Democracy is how we deal with this type of decision. At the very least, accepting that property is coercion means that we should reject totally the idea of democratic “interference“ in property as being inherently incorrect.
I’m no monarchist, and I don’t entirely reject the idea of democracy (ask me about land value taxes! (actually don’t internet, I don’t know anything, tell me about them if you have strong opinions. but it sounds like a good idea.))
But the issues of rampant democracy are well known. The common decency of man works to limit the rate of the damage - just as most won’t steal a phone off the ground, neither will most support a law of blatant robbery. But the moral hazard is very real.
And the moralizers are even worse! Someone with no real stake in the matter has decided that selling marijuana ought to be punished by jail time. So that they could feel better about themselves (at best) or enrich their crony friends (at worst) many people have suffered (and so has my paycheck, as with every other working american).
Alright, so the problem here comes with the larger issue. As minorities, feminists, and others gained power, they change society in a social democratic direction.
I don’t believe this at present.
If you reason like this, the empowerment of minorities becomes an externality, it can be good for the person involved but is catastrophic for the greater society.
That is an excellent case for putting it to individuals who might pursue a self interested course, rather than putting it up to a mechanism that a majority can use to violently enforce discriminatory norms against a minority.
It’s very similar to when Peter Thiel said we lost the ability to be a free society when we let women vote.
Well, if peter thiel wants to spend more money to be without women, let him. Good riddance and we’ll be alright without him.
And this connects with the other point, political stability is the greatest externality there is, and we know in regimes where property rights are supreme how it gets resolved. Reactionary militias and death squads are used to enforce the will of the property owners. Sometimes this is through the state, but the state is by no means required.
Political stability is valuable. And once we have that I think the best you can hope for from government is to limit the misgovernance.
These ideas of private security forces is laughable, why would you hire purely for profit mercenaries that will run away when instead you get cheaper and more dedicated reactionaries to do the job as long as you let them let them torture some feminists and minorities.
This is just as true for publicly provided mercenaries as it for private. You can’t dodge this sort of problem by publicizing it.
There are more private security personnel in the united states than there are police officers. And in my experience they’ve generally been more courteous and less bloodthirsty than their public counterparts.
It probably helps that they can actually be held liable for murder.
Do you really think that things today can’t get much much worse? This is peak interventionists fallacy here.
Of course things can get much worse than they are. That seems a distinct possibility. The traditional lever for making things much worse is a powerful centralized government. As such, I see it as being in my self interest to bind the hands of any future tyrant as much as possible.
Does that mean we should overthrow the government today? No, if you want that sort of radicalism you’ll have to look elsewhere. I want to sell the detritus of the state until we stop getting a good deal.
Do you want to keep up the drug war?
Do you want another land war in the mid east?
Do you want it to be illegal to build housing near to jobs?
Do you want billions of dollars to be wasted on signature campaign projects rather than meaningful public transit?
I don’t.
