Comment by qPM9l3XJrF | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qPM9l3XJrF | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's a bit more complicated than that.

First, just because the state loses its monopoly doesn't mean some other entity gains a monopoly. In Mexico, cartels aren't just fighting the state, they are also fighting each other. If the state collapsed, they will continue fighting each other, and the people of Mexico will effectively live in a semi-permanent warzone.

Second, not all violent entities are created equal. Cartel members are motivated by greed and lust for power. Many are willing to employ tactics such as torture and terrorism to advance those goals: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mexican-drug-cartels-new...

I'm not claiming every cop is a saint, far from it. There is certainly room for improvement in the US at least. However, bad cops are newsworthy because we expect better from our cops than our gangsters. On a statistical basis, a much larger fraction of the police force is motivated by a desire to protect and serve the public. And our police forces are subject to at least nominal democratic accountability.

If due process requirements don't meaningfully differentiate cops from gangsters in your eyes, we might as well do away with them anyways.

> Second, not all violent entities are created equal. Cartel members are motivated by greed and lust for power. Many are willing to employ tactics such as torture and terrorism to advance those goals

First world governments are known to employ torture and terrorism to achieve their goals, but it's abstracted away as much as possible. While I think the same motivations of greed and power lust exist in governments too, I do agree there is a big difference between cartels and "good" governments: a good government represents the will of the people, and has checks and balances to at least reduce the brazenness and frequency of their violent excesses.

To me, the takeaway is that we can't really rely just on individuals to run moral power structures, but that we need to encode these values into the rules of structure itself - the democratic principles, laws, and enforcement - to get a decent approximation of a civil society. I don't know the details of cartel governance, but I imagine it's authoritarian without much oversight.

> To me, the takeaway is that we can't really rely just on individuals to run moral power structures, but that we need to encode these values into the rules of structure itself - the democratic principles, laws, and enforcement - to get a decent approximation of a civil society.

Hmm, I took exactly the opposite message: democratic checks and balances don't work unless individual members of society really believe in them.

Yes, look up Enrique Camarena

I think most of what you just posted has very little to do with what OP posted.

Due process, btw, isn't some inherent property of states. Lots of states were with pretty capricious forms of justice.

I happen to agree with OP that if the state failed, then these gangs would rapidly take their place, but without the trappings of liberalism that are part of modern Mexico's government. However, I also happen to think that it is not analogous to how states form because these gangs rely on the state; they are more like parasites on the body politic. Sometimes parasites kill their hosts though.

> In Mexico, cartels aren't just fighting the state, they are also fighting each other.

To be fair, states also sometimes fight each other. They also tend to de-escalate these fights over time as long-term institutional arrangements come to predominate.

"To be fair, states also sometimes fight each other. "

That's basically European history in a nutshell. The middle ages was basically walled cities fighting other walled cities, renaissance too.

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