Ahh. I meant in the sense of diminishing returns. E.g.: one person with $1B vs one person with $1M. The first million can really kickstart someone's dream life, whether it's repayment of house or car debts, purchasing lots of items, funding a hobby and/or business, or travelling to exotic places. On average, each subsequent million has a drastically smaller effect on overall "quality of life" than the previous million

It is mathematically impossible for large capital to always accumulate. Eventually you would own everything and there would be nobody to transact with.

This is why periodically there are debt-writedowns and the millionaires are fleeced by the $trillionaires who control this world. The $trillionaires then make sure they issue debt to the masses so the masses can transact so the $millionaires can rise again.

As I understand it, "anarchy" is not about the negation of real human sociality. You can project a "topology" into human sociality and call it "the natural tendency to be hierarchical." That's not what "anarchy" is "against." "Anarchy" is about negating the ultra-large-scale singleton social hierarchy that sucks up all humans into this unsustainable and violent Zerg Swarm that's headed nowhere very fast.

If I have to pick from just these options, I'll pick the first one.

I am a Discordian. I am forbidden to hold absolute dogmas. I only deal in relative catmas

Which is just a complicated way of saying that of course I don't know the truth. But I have strong suspicions

Of course government has also produced some new and useful technologies, too. It doesn't surprise me, since it routinely uses up 30 - 50% of the resources of the whole economy (as measured in GDP), it is bound to do SOMETHING useful, probability theory dictates that  Actually, who knows how many more inventions there would have been, if these resources would have not been tied up in government and thus things like financing a bureaucracy, social spending, and war. Hey, war! Wasn't that the reason why the government invented what we now call the internet in the first place? I hear that they didn't want to have a single point of failure in their organizational structure, which could be taken out with a nuclear attack by the Soviets (or whoever else). Also the government didn't turn the internet into what it is today. I am willing to argue that it was precisely the relative freedom from government censorship and regulation which brought forth many wonderful things, which we now use via the web.

To be honest, right now I don't feel like the discussion is going anywhere, we're just bringing up circumstantial evidence supporting one claim or the other

I'm willing to concede, that maybe government has been necessary throughout history, because there was an absence of other forms of organization. But now that it has gotten us to the point, where we have the INTERNET, its usefulness has expired. We can now manage our affairs much more efficiently on a p2p basis. Bitcoin is in the process of proving this right now

Actually not at all. I'll just say that we're better off in spite of there being government, not because of it. The improvement of life conditions has been arguably due to technology, not politics.

I don't think it works this way...

How about instead of these rackets you have several companies that offer security and you can choose which to go with?  One of these stipulations of these companies will be, for example, we will provide you protection from being murdered but if you murder someone then by the terms of the contract you must go to arbitration and accept the judgement.  It's through this process that the laws that you live under are formed.  The company has incentive overall to provide laws that are to the best benefit of the majority of their customers.

Imagine that if these companies that produce law and protect people are 1) No longer confined to any particular territory and 2) They have to attract customers rather than forcibly extracting money from them.   Then you have the same anarchic world where these companies have to interact with each other but customers are free to choose who they want to go with and what level of service they want.   The companies have great incentive to co-operate with each other.  In fact much more so than governments of today, because governments of today can steal vast amounts of money and force people through threat of jail to obey them and kill for them if necessary.   Those dangers don't exist in a voluntary society.

What I like instead: everyone together with anyone, taking personal responsibility. Have a problem that people are starving? Go take your friends and feed them. Worried that they're uneducated - go educate them! That sort of deal But it's easy for me to have faith in such a scenario, because I am what can be described in terms of (sorry for bringing this up again, but it's such a useful model) the 8 circuit model of consciousness as a "neophile". One who has received an imprint from his environment saying that the world is an OK place, new things are amazing and people can generally be trusted unless they've been corrupted somehow.

There is a meme in our culture, which equates the "natural selection" part of the equation with "survival of the fittest". But this misses the whole picture. Survival of the fittest is a survival strategy employed mainly by predators. Much of the rest of nature employs the "survival of the most useful" strategy with a great degree of success. In fact, the more evolved and complex a biosphere is, the more of this second type of strategy you can find in there.

If you think, that people are selfish and crooked,  it makes sense to believe in this interpretation. But at the same time you need to explain how handing the reins of government to these selfish and crooked people helps improve the situation.

That is one possible interpretation. This loops back to what I was saying about "human nature" and the different ways of perceiving it.

Nobody! And that's the good thing about it it is the responsibility of you and everyone else, who has strong opinions about what is right and wrong. It just seems a much effective way than the current delegation of this responsibility to agents of a monopolistic institution, which is prone to corrupting its agents anyway with the allure of money & power.

People can choose who they interact with. They can choose common mediator/security firm for their contracts... Etc...

Who else is going to enforce the constitution?

Like you have to pick the same ISP as everyone else?

Seriously?  Where are their advanced societies?   Do they have underwater cities?

Are you sure that you know what anarchy is?  It doesn't mean chaos.