Against Authority page 110
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Build Alternatives to Currently Statist Services

Organize neighborhood and community arbitration systems as an alternative to state monopoly law and courts. Promote the use of alternate currencies, such as silver rounds, e-gold, or Liberty Dollars, as an alternative to statist fiat money. Help volutary community-betterment efforts like Habitat for Humanity, as an alternative to taxation and the state's Department of Housing and Urban Development.

There are two very common related fallacies that state-indoctrinated people tend to fall into. The first is the fallacy of government solipotence. This is the notion that good or service X cannot be provided in any other way except by a state. Most commonly, the X is arbitration (courts), police, and military (defense against foreign invaders), but some will hold the fallacy for road-building, education, and other things. Fortunately, a little study of history reveals that every morally permissable service ever offered by state has been done by voluntary means somewhere, at some time or another. Furthermore, when done voluntarily, the service is generally done better, and always done more morally (since aggression and plunder are not used.) If someone claims that service X can only be supplied by state, all a libertarian needs to do (if not already familiar with examples) is to look up that service in the ample libertarian literature and see how it was done privately. It used to be that this required a good library; now anyone can easily find such things on the internet.

The second fallacy is "the barefoot fallacy." If government didn't provide shoes, all but the wealthy would go barefoot. This is a weaker formulation of the fallacy above. It doesn't say that provision of service X cannot be done voluntarily, it simply says that voluntary provision would result in limiting the service to only the wealthy. The same remedy applies - just look up historical examples and note that they benefitted more than just the wealthy. This fallacy is popular among those who favor state-run education systems. When you look up literacy rates or other measures of educational quality and look at the "Prussian school" movement, it becomes obvious that the motivation for government takeover and centralization of education was to indoctrinate the children (especially of immigrants) into "proper" subservience to state, and resulted in a reduction of educational quality. Voltairine was right.

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