Few governments aren’t a massive net surplus for their citizens, just look at any failed state to see the alternative.

So calling them a thief is almost always purely self serving nonsense.

Define “net”.

An especially corrupt government might be a net surplus compared to anarchy, yet simultaneously a significant net loss compared to a more typical government.

Put another way, the government is failing to give its citizens what it owes them. By analogy, suppose your employer pays you half the wage they agreed to pay. That’s still a form of theft, even if you are still at a surplus compared to the alternative of being unemployed.

Ed: When exactly did these governments agree to do better?

A restaurant consistently providing bad food isn’t theft, it’s just a poor place to go. I have a great deal of sympathy for people living in areas captured by Russia or locked into North Korea etc, but in general it’s decades to generations of poor performance at this point.

> Define “net”.

All personal costs vs all personal benefits. Militaries and public roads etc may be basic functions of government but someone needs to pay for them and your personal contribution isn’t enough to completely cover such expenses.

You might do well to read about the fundamentals of political philosophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract

I doubt very much they don’t know the potential philosophy.

Personally though, at some point theoretical vs practical takes precedence yeah. Or are we going to start going around ‘fixing’ everyone else’s political systems? Because historically, that hasn’t exactly helped has it?

That’s not the fundamentals of political philosophy. It’s a western take on political philosophy, there’s many others both from the west and elsewhere.

Social contract theory is not the basis of political philosophy, it is one response to the problem of political authority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_authority

If you look at the criticisms section of your linked page, you'll also see why social contract theory is more popular in high-school than it is with actual philosophers (most of whom think it's wrong).

> Few governments aren’t a massive net surplus for their citizens

If the baseline is a complete lack of social organization, yes. But that's a terrible baseline. You compare governments to other potential governments, not to anarchy. That would be like calling eating six ounces of oatmeal per day a massive net surplus to starving to death; of course it is, but that's the easiest curve in the world.

And the fact that you can only have one government at a time means that your current one is blocking all of the others.

> But that's a terrible baseline.

Fair but it’s such a massive difference there’s steps up the ladder which are still worse.

I’d still be careful when suggesting anything but success is theft, because as you say internal transitions are risky. Migration however has improved the living standards of billions throughout history.

Meanwhile just about anywhere today is still better for the average person than living in say medieval Europe or antiquity etc. Falling birth rates provide a significant opportunity for improvement. China isn’t a great place to live, but it’s also now the 2nd most populous country.

I feel like you’re defending terrible governments for no particular reason. Of course it might be better to live in modern china than medieval europe, but this doesn’t defeat the notion that modern china could be made much better for its people if the structure of its government were altered.

The point of the argument isn’t, or doesn’t have to be, technicality (“bad governance constitutes theft”) but a statement about what one believes the people deserve. Implicit in the argument is a belief in a social contract being voided by one party, wherein the government makes lacking effort to provide “the best possible governance” and the people respond with disobedience. I’d personally disagree with the notion of a social contract, and argue only from the idea that an alteration to the government could produce better outcomes, but that argument would produce the same sentiment as the one they’re expressing, so in what way would you disagree with their sentiment?

Why did you say "Modern China" instead of "Modern USA" or some other country?

Read the end of what i responded to

I’m defending social order not terrible government. Governments can be a pure net negative, but that’s really rare.

I disagree with the idea that ‘poor performance’ rather than ‘negative performance’ from the standpoint of an individual gives someone extra authority. I have no issues suggesting someone can void the social contract by leaving but disobedience is something else.

Anyone can disagree with how a government functions, but individuals who dislike something don’t inherently know how to build a better system. Even non violent means like protests and voter suppression have real downsides. When people act with the assumption of authority they often result in serious negative consequences and only very rarely cause actual improvement.

Taken to the extreme the idea even supports wars of conquest. If your government is even mildly better than another why not ‘improve’ the situation.

PS: Which isn’t to say operating within a given system is useless. Convincing others, be that voters or a dictator, can also enact change with less risk. But again well supported arguments are safer than simply persuasive ones.

I’d argue that the solution isn’t for people to avoid protest or disobedience though. The civil rights movement in the US was composed of a lot of different groups, plenty of which were unsatisfied with anything less than radical change. The tactic was then to unite these people under a leader smart enough to negotiate the meeting point of their interests and the pressures of practical political change in the US. The endless civil disobedience and threat of radical violence was then a powerful piece of leverage, really the sole source of leverage, in mlk’s negotiation with lbj.

Given that brain enhancement is a while away, it’s gonna be a while before most people are able to weigh the nuanced ripple effects of their actions in order to optimally resist bad leadership, or be able to see the impracticality of otherwise good ideas; these are difficult mental feats that require a lot of self reflection. I wouldn’t then suggest that these people do nothing. I’d suggest that they represent, in essence, a productive force to be taken up and wielded against the subject of their discontent by similarly motivated, but intelligent, leadership.

Its the same concept with environmentalism. You can’t expect Joe Environment to be smart enough and critical enough to reason his way around the panic-inducing coverage of nuclear scares, but maybe you can harness his frustration with environmental as a source of political power.

I don’t think we’re going to agree though; I think we’re motivated differently. I don’t really find myself enticed by social order in the same way, and I’d trade away much of that stability to get a good shot at change that could make society more pleasant.

I’d argue for many Americans in 1960 the existing system was an actual net negative, and for others it was close. There was ~100,000 young men risking prison for homosexual relationships, about to be sent to Vietnam, treated like dirt for being black, and under significant threat of nuclear war all at the same time. That’s being rather uniquely shat on by a system setup to benefit others.

I don’t expect random environmentalist to have a well reasoned stance, but holding activist groups to a higher standard feels reasonable to me. I get just as pissed when nuclear advocates conflate the cost of uranium ore as fuel cost when reactors are using vastly more expensive enriched uranium fuel rods. (Possibly because the fuel bit works.)

> I’d trade away much of that stability to get a good shot at change that could make society more pleasant.

I used to feel that way, but the more I learned about how the world works the more I understood just how delicate these systems are. Gerrymandering isn’t just a free way to political power, it erodes people’s trust in democracy. Elections dependent on swing states and us vs them ideology fed by Ecco chambers isn’t heading to a healthy place. At the other end, the amount of havoc just a single person damaging fuel pipelines and electrical transmission infrastructure could cause is shocking.

Now imagine a few thousand motivated people intelligently trying to damage the US.

Bad governments have a consistent internal logic, and operate at a local maxima. In some sense, they are "doing the best they can", and practically, most forms of resistance damage the social order without improvement.

But surely this wouldn’t argue against resistance itself. If you argue no resistance should take place because it’s too damaging, then you’ll lose the small portion of radicals with beneficial ideas.

You’re also assuming that change only happens in small steps, which would trap you in a local maxima, but what about a revolution? That’s more like a giant leap, potentially in the wrong direction, but it might be worth the risk if the local maxima sucks enough.

> The point of the argument isn’t, or doesn’t have to be, technicality (“bad governance constitutes theft”) but a statement about what one believes the people deserve.

People deserve: sugar, fat, an uninterruptible TV programm, constant surveillance (it it for your safety, for your children), apps or streaming apps so their brain never stops to think. /s

If I rob Peter, but give every penny to Paul, I'm a thief from Peter's perspective.

The question is if I rob Peter, then give him twice as much in return am I still a thief?

Obviously yes; the surplus had to be taken from someone else.

Not when economies of scale provide an ever larger surplus.

Guarding one house in a lawless environment takes less total manpower than guarding a town but not on a per property basis. Enforcing law and order in a country is even more efficient.

Governments don't produce anything. Taxing is only redistribution, not production. You can't tax your way into wealth.

Economies of scale are a facet of capitalism.

If you rob me but then give me back twice as much, the only way this action is not unfair to someone else is if it has the effect of undoing a robbery. I e the surplus I received in the end is actually restitution. Furthermore, it was taken back from the correctly identified robbers.

That's how your Bolsheviks and Leninists justified their ideas and actions: monarchs and capitalists are just parasites who have taken from the people, so if you take it away from them, it's just restitution.

> Economies of scale are a facet of capitalism

Animal flocking behavior exists from what amounts to economies of scale. Each animal can spend less effort watching their surroundings when there exists a large group with similar motivations.

> the only way this action is not unfair to someone else is if it has the effect of undoing a robbery

The benefit of a road network grows with the total size of a road network and can therefore quickly exceed the cost of creating and maintaining it. That’s a surplus which has nothing to do with moving money from individual A to individual B. It’s a surplus derived from scale not the efficiency of construing individual segments of road.

According to the US Government, yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli

> According to the US Government, yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli

According to the government he did NOT commit theft.

He was instead “convicted in federal court on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy.”

If nobody is robbed in a securities fraud, what makes it fraud?

Risk.

Someone could take an underperforming investment to Vegas, happen to double the investment and return. However if they are using your money then you are taking more risk in that scenario than you’re expecting. Literally going to Vegas isn’t required, the same risk exists in many short term investments. Thus misrepresenting risk is considered fraud even if it happened to work out.

People tend to judge their government by the standard of what it could be if it just exercised common decency and honesty, not by comparison to failed states or anarchy. Personally I think this is the correct standard.

It's not stealing until you've recovered what was taken from you plus some discretionary punitive amount. Beyond that it swings into theft.