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Tldr; Post trying to explain a facet of the Libertarian thinking process and their inherent disdain towards the government.
The Monopoly on Violence
Seems to be the distinguishing feature of an entity that is or isn't a government.
Imagine you live in a lawless land. There are various warring gangs. Your business is repeatedly ransacked by any of the gangs over and over again. However, one of these gangs gains an advantage over the other gangs. A gang member comes by and offers you protection, provided you offer him a share of your revenue. If you refuse, his gang proceeds to ransack your business and possibly do any number of bad things to you. Given you don't want to die and that his gang is doing better than the other ones, you take his offer. The "tax" you pay him now is ultimately just another cost of doing business.
This is commonplace in many parts of Mexico. Large swathes of area are effectively governed by whichever Cartel has their reigns over that area.
Take a look at a hood in Philadelphia vs Juarez. Despite Juarez having 5 times the violent crime and homicide rate as Philadephia, its looks more functional and livable. The streets the cleaner, the infrastructure isn't as dilapidated, and there are more businesses. This is because the Cartels are very much running shit there. Unlike the gangs in Philadelphia, due to the Cartels influence being that much greater, they have an incentive to make sure things are going smoothly, because ultimately they own the shops and need the roads to work. They have their people in all levels of government.
The high crime rate doesn't affect anyone who doesn't get in the cartels way and as such despite its magnitude doesn't worsen the quality of life in the area to the extent it does in Philadelphia. The point I am making is that if a criminal organization becomes influential enough, they start functioning as a government.
A peace march in Michoacan against cartel violence faced a counter protest in favor of the cartel. Both crowds were equally large in numbers. And were filled with "normal people". Women, children and elderly people on both crowds.
Why did so many people in that area prefer to be governed by the cartel instead of the.. government?
Said very simply. As a libertarian, I don't see much difference between a government and a sufficiently competent/potent drug cartel.
They both take your money by force.
They both kill you if you get in their way.
They both want things to run smoothly, one of them obviously so they can make the most amount of money, the other one.. so they can make the most votes(money)?
If you propose to the average western person that he be ruled by the Cartel (and not the Mexican government), that proposition would be unbearable for him, even if he pays taxes, doesn't try to create his own country, and buys weed from a legal pharmacy and not a street dealer. Yet he would probably prefer to live in a hood in Juarez and not a hood Philadelphia.
And the elephant in the room is not lost to the libertarian. The cartels are inhumanly brutal. But governments are not ?
If there is so much money in drugs that cartels can form paramilitaries, govern cities and buy out big wigs in the police force, why not just legalize drugs??
Why not let the drug money be a part of the GDP, let it be taxed, make it legal so that the cartels don't have to hire Sicarios to settle debts, and instead settle it in court? It's not as if liquor stores wage wars that kill more people than the Syrian Civil War.
Because the government is a Cartel. The reason I feel inherently "wrong" being ruled by a government is the same reason a non libertarian feels inherently wrong about being ruled by the cartel. One of them just compartmentalizes their dirty work really well.
If I don't pay my (protection money) taxes, create a competing business (declare independence) or sell products they don't want me to sell (drugs in both cases), I will have hell to pay. Just the thought of being powerless on that axis is disconcerting for me.
Several people reading your op have interpreted it as "government is like cartel, cartel bad, ergo government bad", but that's the anarchist argument, not the libertarian one right? I thought the libertarian argument was "government is like cartel, so we should try to limit its reach" which I am surprised is so polarising. I think in trying to put forward the strongest possible version of your position you may have made it harder for others to distinguish between libertarian and anarchist.
The sentences "Because the government is a Cartel. The reason I feel inherently "wrong" being ruled by a government is the same reason a non libertarian feels inherently wrong about being ruled by the cartel" really do imply "government is like cartel, cartel bad, ergo government bad", though.
I know, that's part of the reason I accidentally originally posted this in reply to you - I found your last argument compelling, but figured he was just caught up in telling the government to fuck off - because that can also be very compelling.
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It's like many other libertarian arguments in the sense that I get the feeling that I'm now supposed to be a libertarian because a libertarian called an institution they oppose a Bad Word. Governments are like drug cartels. You think that drug cartels are BAD, don't you? Taxation is theft. You think that theft is BAD, don't you?
The thing is, beyond that this is not really as much an argument as an appeal to kneejerk reactions related to certain terms, why do we think those terms are bad? Because what is good and bad is normally (which is not to say always) set by government, and "drug cartel" and "theft" refer to relations that government has set as bad. Drug cartels are business undertakings selling chemical products that government has set as illegal, instead of ones that the government has set as legal (the difference between the two not always being too large). Theft is bad, because it's the taking of someone else's property, and when you get down to it, property is also a relation set by the government; when something becomes your property, what happens is that in cases someone else tries to seize it, the government promises to attempt to recover it or at least compensate you, and to punish those violating your right to property.
As such, saying that government is a cartel is a nonsensical, since governments define what cartels are, and are not going to define themselves that. However, as said below, in the absence of a government, a drug cartel might become a government; it's just going to be an arbitrary and capricious one, perhaps preferable to some cases of formal non-cartel governance for some people, but generally not an ideal arrangement for anyone beyond cartel leadership. (And even in cases like Juarez, it's not probably as simple as drug cartel just replacing a government wholesale; there are probably going to be some government services left, for instance, and - without knowing more about the situation - it might even be that a drug cartel is going to operate with the tacit acceptance of government in some area, obviously deriving benefits that offer stability from this arrangement, even becoming in essence an informal paragovernmental unit.
Indeed, these comparisons just come across as libertarians saying that yes, especially in a modern society, there's always going to be a government ruling over you. If the current formal governments collapse, there's going to be a drug cartel government. This comparison is supposed to get me to oppose government, because of the associatin with the Bad Word 'drug cartel', but if anything it just reminds me to keep working harder and smarter to uphold the rule of actual governments, lest they be replaced with another, more capricious government-form institution, or weaken to the point they essentially have to offer that institution enough power to essentially become the formal government's sub-unit.
That's my problem exactly with the argument that "oh hey, government = drug cartel, drug cartels bad, right?"
How about if I say the Juarez cartel is good because it's starting to serve the community? (Actually, how about if I say I don't know if I believe it, it sounds way too much like the Star Trek episode A Piece Of The Action?) They're taking the protection money and providing protection services in return. If this is how government gets started, count me in! Would it be better if they were taking the money and letting the place degenerate into a hellhole (or Philadelphia, which from the sound of it is the same thing?)
The libertarian argument here still depends on the notion that governments are supposed to be for the good of the governed, hence the comparison with cartels is meant to be a stunning knock-down: "Oh wow, the government abrogates to itself the use of force, just like a criminal enterprise? what a fool I was to believe all this democracy malarkey, from now on I'm Going Galt!"
However, no matter how crappy our governments get, they still are not quite on the level of drug cartels. And if the Juarez cartel is beginning to resemble a government, all the better for it: then it is doing some good to offset the real harm it is doing with the drug trade. Who knows, maybe some of them will put down the gun and decide to go for the ballot box instead, in time?
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Edit: sorry, replied to the wrong post.
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Has the possibility that many people do understand and just disagree crossed your mind?
As far as I'm concerned your post provides an apt illustration of why the libertarian party is a joke. Libertarians are defined by their contrarianism, and their unwillingness to cooperate or be members of a polity. It's always "their way or the highway" but not knowing what their way is they tend to gravitate towards strong men who they imagine will "cut through the red tape" and "fix the problems" for them. This is why you see so many ostensible libertarians making excuses for guys like Putin and shilling for groups like the CCP and the Mexican Cartels. This in conjunction with time the apparent inability and/or unwillingness to distinguished between government through buy-in of the governed and government at gun-point is why so many on the normie right and center left view libertarians with a mix of suspicion and contempt.
The libertarians seem to think that they can do away with government but not end up ruled by cartels or warlords in their wake. Either because everyone will be armed to the teeth and can blow anyone away who looks crooked at you, which doesn't seem all that different from living in the crime-infested slums with the criminal gangs running around shooting each other, or because the magic power of legal contracts will make everyone behave. How will the courts enforce any of these decisions? Well something something private insurance companies something something, which turn out to be in effect private mercenary forces, which once again how is this different from living under a warlord?
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... while I'll generally agree with the 'stationary bandits' thesis, this isn't a great example. Even ignoring the elephant in the room of "livable" with a high (and very unpredictable!) murder rate, the Juarez half of the video focuses on the city center and downtown : while even this area was unsafe back in 2007-2012, today it's more comparable to Philadelphia midtown or at worst North Central. The Philadelphia portion looks to be shots from one of the slums in North Philly, maybe Glenwood area.
Juarez's slums tend to be less obviously messy, but you can still find a lot of spots with trash, graffiti, and unemployed affiliated citizens everywhere, along with a lack of businesses. And the difference in quality of homes is pretty huge! Moreover, that difference right now is kinda a best-case scenario; in 2010, something like a third of businesses in the city either moved out or closed down, with corresponding problems.
More broadly, a lot of Juarez' infrastructure and business appearance reflects tremendous injections of outside cash, largely under the theory that the cartels were able to hire so many expendable and trigger-happy troops due to the rampant poverty, rather than some specific and intentional behavior of the cartel. While a few of the nice buildings and clean streets are specifically due to gang actions (if more in the sense of the gangs liking their own buildings and streets looking nice), a lot of the improvements have reflected state or foreign national investment.
((On the flip side, yes, a lot of the violence came about because of either cartel-on-cartel or cartel-on-government actions. Albeit not all of it; during the height of the 2010-era violence and again with some of the more recent smaller surge, there's been a lot of what's pretty likely 'personal' motivations.))
It is hardly a new observation that non-governmental actors can sometimes exercise state functions. Just one subset of such actors has been the subject of voluminous research , and the argument that, in Europe at least, the state developed when violent actors sought to extract resources from the people under their control so they could continue fighting wars was first popularized in 1975 by Charles Tilly, and his 1982 article, Warmaking and Statemaking as Organized Crime, is required reading in pretty much every comparative politics course.
But to infer therefrom that there can be no distinction between a government and a cartel ignores differences in types of governments; in order to stay in power, the leaders of cartels and the leaders of non-democratic governments need only keep a small group happy, so they have incentives to provide relatively few public goods. Instead, they use the money extracted from the populace to provide spoils to members of that small group. In contrast, governments in democracies must provide public goods, because the number of people they must keep happy is so large. See here
PS: I second those who criticize your use of a video from who knows where, with obviously cherrypicked excerpts and your own dubious inferences therefrom*, and representing n=2, to make generalizations about what life is like under the two types of regimes.
*Eg, you say there is a lack of businesses in the Philadelphia neighborhood, but the video does not show the main thoroughfares of North Philadelphia.
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The fact that they want votes at all is a sign of how much more you have to be courted under a democratic government. You may shrug and say that this influence is very small, but you don't make any exemption for population in your post. That is, you appear indifferent as to whether that government rules over you and 9 others or you and 99999 others.
Moreover, consider the fact that there is no recourse at all under the cartel's governance. If they have a shootout and you happen to be affected, who are you going to complain to? Or if they decide they want to use your property a certain way, what are you going to do? Which system would you prefer to be ruled by?
Because they can ruin lives, and their nature means people cannot think rationally when partaking of them. A substance that people cannot be expected to use rationally seems like something meaningfully different than most goods.
How is that working out for Mexico? War and 100k+ missing people a year is preferable to legalizing drugs?
South America is uniquely violent compared to old world countries with similar markers for instability. Almost all of it boils down to the manufacturing and selling of drugs.
I think you are strawmanning my argument.
Which was that a sufficiently potent band of criminals and a government is indistinguishable because the cartels in Mexico display the ability to govern and in some cases the consent of the governed, I would go as far to posit that if a cartel becomes sufficiently powerful and entrenched within an economy, they would very much allow people to vote.
If you legalize it, how much is that going to cut down on the violence? Moreover, it's not as if they're only supplying domestically. I doubt the US is going to let Mexico wash its hands of efforts to prevent the export of those drugs, and this is one of those things the gangs and government fight over.
I'm not straw-manning the argument, I understand that your point is about perceptions of sovereignty. My point is that we should not forget that a system in which a person's vote does nothing is not the ideal for a democratic government, whereas there is no reason to think the cartels give a damn in the first place. We see real-life dictatorships which control more than the cartels do of their own countries and they don't give people real voting power either.
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I had no practical recourse when the United States government decided that my family's rental properties could be indefinitely occupied by squatters because (apparently) that prevents Covid or something. There are also more than a few examples of individuals being disciplined by their governments for defending their own property - sometimes it's worse to have a government than not.
I agree with your broader point, but the level of practical recourse available can feel just as hopeless under a government as a gang. Ain't no drug dealer ever tried to tell me whether gardening supplies are "essential".
Having recourse isn't the same as getting what you want. You could have challenged the matter in the courts. You could have voted for and campaigned for politicians who were opposed to the policy. You could have petitioned the existing government to reconsider the policy. Even though there was an eviction moratorium, it wasn't the same as the government saying you had to allow squatters—the tenants still owed whatever you were charging on the current lease, and you can still go after them for it once they are finally evicted. And if they don't pay there are mechanisms by which you can enforce the judgment. And if you engage in any of these activities, the risk to your personal safety or livelihood is low enough that it isn't an issue. Contrast this with a drug lord deciding to appropriate your apartment for one of his friends. Who are you even going to complain to? What could potentially happen if you do complain? Yeah, it sucks when you lose money because of a government policy you disagree with, but it's a much better situation than when you lose money because of a criminal you disagree with.
I don't think this is a very strong argument. Trivially, a portion of covered tenants are effectively unservable, a larger portion of covered tenants are going to be judgement proof, most state eviction systems got absolutely wrecked by the moratorium in ways that prevent a lot of newly-started evictions from actually going through in anything close to a reasonable time frame and further delay them, and being incredibly charitable and assuming that the same people who told SCOTUS about behavior "absent an
unexpected change" weren't planning around these things, they still are separately impacting those systems by other bad policies.As far as I can tell, there have been no successful cases attempting to bring damages against the government -- indeed, the unlawfulness of the moratorium was used to dismiss a suit about the damages for a taking.
And that's for a court case that ultimately decided on statutory interpretation grounds, not takings clause or due process ones. Eg, a case where the courts would have been A-OK if Congress wrote a law.
This isn't quite parallel with the mafia don that theoretically will accept appeals from those under his 'protection', but gives his made men's decisions incredible latitude even in the face of repeated bad acts, and only occasionally has them injure the representatives of even victorious appellants. But it rhymes a lot more than you'd hope.
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I agree that a government that tries to engage with its people beyond simply keeping the peace is going to fuck up and impose unbearable burdens on some people. But I'd gladly take a democratic government over a literal cartel, and I suspect most people would as well.
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I gotta object that while Philly has genuinely terrible parts, it also has really nice places. My understanding is that it's worsened since I was last there (before Summer of George, I think roughly 2018), but I felt pretty comfortable walking around Philly. It's pretty easy to cherrypick parts of cities to make them look better or worse than they are in aggregate.
Philly is a large city; much of that looked nastier than most of the places I've been. But not all. Some of it might have been the same part I once drove through because the Schuylkill Expressway was closed and had to go around not one but two streets blocked by people stripping cars. In broad daylight, on a Sunday morning. That would have been North Philadelphia well west of Broad. On the other hand, no one threw anything at the car, which is definitely something I've had happen in Philadelphia.
My understanding is the good areas had expanded somewhat since I left the area, but maybe 2020 reversed that.
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Yeah, the point I was going for with that comparison (other than a video exists) is that crime and discord isn't the only factor that leads to dysfunction, if anything their relationship might be a parabola and the limit taken to infinity would suggest that if 5 people are committing violence, they are criminals, if 500,000 people are doing it, its the police.
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I tentatively agree, but with the caveat that a strong drug cartel is a type a government, not that government is a type of cartel. That is, you can governments which are and are not cartels, or an spectrum more or less cartel-like (show me a cartel that lets all of the citizens in their territory vote on their leadership). So it's definitely a noncentral fallacy to say something like "government are like cartels on these metric, cartels are bad, therefore government bad". Which you didn't say outright but appear to be suggesting (please correct me if this is a wrong interpretation of your view).
But as your own post demonstrates by comparing Philadelphia vs Juarez, having a force with a monopoly on violence can create stability and order that otherwise wouldn't exist. If we just abolished governments then everywhere would be like Philadelphia but worse, with various competing gangs violently competing over territory. And any coallition that became powerful enough suppress or unite them would be de-facto a government.
But I think the main distinction here between a good government and a gang-like government-like thing is something like Legitimacy. Which is hard to define perfectly objectively, but is related to the following:
1,) True Monopoly on violence.
If you have five different gangs trying to control the same area, making different rules and overlapping in territory, it's hard to say that any one of them is the true government. Or even one gang (or official government) makes rules but can't enforce them and other people run around doing whatever they want, then this detracts from the legitimacy of the supposed government.
2,) Consistency/Integrity/Honesty.
Laws and processes which are consistent and predictable are much easier to follow and create more order and stability relative to their cost. If someone has a 5% tax imposed on them for thirty years, they can plan around that. They can get a job to earn enough money, save enough, make businesses, that all factor this constant tax into account. If instead you have a dictator or gang that randomly smashes and loots businneses whenever they feel like it, or suddenly doubles taxes on whatever company or businesses they temporarily dislike, then it makes it much harder for citizens to plan ahead and feel secure investing in long-term projects. Similarly, if a new gang replaces the old one every 5 years and changes up all the rules, none of them is especially legitimate. It sort of accrues over time. Or a government which pretends to obey a certain set of rules but blatantly violates them is less legitimate than one which consistently follows its own rules.
3,) Consent of the governed.
This is probably the most important. Obviously, the highest score it would be possible to have on this would be to literally have people sign a social contract in which they agree to allow the government to rule over them in exchange for the government agreeing to various things. Most places don't do this (though I think some charter cities like Prospera are doing this). But we can still get some of this by considering hypothetical questions. Like, if you had a magic button that would cause the government to suddenly vanish, or be replaced by a random or average different government, and presented the button to random citizens, what percent of them would press it? Or, how badly would they want to press it, how much would they pay for the option to press it? How much would they pay to prevent the button from being pressed? A government which does not require the consent of the people because it's powerful enough to force its will on them, but nevertheless has their consent anyway, is more legitimate than one which only forces its will to great protest. Note that this does not require the government to be a Democracy, a Monarchy in which everyone agrees that the Monarch should rule them is still legitimate.
All of this is on a spectrum. No existing government is perfectly legitimate, and any individual who wields a nonzero amount of force could be considered by a tiny government with a tiny amount of legitimacy under this perspective. But usually you'll find one entity, which everyone considers to be "the government", which is orders of magnitude above all of the various gangs and cartels and forces within it. (In cases where there isn't one unique outlier, we call it a "civil war", and it tends to be a temporary arrangement until one faction wins.) Nevertheless, I would argue that governments with high legitimacy, according to this metric, tend to be significantly better, both morally and pragmatically for the people living under them. It is inevitable that someone is going to use force on someone. If you are counting gangs and cartels, then having no government at all is not an option, so pick the best you can. I'd much prefer it be a mostly legitimate government like the one I have now that wants to tax me my entire life rather than some gang with low legitimacy and low time-horizons such which would rather loot my corpse while they're still in power.
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Upvoted for explaining a common libertarian talking point, not so much for me agreeing with said talking point.
Besides the many other differences why I don't think governments are cartels, I would just like to note that "entities violently fighting each other for control over an area" is something that doesn't happen in an area ruled by a government, unless you live in a country currently at war. Furthermore, a lot of governments' founding mythos do not go something like "they forced people to accept their protection for a small fee just because all the other groups were worse". A lot of this comes down to the question of legitimacy, as an entity considered more legitimate is usually correlated with more stability (one of the many reasons cartels are viewed negatively is that their presence implies instability in the region).
sure but especially historically (and recent history, wwi/wwii for us), war was not at all uncommon, and military strength and sending men to fight in wars was frequent.
doesn't the founding mythos of an empire, while not sounding like this, essentially look like this - "we forced people to give us resources after conquering them"?
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Yes, that's just called a civil war. The whole point of the comparison is that the organizations we normally recognize as governments are the ones who have a successful monopoly on violence.
Straightforwardly expressed by Weber, a basic necessity for a state:
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