[hfdh434535]

Good point, and we need to recognize that every so-called free market still relies on governments to enforce the rules (to enforce contracts, to issue currency, to protect against fraud, etc). If governments disappeared tomorrow, we would not have a free market utopia spring up in it's place. Instead we'd have a no-rules situation where the powerful could take advantage of the weak. Some other system, potentially worse than what we already have, would fill the power vacuum.

[injb]

Well I agree that governments can do some beneficial things. But there's a few problems with what you're saying here (and I hope I'm not taking you too literally): firstly, all the rules you list can be handled with alternatives. Secondly, the fact that the sudden disappearance of government would not lead to a utopia doesn't mean that governments are fundamentally needed (although they might be). As an analogy: if crude oil disappeared tomorrow, we would not have a renewable energy utopia - we'd have a disaster. Does that mean that there's no alternative to crude oil? Of course not. Finally, a "situation where the powerful could take advantage of the weak" is really just the situation that we have now, and must always have. It's really a tautology.

[hfdh434535]

I apologize for not being clear enough, and I think I misread your intentions. There are people on HN who believe the government could be abolished tomorrow and replaced with private services, including a private military force, and that this would make everyone more free, since the invisible hand of the market would do the job of protecting the rights of the ordinary people. I mistook you for one of those people.

Governments aren't fundamentally needed per se to create a free market. But rules are needed. And whatever system we have to enforce those rules would resemble a defacto government. How that governments power is distributed, who's interests it represents, and how far it goes in regulating the market may vary.

Without someone enforcing rules to keep monopolies in check, I think those monopolies would become defacto governments. And they wouldn't be democratic. This is what I mean (but did not carefully express) when I said that some government intervention in the markets are needed to prevent the powerful from take advantage of the weak. (And it can go the other way too... governments tilting the scale in favor of existing powerful interests.)