If you and contribute funds to pay an anonymous assassin, you've committed attempted murder. If the anonymous assassin succeeds, you can be tried for murder even if they never locate the assassin.
Though this might not be so much a libertarian solution as an example of the degree to which libertarian ideals can be twisted to achieve the sort of ends they claim to fight against.
What you're ultimately talking about is terrorism - if you're a government employee, don't do bad things* or we might "predict" your death. The choice they're presenting seems to be either bad, violent actors in government, or bad, violent lynch mobs.
*Where "bad things" might be anything from "invading Iraq" to "free healthcare".
Most people would accept that it's moral for someone who's threatened with a gun by another to kill that other person, thus preserving their own life.
Many would still accept as moral the same situation, but where the assailant has a knife.
Many would again accept as moral everything the same, except instead of someone intent to kill with a knife, an assailant who only intended to rob.
Robbery is taking a thing against the wishes/desires/rights of another.
Some might argue that the government collecting taxes is robbery by that definition and thus they have the moral right to defend their property with deadly force. The government certainly will use force to ensure that it gets it's taxes. They won't shoot you but they will take away your freedom and the only way they can do that is with force or the threat of force.
At what point do you disagree with that line of thinking? Why? I'm not trolling you, genuinely curious.
Most people are not very even handed when they feel that their rights have been violated, so it tends to lead to escalation, and tribal/gang style violence, tit-for-tat.
It's much better IMO for a society to deal with disputes by legal means, not by stalking, harassing and killing each other, eg. if I shoot you in self defence, then that's 1 person's worth of productivity lost to the world, similarly if I harass you and threaten you at your home address (0.5 x PP?).
And yes, if you consistently violate other people's rights, or act with poor judgement, then you should lose rights. For example, if you're in the US and threaten people with a gun, you should lose the right to carry a gun, or the right to not be searched.
What if the US had a post-earning tax where the tax collector had to physically come to your house and demand the money that the government said you owed it. And he was armed. And he made the threat of violence personally rather than through a large bureaucracy? Would that change things? Why or why not? Again, not trolling but genuinely interested.
Agree 100% that people don't react well when they feel their rights are being violated. The loss of agency and personal sovereignty is a really big deal.
I'm with you on the loss of rights examples you give up to a point. I'm totally on board with situational loss of rights (I threaten you with a gun and you're in the right to shoot me) but I'm less in favor of doing that systematically. Mostly because of how safe things are these days (I think quite good) versus the potential for abuse (I think quite high).
It's very much an i-win-you-lose mindset, I don't think it's really based much in reality and I'd rather not live anywhere near a society based on those principles.
Because if someone chooses to not obey, they will eventually face a gun which they did not bring.
The fact that the state/government has a monopoly on violence means that your interactions with them aren't necessarily voluntary. Many people don't have a problem with paying for roads, or some semblance of a military, or schools or whatnot.
But the very nature of a state is that if you don't do what it tells you to, you have no recourse. Someone might not put a gun to your head but you have to know that there's no negotiation.
Bullshit.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/civil-d...
Choosing to break an unjust law doesn't mean that a judge will understand the injustice of it and let you go free, nor is there any assurance that jury would acquit you. That's what I mean when I say "there's no negotiation"
Once a police officers decides to arrest you all negotiations have ceased and they may do whatever the law tells them to, or whatever the law lets them get away with, or perhaps a bit more.
Of course, shooting people over "legal action" sounds crazy, so to make yourself sound better you'd better keep talking about guns.
Edit: Here's a good example of the alternative to shooting people, from Bob Brown, former leader of the Greens here in Australia:
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/as-...
a) it works, and b) if you can't find 1000 people who are also willing to come and protest, perhaps your cause isn't that worthwhile?
The laws, the courts, everything else is ultimately backed up by violence or the threat of violence. If you are convicted of a crime and you say you don't want to go to jail there are people whose job it is to MAKE you go to jail. If you cooperate, the threat of violence doesn't turn into actual violence but if you do not, it will materialize.
It's probably the easiest way to cut out the myriad different ways that the state will back up it's laws with actions and cut to the chase: you can choose not to comply but you will pay dearly for it.
"Libertarian or people pointing guns at you" is a false dichotomy.
I'm not suggesting that false dichotomy, you are. What I am suggesting is that the state exists in it's current form largely because it does hold the monopoly on violence. The very definition of government is that it's the entity with the monopoly on violence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D64KcZsD82E
How many steps removed does the guy toting the gun have to be in order for the implicit threat of violence to be OK? Zero? Two? Eight? How does the abstraction of that implicit threat make it any more palatable?