil force is preventing them from getting to it, and you, Jim Bell, are the savior that is going to bring it about. A classic messiah complex.

I saw nothing in the comment that suggested Jim believed he would bring about minarchist government, minarchism is a definite possibility within our current society, because it is based on the concept of democracy which is accepted by most participants in society and furthermore it has been proven to work in the past, the initial stages of the US government when the government adhered to the principles of the constitution could be called minarchist, you might say that the fact that the government has now increased in size and power suggests minarchism did not work, I would argue this was merely the fact that the governments power has, until recently, been increasing slowly, people take little notice of small infringements of their rights, the government know they can safely upset a few thousand people at a time without problems, then go on to offend the next few thousand once things have cooled down somewhat, at each stage of course the objection is small enough to be insignificant, the end result is the government can increase its power virtually without bounds. Now most of the peons accept the "need" for larger and more powerful government the pace of change has accelerated, the government has begun to use force more and more often to crush opposition to its actions. The terror state is on its way.

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Third, murders caused by governments can't really be separated from murders caused by individuals. That is, in many cases deciding whether a murder is a personal action or a government action is impossible.

"Aye vas joost vollowink orderz!"

Sorry, we're still laughing at you.

When the LA cops beat up Rodney King, do you suppose they got any personal satisfaction out of it? Or were they just cold government functionaries, doing their job?

I would say part of each, they knew however that their position as government thugs protected them to a certain extent from retribution, has they been living in a minarchist society where their actions would have been punished harshly they may not have acted as they did.

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Fourth, it's fashionable in these circles to paint all governments with the same brush, but in fact, some are much better than others. But it only takes one bad one to start a war. Furthermore, human motivations are complex and irrational, so wars are started for essentially insane reasons. This is a human problem, not a problem of government.

No, quite the contrary. Considered from the perspective of the cumulative interests of society, wars are not beneficial or "profitable." Only from the very limited viewpoint of the military-industrial complex and government employees does war appear to be a net benefit, and that's true only because the interests of most of the population (on whom the effect of war is a net negative) is ignored. The reason war occurs is that the decision to have a war is made not by society as a whole, but by that tiny fraction which profits.

So of course ideology could never start a war -- Arabs and Jews *only* fight because of their governments, the American revolutionary war was *only* fought because the state governments wanted more power, the Tutsi's and the Hutus only fought because their governments forced them. A wonderful simplification, blaming everything on "government".

This is not really an over simplification given my argument above, I believe most groupings in society can be reduced to some form of government or another, whether it is of your accepted narrow definition of government or in a wider sense.

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Put the decision to have the war back into the hands of the population as a whole, and war will decrease. Give the public the option to make war upon the government parasites infesting their own land, and war will end forever.

A wonderful dream, truly.

Not a dream, a past reality, and indeed, in certain regions where government intervention is more extreme than it is in the USA or UK a present reality. The only reason for war is government, this is simple to see if one defines government as I have above. I do not believe this to be an overgeneralisation, merely a statement of fact, government is any form of custom or structure which forces certain courses of action on people. Of course there are exceptions, such as the NAP, which is a form of government under my analagy, which I do not believe could concievably be called an initiation of force because of its very limited scope. Datacomms Technologies data security Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"