Why should they have access? ICE has no legitimate use for citizens tax returns. We have a right to privacy.
That said, most people here do not agree with me, most are statists who fundamentally enjoy kissing a boot stamping on the face of human freedom, they just have the delusion that their tribe is the good one and they're engaged in a fundamentally righteous and just conquest to crush the evildoers in the other tribe.
So we'll keep playing this stupid game where each side takes turns whacking the other side with the stick of government power, rather than acknowledging that we'd all be better off if we grew up, acted like adults, threw the stick away, and stopped taking turns trying to injure the other with it.
The federal government, further, has almost zero role in policing. Unless you live in DC, there is a >99% chance that any time you interact with a member of law enforcement, they are state/county/city.
The histrionics over fundamentalist Christians, who make up less than 15% of the country anyway (not some rabid majority trying to stamp out the rights of the minority - they are the minority; most Americans who call themselves "Christian" are closer to atheists in terms of church attendance than the tiny subset of fundamentalists), and are not some dangerous threat.
I grew up in a repressive, fundamentalist evangelical southern Baptist household as a non-hetereosexual. I'm very familiar with that world in the worst of ways, including the loosely regulated Christian boarding schools.
These people are a pain in the ass, but they're not a real danger. To insist otherwise is to critically misunderstand reality, crime rates, and really the general intent of that subset of the population.
What's that? It was the liberal Federal government who did those things? Well darn, I guess the theocrats are part of the problem.
Slavery and racial segregation doesn't exist in nature, the legal practice of both only ever existed thanks to government having a monopopy on force.
The correction was good and overdue (thank you to all of the western countries who ended slavery long before the rest of the world did), but never forget that it was governments who created the original evil in the first place.
But I get it. You're fundamentally statist - no amount of state-sanctioned evil can ever convince you that the state is bad.
On a related note: Free Palestine.
> But I get it. You're fundamentally statist - no amount of state-sanctioned evil can ever convince you that the state is bad.
Pretty odd assumption to make. Clearly I think some types of states are bad, I'm just pitching for one specific kind. Israeli theocrats are bad too, but I get it, leftism - history is a suggestion and nothing is ever good enough.
Support these monsters all you want, just do yourself a favor and don't delude yourself into thinking you're on the team of the "good guys". You're on the team of psychopathic mass murderers who will brag about what they've done with a smile and a laugh.
No amount of good governance can justify supporting institutions run by people who commit war crimes and grave moral atrocities with pleasure.
>Western liberal states broadly have greater civil rights and have reduced poverty more than any other type of system in history
Except that of China, whom by embracing markets and capitalism, lifted more people out of poverty than the entire populations of the United States and Western Europe combined.
Make no mistake: Western liberalism isn't what lifts people out of poverty, capitalism does. It doesn't matter whether the capitalism is practiced by western liberal democracies or repressive authoritarian surveillance states - where capitalism goes, widespread increases in human wealth and quality of life follow.
That people could confuse this cause-effect relationship merely because western liberalism adopted capitalism earlier than the more authoritarian laggards only further proves "that government which governs least, governs best".
Less government = more freedom = less poverty.
More government = less freedom = more poverty.
Also, you're cherry-picking convenient examples while ignoring the inconvenient examples (Zapatistas, Rojava, various indigenous societies). The 1790s weren't even anarchist - they had revolutionary governments. The Terror was conducted BY a government, not in an absence of government.
Anarchist societies can maintain order and capitalism can create wealth under any political system. Individuals can murder, but states are the only entities to have ever committed genocide. The question isn't whether states do good things sometimes - it's whether any amount of good can justify establishing the prerequisite conditions for genocide to occur.
Is any amount of poverty reduction worth creating and maintaining the machinery that made Auschwitz possible, especially in a world where that poverty reduction doesn't actually require the existence of that machinery to begin with?
Keeping the state around for the stated purpose of reducing poverty is like keeping a loaded gun in a daycare to open juice boxes. Sure you can do it that way, but you also do not need the gun to do that, and having the gun there just introduces massive unnecessary risks.
Willfully ignoring them doesn't mean they don't exist.
Given those examples, I think most people, myself included, would opt for the stability and moral ambiguity of the western liberal state.
Back to the discussion at hand:
The main threat Rojava faced was ISIS, with Turkey becoming the primary threat after ISIS's defeat. But this only further strengthens my argument - these stateless societies exist under constant threat from states, not from internal collapse.
The Mexican state is essentially semi-complicit with, and deeply infiltrated by the cartels. There is nothing stopping either the cartels or the Mexican state from attempting to steamroll through Chiapas, besides the will of the people who live there to function autonomously (and the will to assert that right to peaceful existence through force, if necessary). The Zapatistas have maintained their autonomy for 30 years not through state protection but through community self-defense. If anything, they prove that people can resist both state and non-state violence without becoming a state themselves.
Your observation that these societies exist under threat from states actually reinforces my point. States don't tolerate alternatives because functioning anarchist societies expose the lie that states are necessary. Of course states and their allies try to crush them - the very existence of these functioning anarchist societies is a threat to state legitimacy
You're welcome to prefer a western liberal state, and I don't refute that most people would. That said, not everyone even has the luxury of choice in the first place. Many Zapatista communities have even seen dramatic improvements in healthcare, education, and women's rights compared to their state-governed neighbors. For these people, the comparison isn't between "the stability and moral ambiguity of the western liberal state" or not, it's between "state-governed oppression & poverty" and "relative prosperity through autonomy".
But I'm glad we can agree that functional, rights-respecting societies can exist without states. Once we acknowledge that, the question in my mind becomes: what level of genocide risk are we willing to accept across all states for the benefits you see some states providing? We can't cherry-pick Sweden while ignoring Syria - the collective sum of their outputs is the toll we pay for the existence of the state itself.