I've been thinking about this a lot especially after reading through Plauche's recently published paper in the Libertarian Journal and his dissertation. I want to use the example of roads to attempt to illustrate the point I want to make. First, let's ask a simple question. Why do we want roads? It seems to me that we want roads in order to facilitate the efficient transportation of goods and people. Now, how do we accomplish this? Well, we can build one and attempt to make a profit off it or we can get together and agree that roads will be mutually beneficial so we agree to fund it together in order to, say, connect our town to a farm or something like that. This is where, I think, things get perverted. The way that our society/state operates now is by basically holding these kinds of things over people's heads. They say well "the state" or "government" has provided these things, therefore you owe the state or government something, when, in fact, the "government" (i.e. the organization of people for the accomplishment of a specific task) was set up in order to create something that is beneficial to everyone.
Why is this so perverse? Well, it's perverse to me because somehow people forget what government is. In using arguments like, "The government provided x so you can do this or that thing", one implicity holds the assumption that the government is some kind of separate entity from the people that instituted it in the first place. It also, I think, speaks to some kind of personality trait that is very common to people, it would seem, that is inherently anti-social. I don't see anything wrong with a voluntary agreement on the part of people to put their money together to build a road, but what is it about our society that it chooses to use these things to basically hold people hostage? How do we work towards a culture that has a more subtle understanding of participatory politics and civic action rather than, as Placuhe would put it, alienated government and representative nation-states?