Libertarians refer to the initiation of force between humans. Competition is not the same as initiating force, and one species consuming another is not relevant for determining what rules people should follow when interacting with each other.

“Granted, there’s no capital accumulation in nature and no division of labor”

You haven’t studied much biology, have you?

(i’m brazilian – I don’t feel free when I read on the papers that we pay 50% tax on gas)

Some coincidences are just funny

The law should be about justice, morality, a higher value. But the sheer revolting brutality I see in nature makes me incapable of reconciling with any kind of higher value. Force seems to be the only value, which kind of defeats Jeffrey Tucker’s teachings of cooperation and productivity.

How can the law justify itself when it’s just another warring faction displaying a show of force ? In which way is the law different than the criminals or terrorists who are also displaying brutal unconscionable force ?

I would like to view the law and the police as moral agents, not just force agents. But all this police state escalation seems to indicate that the police are just about force and that the law can be defeated by being stronger than it’s enforcers.

Come on, the law has got to have more and better justifications than the mere fact that it has powerful enforcers. Because force is force, why then would one force be better than the other ?

How can you become a peaceful and cooperating producer a la Jeffrey Tucker when you are afraid that you might be busted by a swat team for selling milk etc.

Such police states discourage productivity and cooperation and peace and makes civilization poorer and more violent.

And such police states, especially the militarization of police, places a dangerous emphasis on force. It purports that the police are justified to act the way they do merely on the fact that they have the force, the power, the might to do so.

It sends the message that if you somehow find out how to be more powerful than them, you are therefore justified to break the law. That’s a terrible message to send.

If you have to use excessive force to police a society, maybe it’s because you have bad laws that criminalizes things that should be legal and you ought to review those laws instead of giving more teeth to the law enforcers ?

A very brutal world. Surely, all this brutality cannot be accounted for man’s “sin” of eating the forbidden fruit. Therefore, if there’s a God, he’s unfortunately behind all of this. He is the big boss and we all work for him, wether we like it or not. It saddens me that God has a part in this brutality, he is not the all loving, all caring entity I had hoped and wished he was. If he’s ever there, he obviously makes usage of brutality for reasons only he comprehends but it offends me a great deal. I cannot reconcile in peace with my God when I see how brutal is the world we live in.

Libertarians seem to think that it’s all the government’s fault or the police’s fault. Actually, the government and the police are just the logical extension of nature. You cannot remove force from the equation. The universe, physics, nature, doesn’t work in a Jeffrey Tucker way where everybody cooperates to produce ever more. Unfortunately force is always lurking around the corner. In fact, in nature, only the plants produce, and even they compete against one another for light and soil resources, the rest of the food chain consume plants or consume each other. Granted, there’s no capital accumulation in nature and no division of labor, but this state of nature is still transpiring in the modern man, it hasn’t gone away.

Instead of removing force from the equation, libertarians should find way to incorporate it in the equation, ways that are the least harmful, because it’s not going away.

The more we try to remove force from the equation, the more it concentrates and accumulate in a certain area and the more it becomes powerful over us all.

How do you reconcile the Christian anti-sin perfection with the everywhere brutal competition in nature. How can I have any sense of morality left when what I observe is that might is right ?

I would like to think that the laws are there because of some higher reason, not because we should be afraid to get caught. I would like the laws to be backed by rights, by morality, by justice instead of by mere force, in which case the law seems to validate that might is right.

The police state in which we live seems to follow the natural and unfortunately the divine order where might is right and it seems to justify it’s dictates on the necessary to fight fire with fire, to fight force with force, to fight terrorism with terrifying police squads etc.

If the law was based on higher values than force, perhaps it would be more difficult to enact a police state.

That’s what saddens and revolts me.

Very important questions that people should think about more. It is easy to say “sure I don’t agree with it but it is such a small thing”, right up until the time its not a small thing anymore and there is nothing you can do about it.

We are already living in a totalitarian regime under God, the police are just a mere hiccups symptom.