"Oh, that actually explains a fair bit. I mean, if you didn't believe in functional government, no wonder you wanted make everyone a law unto themself and say 'good luck'." She teases.

"I really think it'd be better than almost any government. Governments are very unjust."

"How much of the injustice of governments is a result of them being governments, or of the fact that yours is run by unaccountable assholes? Does your government really not provide any service that makes your country better, and could not be more effectively provided by someone else?"

"Oh, our government's not too bad for its citizens. That's just nowhere near justification for its existence."

"What is the minimum justification for a government? If you didn't have colonies, would that suffice to make it worthwhile?"

"If people mostly want it, and it's not affecting people who don't live under it, and people can leave, yeah, that's fine. I guess. I'd leave."

"What would be the options for where to go? In my world, ever patch of land is claimed by at least one state. Would there need to be some Anarchistland where people tried to solve prisoner's dilemmas without enforcement mechanisms?"

"Yes, probably. And if it was nice everyone'd come to live there, and if not it'd just be me."

"Why do you hate being governed so much that you'd live alone to avoid it?"

"...it's terrible? It's living in the constant knowledge that if you do the wrong thing or if the evidence suggests you did you could live in a cage for the rest of your life, or be executed, and that'd be considered right and just and permitted..."

"And how is that worse than knowing that regardless of what you did - right or wrong - someone down the street might decide to kill you? Maybe you have property they want, or you insulted them by accident, or you have the wrong eye colour, or they just happen to be on drugs - I hear there are snakes that make you high these days. I would prefer predictable, avoidable violence under the rule of law to the unpredictable violence of a couple psychopaths."

"One - strangles you into a convenient direction, the other is a background risk. The government executing political prisoners is worse than people randomly getting cancer, even though both are bad, because one changes everyone else and the other just happens."

"This implies that it would be better if, instead of executing those found guilty of crimes, the government picked an equal number of people by lottery and hanged them. I will accept that the distribution of harm matters - but I disagree that randomly distributed harm is better than harm concentrated on criminals. After all, one of those things deters future crime, and one does not."

"I'd prefer the government randomly hang people, yes, absolutely. There's no particular relationship between being a criminal and making the world worse, and if governments did the latter people'd notice how unjust they are."

"...Do you just have way more arbitrary laws than I'm accustomed to, or do you not believe that murder, rape, and arson make people worse off?"

"Murder and rape are a vanishingly small fraction of what people face state violence for. Arson's probably neutral in a country rich enough people aren't starving."

"Arson destroys people's homes and places of business! It isn't neutral to be rendered homeless or unemployed. Anyway, what do people deal with law enforcement for around here?"

"Union activity, loitering, being evicted, using drugs, blasphemy, homosexuality, criticizing the government, stealing from rich people who don't need the money..."

"Huh. Out of those, the only one that's illegal in my country is the last. Some of the others are prohibited by neighbourhood codes, but the penalty for breaking them is being asked to move further down the street, to a place with a different code. What are the punishments for these? To focus on the ones you're obviously guilty of: What will union activity, blasphemy, homosexuality, and criticising the government get you?"

"Oh, thrown in jail for a night and beaten, usually. They could exile you or sentence you to hard labor for it, but they usually don't."

"Wow. Has that happened to you, personally?"

"Yeah. We're not even unusual. I think your world's the weird one."

"Hey! We have two worlds being compared here. I think it's premature to declare yours the normal one.

But I will admit that my country is probably unusually free, compared both to it's neighbours and its predecessors. We're not the most extreme in the world, though. There are a couple countries that descend from the same intellectual tradition, and we all tend to have the rule of law - and a light rule at that. If only you could be part of our culture, too."

"I don't really want to jump worlds, just make this one less awful."

"Oh, no, I meant bring your world into the fold of Northern culture. Possibly by publishing a lot of our philosophy, unless the people who claim culture is genetic are right. Too bad I don't remember any philosophical treatises word for word. If only I could import some of my friends to work on problems here..."