I don ' t recall economists being the rulers of societies . Are these the same people that failed to predict the 2008 collapse and then bailed out all their rich friends at the wall street banks ? The watchers watch the criminals and everyone watches the watchers . The application , of course , does fall short of the ideal in some cases , At least you ' re admitting that we ' re incapable of holding government accountable . logically though , if you and I are capable of watching the watchers , then we don ' t need the watchers . We can just be the watchers ourselves or hire private companies to provide public services and then we ' watch ' over them . So lets be honest , we are one or the other . We ' re either capable of holding government accountable or we ' re not . Evidence nowadays would seem to suggest that we ' re incapable . but striving for such an ideal is superior to vigilante justice being the only option . I like striving for the ideal , it ' s just that my ideal doesn ' t involve a bunch of individuals with unlimited authority for life and death over me . Again , if we ' re capable and looking for the ideal utopia , then we shouldn ' t cut ourselves short and instead we should be fully responsible for our own lives . Roads are a great example , sewage systems another , and education also falls into this . All of which are rather poorly managed by government at the moment . over a million people die on roads each year , which if they were managed by a private company , there would be a public outcry . However we don ' t hold government accountable for such a horrible service they provide to us . Private companies developing selfdriving cars can ' t rescue us soon enough from government ineptitude . Sewage I don ' t really have much to say about . Schooling ? wow , thats horrendous at the moment . Student performance has been declining for the past decade and I think dropout rates are up as well . Then if we look at the cost of college , the government is putting children into debt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and they can ' t even find a job . I don ' t see how you could even begin to defend this disaster . people deciding these things are important consistently enough to fund them reliably , we just lay taxes that pay for them . I think what you mean is that some people should pay for other peoples stuff ? The problem with this is that if I take money away from you to put into a failing government school or road , then I have no money left over to invest in a selfdriving car . If government stopped reaching into our pockets , then we might have had these selfdriving cars a decade ago and 10 million people would still be alive . Whether or not you drive , you still benefit from the roads . Whether or not you are currently in school , you benefit from an educated society . If these are valuable things to have , then people will pay into them . The problem is that when government just takes and take , regardless of their poor performance , then there is no way to hold them accountable . Imagine if McDonalds operated that way and you had to regularly pay McDonalds to feed people even though you though their food was garbage . How do you guarantee the common defense if everyone decides it isn ' t important this year ? The US has oceans on both sides and has more privately owned guns than the rest of the world combined . Nobody will be trying to invade the US . If not enough people contribute to road repair , goods stop moving . Let me ask you this , how does a private company like DisneyWorld manage to maintain it ' s private roads without tax money ? According to you they should have the worst roads and yet when was the last time you heard about someone dying on their roads ? I tell you as a conservative , there are some things that central planning is good at . you ' re a bad judge of character , I ' m an anarchist . Trump will be worse than Clinton , but since you believe that the system works , we ' ll see within the next 612 months which of us is correct . what about the people that decide that society ' s problems are secondary to their own and contribute nothing to the common good beyond their occupation ? Maybe those people are correct ? Maybe if people focused on improving their life , then they could provide a better contribution to society . After all isn ' t that your claim about schooling , that putting money intoi that helps the rest of society ? So think of it the same way , except instead of schooling children to improve society we make individuals happy and that improves society .