Sure, but this is only tenable as a technical position that aims to reduce all forms of centralized power. It completely fails as a political position applied to the nominal "government". Politically, pushing in this direction seems to only ever play out as reducing the power of governments over corporations, while often even increasing the power of government over individuals (spurred on by corporations looking to wield that power through the government). Whereas for it to achieve its intended individual liberty, the complete opposite would have to happen - decreasing the power of governments over individuals while holding or even increasing the power of governments over corporations - otherwise unrestrained corporations simply step into that nonconsensual role of government and we're back to step #1.
Would you believe that I agree with what you wrote completely?
I’m pretty much a pure anarchist in terms of principles, but I’m a pragmatist in practice. I’d describe my approach in politics as “What do you wish the government would stop doing? Let’s focus on making that happen.”
You can’t change a culture by changing the political system, but my hope is that you can change a political system by changing the culture. I want to be as independent of the state as I can possibly be, and I want to encourage others to do the same. My hope is that this sort of cultural shift will eventually lead the shrinking of the state. I don’t expect to live to see that happen, but I hope my children and their children do.
Aside from the above, just don’t harm others. That’s it.
I would. My own views had to come from somewhere, right?
Responding to what you've said, my unfortunate experience is that culture always ends up going sideways. As movements grow in mindshare they tend to attract people focused on power/expedience, only applying the initial precepts towards those ends. And gaining control over some existing centralized power structures is much more lucrative than a given person's share of the distributed wealth that would be created by successfully constraining them.
Which ties right into the problem I saw with your original comment. A statement like "Government should be so powerless as to be unattractive targets for corporate influence" lands in the political/partisan context by default. And while perhaps that's a symptom of how [unfortunately] inured in centralized politics we are, it's still a fact. So even though we can both take a step back and lay out the context where that can be an agreeable productive statement, the overwhelming use of similar statements is actually to attack individual liberty by getting people to overfocus on the nominal government while giving a pass to another primary contingent of the centralized power structure.
