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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Let me offer a counterpoint. The average Internet anarcho-libertarian has grown up so coddled by the benefits of first-world government they don't even understand why they need it. They go out in the street and feel safe and think that's just how human societies are. They talk about jack-boot thugs, but they've never experienced fear of a real one. They have no experiences that would let them comprehend a world without a monopoly on violence. A world where small groups of people using organized violence can terrorize the majority. A world where the background threat of violence at the hands of government is replaced with in-your-face actual violence from the vicious people among your fellow man.

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That's a false dilemma. It's not about our current government vs no government, it's about complacency vs reform.

Most libertarians are not "anarcho-libertarian", whatever that actually means, nor are we anarchists.

I think most of us agree that a state is important. The question, which people have been grappling with as long as there have been states, is how to make sure that the state is benevolent--that it actually works in ordinary people's favor, rather than degenerating into a relationship of oppression and exploitation.

The libertarian question, specifically, is how do you ensure that the state respects people's individual freedoms?

History has shown mass surveillance to be antithetical to individual freedom. So our goal is to abolish mass surveillance.

You said we're "so coddled by the benefits of a first-world government". Do you think MLK was coddled by his gov't when he was hounded by the FBI, sent threats, & imprisoned for his words? We are lucky that the surveillance capabilities of the state back then were much more limited than they are today.

Today, every email in your inbox, every text, every cell phone GPS coordinate, every draft in your drafts folder is plaintext in a big database. That database is searchable by bureaucrats you'll never meet. Even if they never type in "rayiner" specifically, this state of affairs is dangerous to the freedom we all enjoy. Just because we have it better than some unlucky people elsewhere, doesn't mean that we should stop trying to fix our own society here and now.

> History has shown mass surveillance to be antithetical to individual freedom. So our goal is to abolish mass surveillance.

It has? When?

Every modern authoritarian regime relies on mass surveillance as a cornerstone of its power.

Edit: for example, North Korea, Soviet bloc countries past and present, Fascist states...

I always thought it was the oppressive laws, poor economies, concentration camps and (in many cases) out right starvation of the populace that held the people in check. To me those things seem a lot more important that the gov't snooping on my email.

So just because we are not rounding dissenters up into concentration camps or starving half the population to death David Cameron (or whoever the next one is) should be able to search my entire communication and location history?

That attitude sends society rapidly back to the concentration camps and starvation.

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."

>It has? When?

A precise example: "the Stasi" in East Germany during the 80s.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9049096, for example.

This is interesting to follow; I basically agree with your take, but I also know precisely the kind of libertarian "anarcho-capitalist" type that Rayiner is effectively responding to, folks who follow in the footsteps of Murray Rothbard and company. They elevate "coercion" to the highest possible crime: you cannot have a state that isn't invested with the power to coerce its citizens' behavior, ergo a benevolent state is impossible. So they fashion themselves anarchists, either unaware of or choosing to downplay the very anti-capitalist roots of anarchism. (And Rayiner's observation about the frequent criticism of "a state monopoly on violence" from that crowd is one I've also had; as opposed to what, exactly, a free market for violence? Or a natural monopoly on it, perhaps? I understand their criticism to be valid concerns about what the failure conditions of that monopoly lead to, but many of the alternatives are horrifying in their success conditions.)

Turning this back on the actual topic, though, what do you think the libertarian response to the problems in your last paragraph should really be? I can't think of any reforms which don't still depend on the state following its own rules for both what it's allowed to collect and what it can do with the data it does collect. Granted, merely having those rules--which we largely don't--would be an improvement, but it feels like it's in the "necessary but not sufficient" category.

I didn't mean to imply it was a choice of current government versus no government--my post was a limited response to the idea of the state being the most dangerous thing. I think it's tremendously important to constantly strive for better government.

As for solutions:

> Today, every email in your inbox, every text, every cell phone GPS coordinate, every draft in your drafts folder is plaintext in a big database.

And whose fault is that? The government didn't create SMTP, SMS, webmail, etc. You can't have privacy from the government without creating a culture of privacy. We have a culture where people share extremely intimate information with their thousand "closest friends" via Facebook, Twitter, etc. People are not going to trust the government less than their random acquaintances, and people aren't going to demand privacy from the government unless the culture shifts such that they value privacy in other aspects of their lives.

> Today, every email in your inbox, every text, every cell phone GPS coordinate, every draft in your drafts folder is plaintext in a big database.

> And whose fault is that?

That fault lies with the people directing the assembly of the information into the database.

But agreed with your comment on Internet anarcho-libertarians. That is not a view grounded in rough and tumble world reality. The state is necessary to the human condition. I just wish we had better ones that took a broader view.

There are huge databases with all your text messages and emails. The government didn't create them. Software engineers did. And once you condition people to accept that, you'll sound like a nutter complaining about the government having data that's already strewn all over the Internet.

That's why I'm hoping Tim Cook runs with what he is saying here. In principle, I can send iMessages that even Apple can't read. If you condition people to expect privacy, they will demand it from the government too.

Actually, the government did create SMTP (Postel was on a DARPA grant) and SMS (CEPT was an association of state-run PTTs, and Hillebrand in particular was a Deutsche Bundespost employee); and the US government in particular worked very hard indeed to stop SMTP, TCP, and IP from getting encryption added to them, what with treating cryptographic software as a “munition” and export-controlling it, plus constantly stymieing working groups in the IETF and other places that tried to standardize encryption.

> People are not going to trust the government less than their random acquaintances,

It sounds like you’ve never met an immigrant, a black person, or a poor person? Because that statement of yours sounds totally absurd to me.

I won't try and speak for all anarcho-capitalists, but I've experienced both extremes of the spectrum - and my political position is not a result of some kind of preferred violence. It is a moral issue, as I don't believe that the end justifies the means. In order to support the state, you have to be of that mindset, that the end justifies the means.

This is my experience too. I was just a garden variety minarchist libertarian before I had travelled widely. Seeing the common thread throughout the world that everywhere you go the people calling themselves the state exhibit the same totalitarian thuggishness is what drove me over the edge into being anarchocapitalist.

I find it tragically naive to see statists adopting this position as if they're the world weary travellers that don't wish to be bothered by the naivete of others that can't see the necessity of their chains, when the reality is closer to the exact opposite.

There are some striking anti-vaxxer parallels here.

It's also like the religious fundamentalists who insist "you can just pray the gay away." As far as most people are concerned, the premise that all violence is absolutely unnecessary is not a widely held position. Indeed, it's more commonly seen as an exercise in extreme wishful thinking, on par with believing that it's possible to walk on water or leap from a building and fly.

Sure, you can flatly insist "the ends don't justify the means" but this is begging the question in that it assumes the means in are unequivocally wrong. Most people aren't about to make that assumption when it comes to violence. In other words, the tack taken by our friendly anarcho-libertarian here is is a bit like hitting a baseball and making a dash straight for second base. Sorry, kid, but nope.

To get to second you've first got to convince us that all violence is absolutely, supremely wrong in each and every case. Only then will the "ends don't justify the means" argument have a leg to stand on.

Good luck.

>>As far as most people are concerned, the premise that all violence is absolutely unnecessary is not a widely held position.

This is a straw man that, quite frankly, I'm left scratching my head as to where you got it from. People commit violence when they can get something they want by doing so, and won't face repercussions for the violent act. The places around the world that are widely considered the most violent countries are those that have strong (sometimes authoritarian) central governments, and few rights individuals can exercise to protect themselves on a local level. Examples - China, Russia, Brazil, the Middle East.

The reason this is the case is because the vast majority of citizens in these locations are law-abiding citizens, meaning they won't break the law to own a gun to protect themselves, or take other measures necessary to ensure their own protection, other than depending on the government (either local or national). Then, what happens is government law enforcement fails, because we're human and we all make mistakes - national law enforcement may not be present, local law enforcement may be corrupt or incompetent, or hundreds of other reasons failure could take place. When the law enforcement fails though, regardless of the reason, those law abiding citizens who don't have any means of protecting themselves are now vulnerable to pretty much anyone.

I hope you realize, and can think deeply enough, to understand that the problem of violence is not one that has a binary solution to be solved only via monopoly powers of government. There are literally thousands of creative ideas that can be tried to combat violence...before resorting to coercion by the State. If you read the other posts here, you would understand how those ideas could be explored, and also why they have pretty much died out.

No libertarian or anarcho-liberterian lives in a fantasy world where they think they can just 'wish away' violence. They just understand the answer to violence is not as simple as a vote for 'yes' or 'no' on a ballot box. If that's the world you wish to live, then great. If not, I suggest you open your mind a bit, expand your thinking, and at least consider what the other side has to say.

"Then, what happens is government law enforcement fails, because we're human and we all make mistakes - national law enforcement may not be present, local law enforcement may be corrupt or incompetent, or hundreds of other reasons failure could take place."

Then there's anarcho-tyranny, where in a riff on the old theme of the upper and lower class uniting against the middle, the ruling class uses withdrawal of police resources against geographically distinct enemies. I've been told this has been done in D.C., which like NYC essentially forbids legal gun ownership (although when I was living Inside the Beltway, I noticed D.C. police and juries were rather sympathetic to genuine self-defense shootings).

I've observed this in the U.K. during Blair's regime, where rural areas were stripped of ... 2/3rds of their police, if I remember, and some suburbs that voted "incorrectly" were also said to have suffered, but it was less clear cut.

So this goes way beyond "When seconds count, the police are minutes away" and societal/governmental breakdown.

Brazil doesn't have a "strong (sometimes authoritarian) central government" and individuals certainly do not have "few rights".

Maybe not as much as in the past, but they certainly have far fewer freedoms than Americans enjoy, including the right to own a gun to defend yourself. I was just reading the other day that entrepreneurs are afraid to start businesses here because there are so many taxes and fees that apply to new businesses, that business owners don't know what fees and taxes are legit and what are scams from criminals taking advantage of their naivety. Sounds like a great way for a country to help all of its citizens achieve their full potential.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/brazils-leader-fig...

Your bias is really showing. Brazilians don't have far fewer freedoms than Americans, in fact I'd say some of the freedoms brazilians enjoy are far more important than those in the US.

That doesn't mean Brazil is perfect, it's certainly not. It's a country with a lot of problems, but to say it is authoritarian is just straight-up false.

This is just a small list, there are many more examples if you bother to look for them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unite...

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