Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)

That there's always been hunger in the world, even when we didn't produce more food than needed tells you production of food is not the resource limiting the distribution of food, other resources are. Even with all the imagination and collaboration of every communal government in the world to a scale never seen before in history, hunger is still a huge problem, because food is not the only resource, everything is a resource: time, interest, emotions, infrastructure, goods, distribution, people, communities, everything, and they compete with one another for our time and attention.

Everything is in competition, even your ideas and mine right now, and that's a good thing, but the first step to try and better our situation is to accept the reality of the natural world and not fight against it.

And you know what? If the ticket didn't come with some threat of forceful punishment for no payment, I probably wouldn't have paid it, and I wouldn't be afraid of getting another one.

I also wouldn't pay taxes voluntarily, at least not nearly as much as I pay now.

I do these things because I am scared of the law. I don't think I'm unusual, and I don't think I'm a psychopath. So unless the threat model is only serious crime, I don't think psychopaths are the only issue. I think most people are not good players once a community grows large enough to afford anonymity.

I was eliding what I thought was the obvious conclusion. But let me be more explicit. If someone is determined to do something, and you are determined to stop them, the result will be an escalation that leads to taking actions that hurt, damage, or kill the other person.

> It doesn't. If it was, they wouldn't be lifelong criminals.

You just restated the original assertion I responded to, again without evidence or argument. Why not try responding to the ideas I presented?

> That shouldn't be their role. Violence just leads to more violence. They are breaking the laws they're paid to uphold otherwise.

That should be their only role. The biggest problem with police is that they are doing a ton of other jobs that they are not qualified to do. A firefighter is trained to put out fires. A paramedic is trained to perform lifesaving medical procedures. Pretty much the only thing a police officer brings to an emergency is a gun. And most emergencies cannot be solved with a gun. A car accident can't be solved with a gun. A cat stuck in a tree can't be solved (except in the loosest sense) with a gun. A psychiatric emergency can't be solved with a gun. But a handful of emergencies can only be solved with a gun - an armed bank robbery, a terrorist attack. And many more situations can only be resolved because the authorities can wield the threat of violence. Consider a criminal investigation for instance. When the feds show up at your business to request financial records, they don't usually carry guns. But even though you may not want to give them documents that will incriminate you, that's still preferable to the investigators calling the police and seizing the files themselves while you sit in the back of the police car.

I actually like a lot of things about Freidman's work, but I don't think it would actually function. The issue is that at the end of the day it's still just armed gangs living in tension with each other. Peace is retained as long as it's more profitable than war, but that's no longer the case when one gang is stronger than the others. In our world, I think you'd pretty much immediately see Amazon Security Forces start annexing all their smaller neighbors, thus making ASF stronger so they can annex more and more. This scales up until there are just a few large organizations (ASF, Google Army, Exxon Defense Group, etc) who are equally enough balanced - or until there is only one. These large organizations have contiguous territories, borders, and monopolies on violence.

Anarchist just can't last. It's like try to make a sculpture of water. Even if you could shape it, it'll immediately move towards the lowest-energy state. Without something to stop them, the strong will immediately begin seizing power from the weak and ultimately culimnate straight back to governmental entities with monopolies on violence. Which is how we live now.