Just one of several good reasons why it's inaccurate to think that if you've done nothing wrong then you have nothing to fear from the authorities.
The trick is to stop treating "the government" as some monolithic "other", and work to make the government part of us; made out of the same cloth as everyone else. If you don't like what the government is doing, then get more active in government. Any barriers to everyday citizens becoming active in government should be torn down as much as possible. Then giving the government power is the same as giving everyone power.
This is what libertarians and anarchists never seem to understand (or intentionally ignore). There's no such thing as "limited government" if you think of "the government" as a collection of entities that have power over your life. If you're lucky, you can have some influence on the makeup of those entities: mega-corporations, billionaires, tribal warlords, 70-year-old white supremacists, crime bosses, religious chosen-ones, feudal lords, or us. Let's work hard to skew it toward being us as much as we can, and stop pretending that if we take power out of the hands of one entity that we call "the government", then that power just goes away and nobody else exercises it.
The existence of that constraint on government power does not imply a power vacuum. If the government can't take your property without due process, that doesn't imply that a corporation can, because the restriction on government takings doesn't prevent the government from passing and enforcing laws against property theft by others. They're two separate things.
We could, and should, make civil asset forfeiture unconstitutional. Arguably it already is and the right case just hasn't made it to the Supreme Court yet. That's an example of a constraint on government power and it's a good thing.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
And btw, I also mentioned the ongoing plague of opioids addiction sparked by Purdue pharma. Didn't you read it?
The laws upholding slavery were government action, without which there would have been no slave trade because without government support to hunt them down the slaves would all just run away.
> the Dutch East Indian Company colonization of Indonesia
The Dutch East Indian Company was essentially a government. You can't "colonize" anything and not be a government.
> drugs traffic in the 20th century
The result of government prohibition creating a black market.
> the cumulative effects of poisoning from tetraethyl lead
> the ongoing plague of opioids addiction sparked by Purdue pharma
These things are certainly bad, but Stalin killed more than 20 million people. If you were to nuke five cities the size of Los Angeles it wouldn't be that many people. These things aren't even the same order of magnitude.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith
Moreover, oversight and accountability cost money, which leads to more bloat, which leads to more people complaining about government.
US Federal foreign policy IS fucked however, and I can see how ‘the Great Satan’ arose as an epithet.
Take some single mother in a backwards part of a backwards state making near enough the absolute minimum wage. If her rights are curtailed even further, it’s not like she can just up and move.
You need:
- the means to move
- a network (or the skills to build one) at your destination
- the general knowledge to know where is good to go to
- the street smarts to not get exploited when you arrive
Though at the same time there are many who don’t dream and just get stuck in the drudgery and lose the will the fight despite having a good shot. Demoralized.