Sometimes I wish people who support women's rights would move to Pakistan. If women's rights is what they really want, they can have it. <- This statement makes just as much sense as yours.
Somalia has a government which practices quasi-Sharia [1]. Fun fact: most people who want to reduce the size of western governments don't actually favor increasing the scope of the government to pre-marital sex (a stoning offense in Somalia), wearing socks (failure to do so for women is punishable by flogging) or chewing khat (a floggable offense).
[1] Mahmud, who posts here and is Somalian, claims it's not quite Sharia. Knowing very little about Islamic law, I'll take his word for it.
Southern Somalia is ruled by warlords, as I understand it. That's what I'd expect in a country without a government; a country ruled by men rather than laws.
Government simply doesn't ruin everything it touches. I could make a similarly facile argument about how the market ruins everything it touches, turning all of life into a uniform sea of brands, destroying geographic and cultural distinctiveness, as well as laying ruin to the environment and every other cost externality that isn't accounted for in the absence of a regulator to internalize those costs. Factories belching out fumes in foreign lands, child labour etc., all intermediated by the market so that you can buy your consumer goods in your well-lit mall without needing to care about the blood and bones ground up in the machine, because it's all hidden from you: all you see is a price.
I'm in favour of mostly-free markets, and very-free civil liberties. I want as little government as possible, within the scope for the society I personally would like to see. Government that starts a lot fewer wars would be a fantastic start.
But when people go on about how the customer just needs to be educated and the free market will do its work, well, I just sigh. I don't want to have to do that work, because I know (a) I don't have time for that, and (b) in any case companies will be motivated to spend a lot more resources fooling me and people like me than I even have. Information asymmetries are real, and they strongly favour the wealthy. I don't think that's fair, and it's not a society I'd vote for.
The grandparent - algoshift - is simply mistaken about health insurance, for example. The vast majority of health spending is in the final years and months of life. But elderly people have no motivation to reduce this spending; even if educated, why would they reduce it, when the alternative is death? The fact of the matter is, we spend too much money and resources keeping old people alive but on the brink of death. I don't think that's fair either.
Government simply doesn't ruin everything it touches.
Nor did I claim it did. I just pointed out that it's silly to point out a nation with a government that is more intrusive than the US government and then suggest people who want less government should go live there.
Somalia has a government which practices quasi-Sharia [1]. Fun fact: most people who want to reduce the size of western governments don't actually favor increasing the scope of the government to pre-marital sex (a stoning offense in Somalia), wearing socks (failure to do so for women is punishable by flogging) or chewing khat (a floggable offense).
[1] Mahmud, who posts here and is Somalian, claims it's not quite Sharia. Knowing very little about Islamic law, I'll take his word for it.