@Jardine K. Jardine: There is no good reason why equality should be the criterion of decision-making.

Well, actually there are good reasons. Despite your abhorrence of government, people have to agree to subject themselves to your rule by wealth. Either that or be forced into it.

People are simply more likely to agree to be part of a situation if they perceive they are being treated equally. That isn't some fanciful assertion. It has proved repeatedly in psychology experiments. So if you want to have a society that doesn't spend much time and effort forcing their citizens to go along with the rules, basing it on equality of at least the perception of it is a dammed good way to go.

As you have observed, democracy doesn't mean absolute equality. Wealth in particular isn't distributed equally. But we citizens put up with that because most of us perceive it to be about as close as we are likely to get to absolute equality.

To me it looks like you have got this all backwards. You have observed that well running markets deal with things fairly and efficiently, therefore we should use markets to run society. There are two flaws in this. Markets don't always run well. Even when they do run well for a while, they often go spectacularly awry. In fact they often can't exist without government intervention to ensure there is competition.

Secondly, allocation of resources clearly isn't the whole problem. People have been known to kill each other over things that weren't about property. Arguments about religion, ethnicity, and sex all come to mind. Which isn't surprising, when you consider out of our population of 22 million, only 10.8 actually work. And they only spend 1/2 of their waking hours doings that. So overall, we spend less than 1/4 of our time engaging in the very "wealth creation" you are trying to say we should be using to run our lives!

You are trying to set up a dichotomy between ‘rule by wealth’ and ‘treating people equally’; but it is a false dichotomy.

When you go to the shop to buy an orange, that’s not ‘rule by wealth’. Everyone, by all their decisions to buy or abstain from buying, participates in determining the total configuration of resources will be used. Are you oppressing the orchardist, who must obey your commands or die of starvation? Is he oppressing you? One of the many problems with the equalitarian creed is that inequality inheres in all transactions, and so the equalitarians regard all transactions, and therefore human society, as intrinsically exploitative.

You have not attempted to deny that people are factually unequal, that a state of equality is impossible to attain and would be the end of human society, that the inequality between government and the individual is greater than between the richest and the poorest individual, and therefore government does not treat people equally. And in any event, most questions do not involve a question as between the richest and the poorest.

You have not shown any reason why resource use decisions should not be based on property and liberty rather than on political decision-making; other than to make groundless appeal to hyberbole about anarchy. Thus your argument continues circular, to which you have added misrepresentation and ignoring refutations, and I am tired of pointing out fallacies. Good-bye.

@Jardine K. Jardine: You are trying to set up a dichotomy between ‘rule by wealth’ and ‘treating people equally’; but it is a false dichotomy.

No, its not. The nations of the world effectively run the planet the way you want now. The richest, the US, sits at the top of the heap. It has the most say in world organisations like the UN, ISO, World Bank and so on. All of Africa sits at the bottom, despite having 3 times the population. In no sense are the poor in Africa treated equally to a US citizen.

@Jardine K. Jardine: You have not attempted to deny that people are factually unequal

You are labouring a statement of the obvious. A BMW and a VW are obviously unequal too. But if you are planning a cities roads they are both just cars. Societies work best if people enthusiastically cooperate. And when it comes to designing a society, like the BMW and VW we are equivalent where it matters. All of us are more likely to be enthusiastic participants in that society if we perceive we are treated equally. Nobody is going to consider awarding their personal influence over what happens according to their wealth as being treated equally.

@Jardine K. Jardine: You have not shown any reason why resource use decisions should not be based on property and liberty rather than on political decision-making

I don't know what "based on liberty" means. As for basing it on property, I have said the egalitarian societies where people are encouraged to consider everyone equals, with an equal say demonstratively work better than non-egalitarian ones. Such societies currently rule the planet.

@Jardine K. Jardine: other than to make groundless appeal to hyberbole about anarchy

Err, I didn't do that, for the obvious reason what you are proposing isn't anarchy. It is a fairly ridged set of rules based on property.