Seems like an atavistic defense mechanism.

And since they’ve given up their freedom, they can’t be bothered to think of anyone else’s. Hence the war on drugs, years in jail for possession of marijuana, DUI, and Texas’s 11 felonies involving oysters. (Texas has a lot of wonderful freedom-loving rugged individualists, but there’s a sublayer of real fascists, working mostly in law enforcement).

We have a difference in political philosophies. You think government should continue to grow unless it’s proven too big; I say cut government back until it’s proven too small. You say we should build it better; I say that it’s been fed on false (imaginary or overblown) fears and should be pruned back severely.

Is government broken? Have you not been watching the news for the last decade? If tens of thousands of brain-injured veterans, impending financial collapse (to which the solution is less freedom for the people, in the form of more of their property handed to the corporations), and two million Americans in prison is not enough to start you thinking that maybe, just maybe our government is not “pretty darn good”, then I think you might be a lost cause. If you’re happy with the taxes you pay and where they go, then godspeed.

Maybe 90% is extreme; I’ll concede that. So let’s try 10%. Heck, let’s just end prohibition and send a few prosecutors, judges, and cops out to find honest work. Give it a decade, and if it hasn’t worked we can recriminalize.

One final point. We got out of the last Great Depression by burning a lot of fossil fuel, and we kept burning it for six decades. The economy is literally running out of fuel, and can no longer sustain that way of life. Government is going to shrink in our lifetimes; the question is whether it’s going to happen in a controlled way, or cataclysmically.

Usually, disagreements are about a basic assumption that is never articulated. You are correct that my basic assumption is that our government is necessary for our safety and for the value of freedom. Though not perfect, our government is pretty darn good. I believe that. Show me good, hard, and clear evidence to the contrary, and I might rethink my assumptions. But I doubt that kind of evidence exists. Most people prefer to reject things wholesale rather than constructively consider how to make an institution better. It’s easy to demolish, but it’s hard to build. I believe that our society is important enough for us to try our hardest to build the best government we can.

You seem to have the assumption that our government does more harm than good. You seem to have the assumption that the government is beyond help, and the only way to make it better is to fire 90% of the workforce. Logically, I am having trouble understanding your solution. If you really believe that our government is incompetent, you wouldn’t write that 10% better than 100%. If our government was truly incompetent, wouldn’t 0% be best?

Of course not. Because we do need our government, and our government does a lot of good that is necessary to our basic liberties. The solution isn’t to cut it down, but to build it better.

You don’t like that medicine because of your romanticized views of the government’s competence. Those views have very little basis in reality. You believe the government is fairly competent at holding these dangers at bay because you want to, and not because of any evidence. In fact, the world is simply not as dangerous a place as the institutions who want your power would have you believe.

WOD = War on Drugs: fictionalized danger (arguably self-actualizing fictional danger). Terrorism (also arguably self-actualizing) and DWI are dangers blown way out of proportion, so that we are insanely far beyond the point of diminishing returns for further sacrifices of our freedom.

The complainant who has relied on the government to keep him safe, and lost the bet, is screwed. Nothing the government can do will restore him. Better that he learn to rely on himself from the beginning than that he count on an incompetent government to keep him safe, and then expect that government’s retributive justice to make him feel better.

Mark.

(Maybe we need to define “fictionalized dangers.” I think real dangers that are blown out of proportion are distinct from fictionalized dangers that are not dangers at all and are therefore always blown out of proportion.)

Are WOD, GWOT, and MADD blown out of proportion? Statistically, maybe they’re blown out of proportion by the press. But I expect that if the government didn’t try to stop these dangers, we would have a lot more drunk drivers colliding with minivans holding a family of six and the terrorist plans we foiled would have occurred. Etc. Luckily, the government is fairly competent in holding these dangers at bay. Perfect? No. But pretty good.

And when Joe Schmo is the complainant and seeks justice, who should he go to? The government. If the government is incompetent, let’s try to make the government better. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Not to ensure justice; to protect his life, freedom, and property.

Every complainant in a criminal case is someone who relied on the government to keep him safe.

The government isn’t competent to keep us safe; it’s barely competent to retaliate against people who harm others.

For dangers fictionalized or blown out of proportion, start with the WOD, the GWOT, and anything involving MADD.

The situation in some inner cities is indeed dire. But the situation is entirely the result of the government “protecting” us from the “evil” of drug use. Absent the government prohibition on (some) drugs, the gangs would have no reason to exist, much less to compete for turf. (not to mention the money to buy the weapons.) Jim Beam and Jack Daniels aren’t shooting it out for market share, because they aren’t proscribed. And yet, within the memory of people still living, alcohol WAS proscribed, and those who dealt in it DID shoot it out for market control. The country eventually had the good sense to ensure that Prohibition was brought to an end, which not-so-coincidentally ended most of the street violence associated with bootlegging.

What you are pointing to is yet another example of the government creating the problem from whole cloth, then using the existence of the problem to justify grabbing yet more power and control.

That aside, great post; no wonder both you and His Prickliness deserve to win the youknowwhat that you’ve been fighting over.

As to the government prosecuting people over fictional threats, well, I’m not sure how many were eventually prosecuted, but I’ve noted more than one suspected (and, for all I know, coincidentally actual) terrorist arrested for photographing a targeted site. Trouble is, other than in fictional accounts, photographing a target in advance and as part of planning for a terrorist attack doesn’t seem to have ever happened.

Y, even in the worst neighborhoods, it’s rare almost to the point of nonexistence that any, much less most, of a given person’s family has been killed by gangs. In the year that Minneapolis earned its Murderapolis designation, for example, we had just under 100 murders. Not quite all of them were for business competitive advantage — a few were of uninvolved witnesses to ballistic business competition removal — but almost all were. (I don’t mean to minimize the damage to living an ordinarily decent life that the gangbangers do — it’s huge — but I think it’s important to criticize it for what it actually does.)

And, yeah, the Founders very deliberately created a state where the State not only did not but could not have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Understandable, given that the Shot Heard Round the World was fired at state minions acting to enforce a commonsense gun control measure.

If I believed in reincarnation I swear i was talking to the likes of Thomas Jefferson!!! So is this the type of response one should expect to get when they strike a cord of interest!?! Sorry I wasn’t able to make Houston between my late start and the snow in LA I was happy to have made it at all!!!

Remy