Governments are the source of the biggest atrocities and injustices in history, yet most Americans want to give the government more power. That won't end well.
Usually, if you don't give the government some power, that power is just taken by the strongest or least scrupulous. If you want to reduce the government's power to tell industry what they can and can't do, you just increase industry's power to control your life or pollute your environment. If that other party gets powerful enough through this method, then they eventually earn the title of "the government" -- so of course governments are the sources of atrocities! The word just means "whoever has the most power". Yes. Atrocities are committed by the powerful against the weak. Of course!
The trick is to stop treating "the government" as some monolithic "other", and work to make the government part of us; made out of the same cloth as everyone else. If you don't like what the government is doing, then get more active in government. Any barriers to everyday citizens becoming active in government should be torn down as much as possible. Then giving the government power is the same as giving everyone power.
This is what libertarians and anarchists never seem to understand (or intentionally ignore). There's no such thing as "limited government" if you think of "the government" as a collection of entities that have power over your life. If you're lucky, you can have some influence on the makeup of those entities: mega-corporations, billionaires, tribal warlords, 70-year-old white supremacists, crime bosses, religious chosen-ones, feudal lords, or us. Let's work hard to skew it toward being us as much as we can, and stop pretending that if we take power out of the hands of one entity that we call "the government", then that power just goes away and nobody else exercises it.
The takings clause of the Fifth Amendment is an example of "limited government." It constrains what the government can do and it can't be overridden by a simple majority because it's part of the constitution.
The existence of that constraint on government power does not imply a power vacuum. If the government can't take your property without due process, that doesn't imply that a corporation can, because the restriction on government takings doesn't prevent the government from passing and enforcing laws against property theft by others. They're two separate things.
We could, and should, make civil asset forfeiture unconstitutional. Arguably it already is and the right case just hasn't made it to the Supreme Court yet. That's an example of a constraint on government power and it's a good thing.
I know we're not supposed to mention downvotes here but I really am genuinely interested in how someone could disagree with this argument. I genuinely want to hear what you have to say, downvoter. Please tell me which part of this you disagree with.
Governments are the source of the biggest [substitute many things here]. They're going to be powerful no matter what. It's silly to say in a blanket statement that "more power" is going to end poorly. Many groups with competing interest will appeal to the government. That the government power supports one interest is not inherently bad. Aside from this supporting one interest doesn't require the zero-sum exclusion of a competing interest.
Every part of the law and order wing of conservativism is a conflict vs its libertarian wing. The only reason they're even in the same party is that they both agree on economic freedom and the US first past the post voting creates a two party system.
> Governments are the source of the biggest atrocities and injustices in history
And you have the data to back that up or is it just simple libertarian zealotry?
There are so many other forms of power abuse: economic power abuse from income inequalities (e.g: corporations bribing politicians with campaign contributions), intimidation by violence (e.g: criminals, abusive domestic partners), cults and other ideologically closed communities (e.g. Jehovah Witnesses, fundamentalist/orthodox religions), frauds and misleading propaganda (e.g. Purdue labs sparking opioid epidemics with Oxycontin), ...
But for libertarians' paranoia is just government, government, government,...
Transatlantic slave trade (was done mostly by non-government actors), the Dutch East Indian Company colonization of Indonesia, drugs traffic in the 20th century, the cumulative effects of poisoning from tetraethyl lead,...
And btw, I also mentioned the ongoing plague of opioids addiction sparked by Purdue pharma. Didn't you read it?
> Transatlantic slave trade (was done mostly by non-government actors)
The laws upholding slavery were government action, without which there would have been no slave trade because without government support to hunt them down the slaves would all just run away.
> the Dutch East Indian Company colonization of Indonesia
The Dutch East Indian Company was essentially a government. You can't "colonize" anything and not be a government.
> drugs traffic in the 20th century
The result of government prohibition creating a black market.
> the cumulative effects of poisoning from tetraethyl lead
> the ongoing plague of opioids addiction sparked by Purdue pharma
These things are certainly bad, but Stalin killed more than 20 million people. If you were to nuke five cities the size of Los Angeles it wouldn't be that many people. These things aren't even the same order of magnitude.
The problem with that is that you can't pin it on any single entity and many of the guilty parties are governments, e.g. Saudi Arabia, any state-owned oil company, US government subsidies for oil companies, zoning regulations that induce people to drive cars because it's illegal to build enough housing near the jobs etc.
My comment was meant to give an example of how governments can protect more local regions (which is what is being discussed), though after reading it again I can see how someone could misinterpret what I was trying to say. On that note,
Nothing about the parent comment made me think they wanted to abolish the federal government. What I took it is as we need fewer laws, fewer agencies, and much better oversight and accountability of those agencies.
If anything the Feds should be the reasonable ones since they (in theory) derive their powers from the consensus of the entire nation, whereas state governments are more likely to implement reactionary and anti-human policies, especially if located in a region where those supportive of such policies tend to congregate.
US Federal foreign policy IS fucked however, and I can see how ‘the Great Satan’ arose as an epithet.
If a local jurisdiction implements an anti-human policy, humans have the ability to "vote with their feet" and leave that jurisdiction. It is harder to migrate on an international level.
As a migrant I get it and have done it, but there are humans who cannot do it even locally.
Take some single mother in a backwards part of a backwards state making near enough the absolute minimum wage. If her rights are curtailed even further, it’s not like she can just up and move.
You need:
- the means to move
- a network (or the skills to build one) at your destination
- the general knowledge to know where is good to go to
- the street smarts to not get exploited when you arrive
Though at the same time there are many who don’t dream and just get stuck in the drudgery and lose the will the fight despite having a good shot. Demoralized.
In the article, the events occurred in the state of Nevada while the individual was a resident of the state of Texas. No Nevada residents were harmed in the creation of this article.
Migrating comes with its own dangers, risks, and unknowns. If those dangers, risks, and unknowns are deemed too high by an individual, they might choose to stay, but that doesn't mean their rights are not being violated.
