They arrest your money. You are not accused of a crime, your money is. Your money is not a person, and thus has no constitutional rights. Your money is not innocent until proven, that's a silly system reserved for persons - instead, your money must prove its innocence. And thus you get cases with absurd titles such as "United States v. $84,740.00 U.S. Currency" ( https://casetext.com/case/us-v-8474000-us-currency )
I'd love to say you can't make this up, but they did.
A federal suit under which the government unsuccessfully attempted to force the Coca-Cola Company to remove caffeine from its product.
United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Approximately...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Solid_G...
Joe Biden was also a huge fan of civil forfeiture in the 80s and 90s: https://fee.org/articles/how-a-young-joe-biden-became-the-ar...
- police writ large
- police monopolies
- any given police policy and its interaction with capital
Anyways, if police are supposed "to defend capital", then a policy of stealing capital from private individuals is exactly not capitalistic.
And people's personal property is not normally capital in the sense of capitalism, it not generally being the means of production or of reproducing capital itself. This is a really basic point which has me thinking we disagree on the fundamental terminology. Capitalism isn't a synonym for commerce, assets are not necessarily capital.
Means of production is not the same as the shoes on your feet. It's just unfortunately confusing terminology that leads to twisted argumentation.
Btw, the alternative to capitalist liberal states is not exclusively authoritarian marxist-leninist communism. Not all anti-capitalists are pining for another different boot to lick.
Even today factories aren’t the means of production, they don’t make houses that’s mostly people with hand tools. Nor do they make food or mine resources etc.
The context for his writing wasn’t simply factory conditions being so so bad he created an ideology from whole cloth.
Your kid may also be messy, but the two messes have nothing to do with each other, bringing your kid in to it serves no useful purpose, and people may reasonably wonder why you're focusing on your kid's messiness in unrelated contexts.
In both cases here, the true underlying motivation of the parties involved is to take other people's stuff for themselves, but their apologists, communists and drug warriors alike, both rationalize real harm done to real people by pretending their actions are in pursuit of some utopian end state (which in both cases is an unattainable fantasy).
Capitalism has no defense mechanisms against unwarranted seizure of property. Private ownership is a precursor to capitalism, not a byproduct of it. Furthermore, there are plenty of ways by which capitalist entities can gain government-like powers, if not totally supplant the government[0]. Concentration of wealth is a problem whether or not the person who owns the wealth claims to own it for themselves or in the name of the working class.
The way that you prevent the government[1] from stealing your stuff is to make it inconvenient for them to do so. In the US, we have presumption of innocence, right to due process, and so on. These are constitutional rights that the government broadly respects. If they regularly didn't, you'd see brain drain as people and businesses with the means to do so would escape the country. Those without such means would begin economically sabotaging the country. However, these are blunt instruments whose use entails personal cost, so people don't use them right away. The US can therefore get away with ignoring its own constitutional obligations some of the time, and in this case, that's how they get away with civil forfeiture.
Think of it like this: when Apple or Google start screwing over developers, or Reddit or Twitter start screwing over users, we don't all immediately jump ship, but some do. If they continue doing this, and they exceed a particular threshold of bullshit, they continue losing people faster than they gain. This creates a feedback loop of stupider and stupider tactics pissing off more and more people until the platform collapses.
Countries work in similar ways.
[0] The basic idea of Rothbardian ancap economics is that we should deliberately encourage this. The idea is that this would supposedly lead to competition for governance. Except this wouldn't actually happen because competition is a byproduct of capitalism, not an essential property of it.
[1] or government-like entities
If people start organizing and forming mass strikes and unrest, all those things would, and already have, happened.
As for the rest of your comment, I have no clue what it has to do with what I posted. My point was that when talking about a system and its negative outcomes, it is pointless and often disingenuous to immediately mention another system. It blurs the topic and takes away from real analysis and critique.
Let’s talk about how this system developed in the US on its own merits, and when that is well understood, maybe then compare it to other systems.
How it's used and abused in practice in both systems is the important part. I'm not sure either system necessarily has a great track record in that respect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJd4Q4u5cqU
Reminder: this is yet another piece of evidence that The War on Drugs™ does not serve us well in any way, shape, or form.
Yes, that is exactly what I said. I'm not sure how to read it otherwise. If you're going to assess how it works under communism by looking at why the government allows and and what their goal is, it only makes sense to assess other systems the same way, which is why I said "the reasons the law allows..."