link to original reddit post by /u/Anenome5
If you are to be protected from something, you should ask whether that protection is costing you more than the something being protected against.
One notable example was a recent article I saw about "asset forfeiture", a fancy way of saying the cops take your stuff without a conviction. The yearly dollar figure for assets seized by the police has exceeded the dollar figure of thieves robbing people, either at gunpoint, casual theft, or breaking into your home.
Why would we, as a people, accept things like this as well as police brutality and militarization? Let's be realistic about it.
For one things, most people feel that asset forfeiture is not something that happens to them, only to bad guy, people who smoke drugs or deliver drugs or deal drugs.
But beyond that, people want the police in their life because they believe that the police create law and order, and without the police we would have true anarchy, ie: chaos.
And they are not wrong.
I remember reading about the experience of a young left anarchist in Italy back in 1930's era who was constantly arguing with his parents, saying without the police everything would be roses and sunshine, people wouldn't riot or steal or kill each other, and his parents were arguing that without police the city would descend into a dystopian chaos of crime and victims.
Soon after, the cops really did give up and this anarchist got to see what resulted, and it was crime and riots and chaos, with open murders and theft on the streets, people turned on each other without law enforcement.
People have a kind of cultural memory about something like this, and this is not something we as libertarians have talked about very much, the legacy of the state in culture. We are striking at an element of culture that crosses all cultures and descends literally from pre-history. No one can say where the first government came from, it predates writing.
We should not align ourselves against that necessarily, because people are willing buyers of law and order, and we are not seeking to overthrow the establishment of law and order, rather we seek to obtain law and order via stateless means.
And that is a key distinction.
The truth is, if we had a libertarian / ancap society, the vast majority of people would not even realize it is a stateless society. Because what they THINK in their heads of as 'the state' is primarily about having law, police, and courts to establish law and order. They do not think, like we do, about the effects of giving one group a monopoly on law creation. As long as there is law-creation in some form they will tend to think they are living in a civilized society.
And they are not wrong about that. It will be civilized, more civilized even than our own current society, because it dispenses with aggressive force as part of the political system.
But these are jargon terms that the masses need never know about. All the masses care about is outcomes, not the theory behind those outcomes.
The masses do not care about the engineering that went into the car they're about to buy, they care about the miles-per-gallon and safety rating.
The masses do not care about the tolerances achieved through new manufacturing methods, they care about how cheaply that car can be made and what kind of value they expect they can obtain.
What we have to realize is that ancap society, the one we want to build, is like selling cars to people who've been using horses for the last five thousand years. The only thing most people will care about is "what's in it for me?"
Our focus should not be on converting the entire world into libertarians, that is an impossible goal. Our focus should be on building alternatives that ordinary people can invest in and obtain superior outcomes to the current societies they live in.
It is a massive opportunity for libertarians that the entire 3rd world is desperate to leave those countries and emigrate to a better place. It's one reason why I like the concept of seasteading so much, international waters both allows for the building of international cities and bans the establishment of new states! That is a recipe for an ancap society! Private societies where anyone can live regardless of passport, where building borders and states is illegal! They've handed us the trump card!
The fact is that the disease of the criminality is not worse than the cure that is the State right now in the US and in much of the 1st world. But it is trending in that direction and it has been trending in that direction for so long now that we can reasonable begin to forecast that it is coming. It has come already for many of us who have the least tolerance for the State's bullshit, and people will continue to wake up as the state grows more powerful, so as a trickle becomes a stream becomes a flood.
The opportunity I see is, what happens if we give that flood somewhere to go, somewhere that is inside a libertarian society. If we want to achieve that kind of win someday, we need to start building now.