zlacker

>If a farmer has a tractor stolen from him it is not acceptable to track the criminal down and use force to take it back, that is the job of the police.

That's just hiring someone else to use force to take it back. So we at least agree that taking it back by force is the right thing to do. I'll even go so far as agreeing with you that it's morally justified to hire someone else to do it for you. I suspect our area of disagreement is really narrow on this issue.

>>Consul+(OP)
I would rather have a group of people trained on how to apprehend criminals with the minimum force necessary and with rules and regulations to follow than have untrained, armed citizens going to retrieve their goods. Would the farmer have the freedom to search any property they please? A criminal would not let the farmer search his property, and if the farmer insisted with force he could be threatening an innocent person. Criminals would almost always be better armed and trained than their victims, and if a "mercenary" service existed which could be hired by victims, that mercenary service is essentially just privatized police.

Yes, there are often police who do not follow the regulations on how to interact with suspects, but I believe it is better to have guidelines which are sometimes broken than none at all.

>>metrok+o3
First of all, I want to say that I don't support roving gangs of mercenaries. But just as a thought experiment... which do you think is likely to kill more innocent people: roving gangs of mercenaries in a stateless community where most are armed or the US government?

edit: changed vigilantes to mercenaries for consistency

>>Consul+p4
We have numerous examples in US history of that. What do you think they did in the Old West? The sheriff was often outmanned and undergunned, so nobody wanted the position. The bandits were so powerful that ordinary citizens had to be called upon to catch criminals. Not to mention, there were hostile Native American tribes that wanted to scalp you.

>>Consul+p4
Well, we are now talking about the entire US government instead of just US police. Certainly a state has a greater pool of resources to draw upon for war if it chooses to do so, but comparing a state with groups of mercenaries or vigilantes is impossible because of the myriad of different forms they could take. One would be comparing a single large casualty number vs. many much smaller numbers. The Iraq war is estimated to have had 150,000 to over 600,000 civilian casualties in the first three to four years of conflict, although I believe that is total, not just casualties attributed to the US. The US had a population of just under 300,000,000 at the time. Revolutionary Catalonia is the best large example of a large-scale anarchical society I can find, and in 1936 is estimated to have had 8,350 killings for a population of under 3,000,000 [0]. Of course those two examples are more on the extreme side, and there are infinite nuances, such as the fact that not all civilians in the civil war were innocent, the same with Revolutionary Catalonia. They both were extremely different times as well.

I'd say it's a toss-up if I absolutely had to guess.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia

>>Consul+(OP)
You don’t “hire” the police, and that’s critical. If you did, they would be accountable to you and not the rest of society. Police are agents of the government which is accountable (to some degree) to the people. This is a tremendous distinction.

>>throwa+ZF
Police and government have something very important in common with you. They are all just people. Regular people without superior morals, intellectual capability, resolve, etc. In this case a government is just a group of people getting together and saying, "Okay Bob, a few of us in the community have pooled our money together to hire some mercenaries and we'd like you to do the hiring." And then Bob just does it.

>>Consul+jX
No one said anything about superior morals, capability, resolve, etc. The important part is that the state has a monopoly on violence and in a democracy, the state is accountable to the people. This doesn't require agents of the state to be superior in any specific way, only that We The People authorize state agents to enforce and uphold law and order.

We literally cannot remove the police without a collapse of the state and consequently the rest of our civilization, and if you think for even one moment about how that would play out it would be apparent: everything fractures into private armies with no incentive to uphold democratic rule of law; the most powerful private armies become de facto states and their ruler a law unto himself--effectively a king. Obviously modern society can't survive under these conditions--no one can trust rule of law which absolutely underpins our economy. So congratulations, you've rediscovered the dark ages and doomed hundreds of millions to deaths from violence, illness, and starvation. :)