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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.
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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