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I'm pretty convinced that the modern state is just what we get when we decide we don't want families, communities, and churches to be at the center of life. Many modern state functions used to be performed by those groups and it wasn't perfect but we need something to fill those roles.
Personally I'd rather see those groups take back responsibility but most people just seem to want free stuff and "freedom", not accept responsibility so we get politicians ruling over us. They promise the moon and people buy it. It doesn't have to be like this but it won't change from the top down. Has to be bottom up.
I tend to agree, the state fills the void created by abdication, that's why libertarians and squeemish conservatives are much worse than socialists... even communists. Socialists and communists and ineffective by themselves, they require good people convince themselves to do nothing.
It's this abdication that creates horrors, quintessential weak men = hard times.
The surest path to a tyrannical government is pearl clutching over the sausage making of law and order, and the sidelining of moral people from governance by their own virtue signals.
The irony is amusing when you really think about it.
What you are describing doesn't make sense to me. I don't think the cause is libertarian ideas. It's passive men. Yeah, there are MANY that are libertarians but there are many moderates, conservatives, and leftists that are also passive and abdicate their agency to political systems.
But maybe I am misunderstanding you.
Your freedom is the ultimate collateral
This is a thoughtful statement. I agree with it, and I think I probably need ot think about it for a while.
Am I equating government to the mob? yes. Because that is reality, and it's reality because it works and there is no alternative.
This is something I also believe. However; even if we use this lens, we can question whether a mob functions better or worse when it starts to use restrictions on mobility as a tool to encourage repayment of debt.
However: while the mob may do a bang up job enforcing a culture of not skipping out on your debts, it is also possible that they do a bunch of stuff that we all kinda of agree sucks (demanding protection money when it is entirely unwarranted or just deciding to use violence against people that threaten them in some way).
Seems like humans have been trying to figure out how to set up our government-mobs in ways that limit abuses by the mob against its people or by a foreign mob. Democracy and Republicanism may be an example of a somewhat successful attempt at this.
Ostensibly, the King George mob so overplayed its hand that the colonial people set up a new mob called the US and this mob was more effective than the King George mob partially because it claimed to listen to its people a little more or in different ways. It may have achieved this gain in effectiveness because it offered guarantees to its people that the mob wouldn't do certain things to them. It even wrote this down so we could all check on it.
Great. So now we're discussing whether or not our mob will retain its effectiveness if it restrains its people's ability to move around based on financial debts.
We should agree that the NAP is a desirable underpinning to any system.
But the NAP doesn't mean non-violence, simply that violence is just. Systems becoming unjust is inevitable, that's universal cyclicality present in everything.
In the neighborhood I grew up in, if you didn't pay your bills, you ended up in the cement pour of a big dig tunnel and it was therefore a fairly rare occurrence people didn't pay their bills.
If you bugged out to Providence or Florida to escape your debt, someone brought you back on a bounty.
That was a much nicer neighborhood then, unlivable now, because compassion to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
Your freedom is the ultimate collateral, whether that's government or society in general.
Am I equating government to the mob? yes. Because that is reality, and it's reality because it works and there is no alternative. Music festivals full of dope in the 60's couldn't change that.
True, the woman's brothers and uncles handling matters was a better system.