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>"If people are crowdfunding law enforcement, if people are allowed to spend money on security to effectively make being a poor homeless dude wandering around on their street a crime, we've failed as a civilization. We've given up any aspiration that hey, justice is something that matters, morals are something that matters: if I can pay for it, I can inflict my will on others to increase my own convenience."

If people are voting for the leaders of the law enforcement, if people are allowed to vote for security to effectively make being a poor homeless dude wandering around on their street a crime, we've failed as a civilization. We've given up any aspiration that hey, justice is something that matters, morals are something that matters: if I can vote for it, I can inflict my will on others to increase my own convenience.

Lest you think that is a silly thing to say, THAT IS HAPPENING NOW. The City of Berkeley gets a DHS-sponsored Armored Personell Carrier. Cops in New York stop and fisk people of color. In no less than 10 cities in america, it is illegal to feed the homeless (I've broken this law in my own city, many times). What makes the group of people known as the "wealthy" any more or less suspicious or despicable than the group of people known as the "popular"?

Just a question, how do are laws that make feeding the homeless illegal enforceable? Do they require people to provide proof of residency somewhere prior to purchasing food for others?

I don't know, I've never been arrested for it, and I hope to never, but other people have not been so lucky.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/10/orlando-food-not-bo...

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Houston-perm...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/28/us/28homeless.html?pagewan...

etc. etc.

This sort of thing is not just restricted to "red states" - SF made it illegal to sleep on the sidewalks...

> What makes the group of people known as the "wealthy" any more or less suspicious or despicable than the group of people known as the "popular"?

The group of people known as the "popular" is much larger and generally more diverse, and therefore it takes a bit more power of persuasion (or widespread bigotry) to convince them that harassing a particular social group is a good use of their tax dollars. If the "popular" backs that harassment, society has bigger problems than the legal mechanisms that permit them to do so.

A situation where people wanting "security" to target a minority or behaviour they dislike need electoral and legislative support may not be perfect, but it's still preferable to a situation where they simply need sufficient funds.

> The group of people known as the "popular" is much larger and generally more diverse.

Yeah, no, that's really not true, by "popular", I'm functionally referring to people "popular enough to get elected". This specific subset may also be restricted to the intersection of the common definition of "popular" and "narcissistic enough to try".

We may choose to really examine those individuals who have a day-to-day operational control over the work of the state. Here there are also complicating factors like bureaucrats and mid- and high- level managers in the state apparatus not only are unelected (so that to properly describe this group we should re-qualify popular as "favorable to the elected") but these people also tend to be less accountable - "qualified immunity", not often do you hear of government officials going to jail - though I suppose that's true of wall street, too...

Coming from a country where private security and completely private healthcare, and living in secure 24/7 guarded enclaves is how you secure for yourself the kind of lifestyle most Americans enjoy, I'm not sure dismantling government is the solution.

This kind of stratification feels very familiar.

The privileged forget the hidden costs of civilisation, the little safety nets ensuring misfortune for the few should not be a life-ruining event, forget their own massive position of safety and security, therefore, what is government but a useless edifice impeding profit and efficiency.

Are we not all self made men who raised ourselves from the cradle, catching our own food, building our own cabins, driving on roads we made, teaching ourselves from first principles?

In the case of Oakland, where I live, I get the sense that one of the challenges is that there's no real pressure on the city government to improve things. While it is true that services such as the police are underfunded, I think this is also used as a pretext to enable unresponsive, bureaucratic behavior on the part of the legal and law enforcement systems. Perhaps crowdfunding will provide a stimulus for additional responsiveness once government agencies see the possibility of genuine competition on some level.

I live close to this neighborhood and walk through it frequently, and I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. Besides the general principle of justice/policing not being the same as trash pickup, the article's premise is flawed; private security won't have any power to make arrests, so whenever it calls on official police resources (which I anticipate that it will) it most certainly does whisk those away from other neighborhoods.

> We need to address the fact that we've lost faith in our governments, and that we don't depend on our .gov to provide for our needs, and that we don't believe in the contract anymore. This is a short-sighted sort of fix, and one that is only going to lay the groundwork for a much, much messier attempt at resolution. We need to fix the .gov.

I would really like to see more people taking an interest in figuring out the details of how to construct a government. Most people tend to go with the overly simplistic solutions of (1) "magically minimize" or (2) "reset back to [insert date here: 1776; 1860; 1950]", neither of which are intellectually honest answers. (They're akin to asking, "What kind of map projection do you prefer?" "A globe.")

I've done some work in the area (an HN search will turn up me talking about it), but I'm crippled by my own neuroses.

It'd be nice to see better toolsets for collaboration, for instance, or figuring out a way to wholly replace voting altogether (rather than swapping out the specific ways of casting ballots). Atwood's Discourse is nice, but it's still just a forum for talking rather than a system for making decisions.