Physical violence is the last resort for enforcement of all laws. That does not mean that it makes sense to equate every government action to physical violence.
Lets say, I come to you and ask for $1000. If you don't pay me before March 1st, 2013, I'll send you a reminder. If you don't send money within a week, I'll send you another reminder. If you still don't send money, I'll ask a friend of mine to come to your door and politely ask again. If you still reject my "offer", I'll send another friend with a gun who will ask you again. If you don't open the door, he will kick it out and search for money in your house. If you try to stop him, he will kill you. As a last resort, of course.
We both know that we know the whole chain of threats. Doesn't my demand for your money equate with physical violence? If not, how short should be the chain of such persuasion until the gunpoint, so it's considered equal to threat of physical violence?
They are more likely to simply garnish your wages or seize your bank account than they are to break down your door and go searching around in your dresser drawers for money.
But they will get their money, one way or another. That point stands.
Assuming "him" is the government, no, he won't, unless you try to stop him violently. The government doesn't kill people who don't pay taxes. Your analogy doesn't work.
The Waco and Ruby Ridge incidents were about not paying taxes.
The Supreme Court said "Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife." In these cases, heavily armed agents raided homes for want of $200 in NFA manufacturing taxes; whether heavily-armored men crashing thru windows carrying automatic weapons actually fired the first shot, or baited the occupants into "threatening behavior", is irrelevant: the government killed people who didn't pay taxes.
So you can keep a key of your vault with your unpaid taxes and no one will try to take it from you by force? Bank manager will not go to jail if he does not make a wire transfer from your account to IRS?
It makes sense to not forget that every government action IS backed up by threat of violence.
If the "no arial photography" law passes, flying a quadcopter around gathering imagery becomes illegal. When police show up to fine or arrest you for doing so, they do it in a manner & reputation implying physical violence will follow if you don't comply and persist in violating the law.
Ergo the question for legislators & citizens is: why is arial photography deemed harmful enough that doing so warrants threat, even invocation, of physical violence based on simple engaging in that activity outside of any other warranted factor? (To compare: why does NYC go so far as threaten, even carry out, physical violence against a restaurant owner for selling a 20oz soda?)
Viewed this way, one is reminded of the vital imperative of freedom & liberty. It makes sense to ask why a government is willing to resort to physical violence for enforcement, rather than "no harm done, let it go".
Sidenote: I don't think it is a good idea to wonder why and how government should use violence. First, people around you may be asked why they think anyone can use any amount of violence and when. Before you get a satisfactory answer to that question, it's meaningless to discuss what the government can or cannot do. Government is just a bunch of specific people, particular case of a general rule "person A can kill person B when XYZ".
Government is a specific case of that general rule if and only if group decision making is isomorphic to individual decision making.
The idea behind government is that 1) it is occasionally necessary to impose some course of action on individuals or groups, 2) force or threat of force is a necessary component of said imposition, and 3) making the decision to use force is safer (under the assumption that there is in fact some 'correct' course of action) if you first discuss that decision with as many people as possible than if you decide by yourself.
Whether or not that all holds would appear to be up for debate.
Do you agree that "the idea behind government" exists entirely in heads of people? E.g. my idea of govt is different from yours. Does the fact that many people share the same idea make it right? If so, does god exist? Is Earth flat when most people think it is?
I'll agree that it's difficult to think about ideas with a rock :)
As for the rest, people believing something certainly does provide evidence for that thing the strength of which scales with the number of people believing, if not nearly linearly. It depends on which people too ;) Fortunately we have plenty of other sources of evidence to base our opinions on (and remember that sources of evidence aren't necessarily independent; one can screen off another). Whether or not those other sources are leveraged in group decision making is one of the things that would appear to be up for debate.
> Physical violence is the last resort for enforcement of all laws.
That's true, but even though all laws are enforced by violence, there's still a notable difference between laws that prohibit violence ("don't murder or else we will use violence against you") and tax laws ("give us money or we will use violence against you").
And if you tell me that the law is a magical piece of paper that transforms morality of people it describes, then how it is different from my personal law written on my own magical piece of paper?
The difference here is that I do not propose killing you because I have no idea how can that be justified (even in a self-defense case - I'll just have no choice, but when there is no choice, there is no capacity for being moral or immoral). But others think they can justify the violence and build the whole concept of justice on top of it. Which is rather immoral because their justification is very far from being 100% logical, solid and accepted by everyone.
I agree that government should be prohibited from killing anyone, just like regular people should be prohibited from killing anyone (the self-defense case is different, even from a moral point of view, because all major moral systems distinguish between attack and defense).
Most democratic governments manage to work just fine without threatening to kill anyone. The death penalty is the exception rather than the rule in civilized societies.
Also, you will find that a vast majority of people accept the use of force by government in the vast majority of cases where it actually happens in practice (which is to stop violent crime).
Yes, government uses force in other situations. And usually, that is followed by a public outcry when it becomes known. And when the people actually agree that this use of force is inappropriate, laws do tend to change - see the history of civil disobedience around the world as an example.
Death penalty as described in a law is irrelevant.
What is relevant is a threat of murder when police/court requires you to do something. Pay a fee, pay taxes, go to jail etc. And this threat of murder is very real and is used in enforcement of every single law. Government never threatens you with ostracism and defamation. It always threatens you with death if you do not obey.
I call bullshit. Outside of a death penalty, government does not threaten you with murder, but with prison in the worst case. Government will actually try not to kill you, even if you resist arrest (note: I was once arrested - or is it detained? - for political reasons. I'm not sure about the legal terms in English).
Obviously, if you barricade yourself in with machine guns or more, it might come to a stand-off where you are killed. But ask yourself this: If it comes to that, how many people will still think you were acting reasonably relative to any standard?
The only way you could possibly talk about a threat of murder by government (in countries that do not have the death penalty) is if you're essentially saying: "There is a possibility for me to behave in a way that is so far out of the social norm and involves my own use of physical violence to such an extent that some government agent may end up killing me. This is what I mean by 'threat of murder'."
But then the term "threat of murder" becomes entirely meaningless, because by that standard, virtually every person in the world threatens you with murder every day. Think about it: There is a possibility for you to behave in a way that is so far out of the social norm and involves your use of physical violence to such an extent that any random stranger may end up killing you - in attempted self-defense against your own violence.
So: Do you believe every person in the world is latently threatening you with murder? Because if you truly, genuinely believe that government generally threatens you with murder (independently of a death penalty), then you must logically hold that belief as well.
Now to be fair, I think I have some understanding of where you are coming from. I got acquainted with some far leftist/anarchist groups during my undergraduate. This feeling of being up against an all-powerful and overreaching evil can be a powerful social glue. This is what they felt, and I suppose it affected me as well, though to a smaller extent. But I grew up.
I sincerely hope for your own sanity that there is some part of your mind that recognizes how ridiculously extremist you previously stated position is.
Sorry for a very long reply. Here's a short version.
So it's okay to be locked up, but not murdered? What's the difference if you now act only in a very prescribed manner? What's the joy of life when there's no negotiation? It's only better than death relative to a chance of getting out. But then no one will revert the permanent psychological damage.
People generally do not like violence, do not like courts, police, guns and prisons. Only few people are happily using state violence for their benefit. Others simply have no choice: if you don't go to court, your opponent may drag you in. Or you cannot protect yourself because only official police has a right to do that, so you have to agree with their terms without much negotiation. In cases where people have no choice, there is not capacity for morality and I cannot blame them for using courts. It's still the state who has capacity not to use violence and hence can be viewed as moral or immoral.
Think of it in terms of ability to negotiate: when protecting yourself against theft, you can negotiate about installing locks and protection, about face-control, reputation points, ostracism etc. When you have a universal system of violence, there is no negotiation. You simply beg the court for appealing to you. They have much more power over you. Yes, it can be nominally limited, but not by you anyway. There is never a negotiated set of rules and protective measures against corruption that you have agreed to. You are simply born into the existing power structure and have to comply.
The justice system is all about striking a balance between different people's rights and freedoms. This is why I called your extreme position ridiculous: Any extreme position is ridiculous when it comes to the overall justice system, because no extreme position is justified. There are always trade-offs. (Edit to clarify: Yes, my previous reply was only because you specifically talked about threat of murder; if you had talked about threat of incarceration, I definitely would not have replied like that, and probably wouldn't have replied at all)
As for being born into an existing power structure: That's true, but inevitable. Complaining about that is like complaining about the laws of physics: utterly useless and, in some sense, a sign of immaturity.
By this I do not mean to say that just accepting the status quo is a sign of maturity. It is important to point out overreaches and to fight against them. But you have to understand that there will always be some kind of power structure, and what we have in most Western countries is extremely good when viewed in perspective.
I take issue with your claim that people do not like courts, police, and so on. The vast majority of people benefit from the fact that they can go through their lives without spending many brain cycles on their security. That may be an unusual way of phrasing it, but most people do seem happy about that.
The justice system is not a law of gravity. It's completely made up by people. And as people change, or change their opinion, the "system" also changes. Of course, our conversation on HN does not change the court system, but both you and me are debating because of expected possibility to change each other's opinion, or someone's who is reading this.
If you are born as black slave girl in 1825 and have a lot of difficulties because of your origin, skin color, and gender, is it "overreacting" to say "slavery is absolutely immoral and beating wives and children is immoral too"? Is it moral to have 50% less slavery and brutality, but immoral to have 51% less slavery because it's too extreme?
Yes, people would like to not waste brain cycles on the security. And there are different ways to do so if you allow competition in that area. E.g. the government does not tell you how strong should be your door lock, therefore you have choice to buy the lock you like and not "waste brain cycles" on it. Same with computer security - you choose a password, stick with it and feel secure. If, on the other hand, government punishes choice and forces people to accept whatever police they set up, then people have no choice, but to accept it and further save their brain cycles. But you cannot derive from that situation that they have chosen this method because they are accepting it. It's like saying that you choose to pay your taxes because of the gov "services". If people were choosing to pay taxes, why need policemen to force them to?
Do you really believe that people somehow come together, debate and make collective decision? In reality, some people who want to debate about, say, taxes, come together and discuss where to spend them to (e.g. roads vs. military). Those who don't like taxes at all are not invited to the discussion because "they are unrealistic". Then, the first group decides somehow to do something, comes back to the second group and forces them to pay taxes "because people decided to". This is a mob rule and not justice in any sense. Do 99 people have a moral right to take away from 1 in a situation when 49 should not take the same from 51? Compare this with corporate bylaws: majority of shareholders may decide over the minority, right? But the difference here is that all of them came together and subscribed to these rules voluntarily beforehand, can exit at any time and are never threatened by murder, jail etc.
Imagine a society without use of violence, without any single "law", but only with contracts, network of dispute mediators and ostracism. Private guards will of course exist too, but they'll be paid only when they are transparent and heavily insured against. And will be used against rare random psychos. In this situation, the "common laws" will come out of negotiated mutual agreements between all the clients of mediators done through mediators. And the punishment for not fulfilling your obligations is ostracism: mediators will work on propagating info about your misbehavior to others, so you cannot participate in economic life until you either prove that you are not as bad, as your stupid mediator (in which case he quickly loses all customers), or follow the suggestion to work out your debt voluntarily. For those who do not want to waste their braincycles there is a simple rule: you can secure any contract where it is possible to prove who did what. If your contract is such that no mediator can prove to others that you failed or succeeded, that no one will protect that contract. Mediators and insurers will of course work together to give you the biggest choice of things you can be insured against, but in exchange you cannot have contracts that violate existing client's operations. E.g. you can secure your factory-building contract, but if some guys around are already protected against the pollution, you have to either pay them, or avoid pollution.
So the "laws" would naturally shape themselves in terms of actual, tangible agreements between particular people. No one could say that he was "born" into all these laws. You would only be born into your family, while the adults in your family have choice to re-negotiate the agreements, move out and back etc. (If no one is re-negotiating at the moment, it's because the current state is optimal and everybody's happy.) And as you grow up, you will be able to negotiate and re-negotiate anything. The only prerequisite is absence of physical violence or effective protection against it.
Calling idea ridiculous for being extreme is dishonest. Idea either has merit or it does not, regardless of your opinion of its extremity. Roundness of Earth was also considered extreme, that does not change its validity.
You say I'm extending definition of "threat of murder" to everyone. That's true, but it's not their fault. If we both have a thing called "court", then even if I don't want myself to inflict violence on you, I'm not sure you won't use the court against me. Since the court has the last word and all the guns in the world, I have no choice, but to protect myself by either fleeing from the jurisdiction or using the court against you. It's absolutely the same with patents: Apple and Google are buying up patents because if one of them does not, they will be damaged by others. You could blame them only if they had voluntarily established such a destructive system for themselves, but they did not. Patent cross-licensing is an evidence that people do not like fighting with each other: by doing cross-licensing two entities expect to reduce amount of stupid fight. Of course, human nature is not perfect and some people who are born into this system, feel they have a full moral right to use it for their benefit. E.g. recent war of Apple against Samsung is mostly proactive use of violence that was sold via patents. But even here, the problem does not begin with Apple, but with those who controls the guns (Apple only hired some of them).
Without state some people can still voluntarily fund an agency with guns, courts, licensing and patents. But it will be very different from today's situation. Because today the violence is paid by taxpayers, not the actual users. So when some army of lawyers wants to press you for copying a file, it is not them who pay for prosecutors, lawmakers, prisons, police, propaganda, army and huge bureaucracy. Lawyers spend their salary not on guns and prisons, but on iPods and spa. So how about trying to build an army of policemen using private funds? What would be the business model? Who would risk putting money in the enterprise?
If you seriously fear that someone could earn a $billion and then risk all of it to build a James Bond-style corporation of evil, then you for sure cannot advocate the state - a monopoly on violence funded by forcible extraction instead of voluntary investment. Did you notice that all of evil guys in James Bond movies were either government-funded or absolutely economically impossible (how would you gather 1000 engineers to build a secret nuclear weapon without massive public propaganda that military spendings are good for "society")? All real big mafia structures exist with governmental support. And the bigger they are - the more support they have. Actually, the government is simply a name for the biggest organized thugs in a given region.
Ultimately, it boils down to existence of choice: those who have no choice are not moral agents. If someone attacks me, I will defend myself, but I cannot justify any violence and I don't need to - I simply have no choice. If we both are in a situation when court ruling will put one of us in jail, we have no choice but to play this game. Are we morally responsible for this? Not as much, as the prosecutor, who sure has a choice to not threaten either of us. Equally, if someone steals a wallet from you, and you do not expect any violent threat from this guy, would you think it's morally justified to catch him and put in jail? If he cannot give you wallet back without you breaking his neck, would you prefer to let him go and make sure he never steals again (using doors, locks, reputation, insurance, ostracism), or will you threaten him with physical violence? If latter, would you institutionalize this threat of violence (and accept a risk of getting hit by it), or you'd rather not give anyone ultimate power and seek more preventive solutions?
If you can hire a protection agency voluntarily, would you require maximum transparency of its operations and other proofs that they cannot kill people arbitrarily and would immediately lose a lot of money in case everyone withdraws their contracts? If you want to be an armed guard, you sure will have to prove to everyone how they will punish you effectively in case of a corruption. Without such proof, no one will hire you. If you would require such transparency and strict controls as a customer of protection agency, why is it okay to have a government who was not established with your consent and which cannot be affected directly and immediately in case of misbehavior, but on contrary is forcing you to fund it anyway? It is huge logical mistake to fear a violent guy in a free market and at the same time allow a system of monopoly of such violence that surely will attract people who'd love to use such power.
