whakatikatika:

andrewriddle:

God I’m tired of this “more government” meme. Politics would certainly be a lot easier to understand if all forms of legislation, regulation and enforcement were reducible to a single fungible slurry called “guvmint”, and it’s a lot easier to make libertarian arguments if you pretend that it is. You just have to hope no one goes nuts and applies ten seconds of thought to your argument, because in that case they could be forgiven for concluding that you’re stupid.

I think you’re missing the point here. Certain characteristics empirically specific to the social institution we know as ‘the guvmint’—more precisely the contemporary nation-state—create an incentive-information structure that results in the same sort of (mostly bad) things when applied to humans. One of those characteristics is the mass ideological legitimation of the mass violation of general rules of just conduct, such as the proactive interpersonal use of coercion (or ‘violence’ as President Obama put it). It has far-reaching and predictable consequences. When the legal scope and/or scale of the government is expanded, when you have increased government power and intervention, ‘more government’ as it were, then you ceteris paribus have more of these bad things… like police brutality and bank bailouts and generic cronyism.

To put it very simplistically for context of the photo, the protesters are (supposedly) calling for more government and more government entails more coercion which is what they’re immediately combatting. They don’t understand that what they’re calling for entails and will result in more of the bad things they’re protesting.

Also liberal dude, you claim that libertarians are over simplifying the argument when your whole schtick can be boiled down to “Only government get real positive change done.”  That is always what you are arguing at any given time, even when privately funded, privately ran groups of people pull off some of the most awesome protests ever, and then can carry on about how much honest political change we need on a privately ran for profit website (that “.com” means commercial, as in people are paying to run this and obviously doing fine), some people defer to government as the only way to get any “real” things done.  
If you are going to insist that society changes and en-masses start forcing people to do things, and it is violent force we are talking about whenever we are talking about any kind of government, than the burden of proof is on you homes.  Also, read up on the law of unintended consequences before whining about how you can’t get everything you want handed to you forcefully from other people (the legislation you mentioned.)

(Source: uomodavverolibero, via whakatikatika)