I think this has the same problem as all non-legal security. I can see entrepreneurial big guys deciding this a good business, and just paying some people a nominal amount to squat, while offering their services to the property owners to "remove them". Eventually, they don't even need the squatters in the loop, just "Nice place you got here. It'd be a shame if someone squatted in it."

That's what the government does already with the police / court system / lawmaking. You pay taxes for protection. In the past they were at least removing squatters. We're at a point where they don't even bother doing their job.

Any use of violence need opposing and competing forces in a market to work.

Judging by the quality of service, it obviously doesn't work when the government has a monopoly of legal violence.

As you mentioned, having people doing it illegally is prone to the creation of a black market. Black markets need to stay hidden so they'll have lower standards and generally a worse experience for everyone involved. If there wasn't any control on these "big guys", eventually someone would come up with a way to broadcast these "big guys" reputation. Someone could easily hire some other "big guys" to keep the other ones in check.

The black market can have higher standards because the barrier for entry is much smaller or nothing which creates more competition.

Having a legal and black market operating side by side can mean more quality and variety for the black market. The drug market is a great example where in places a legal market exists the black market can offer better prices, better quality and a variety of strains the commercial growers cannot.

That's a very interesting point of view! I wonder if maybe you're describing a Canadian point of view? I've heard the government screwed up / over-regulated (not sure about the details) distribution of Cannabis in Canada and people still had to use the black market to buy cannabis.

We don't need a black market, we just governments not to get in the way in what they consider legal or not. I think you're advocating for small independent producers vs big monolithic ones (which sounds great, I'm in!). In a world where licenses don't cost half a million, that can be a legal market as well.

> The black market can have higher standards From my anecdotal European experience this hasn't been the case. Eg. If I think about cannabis in Netherland, what you can buy in a coffee shop is generally much better than any black market deal you can find in all of Europe. You can get cannabis from Amsterdam in the rest of Europe as well (amongst the dozen fakes) but it will cost much more.

In a black market you have a higher risk of getting scammed, lower quality and no controls. Online marketplace with reputation systems help a lot but it's still not like buying on Amazon.

The barrier to entry is higher because you have to setup the tools to act anonymously (eg. Tor, cryptocurrencies), you have to worry about stealth and you're running the risk of going to jail. The quality / price ratio goes down pretty quickly. Sure, you're not paying taxes and you don't have to do accounting, but I think the negatives are more expensive than that.

"it obviously doesn't work when the government has a monopoly of legal violence."

I heart afganistan has no such monopoly, opportunity!

That's because Afghanistan isn't a government, the Western world just tries really hard to try to make people think it is or should be for a variety of mostly grifting reasons

Monopoly on violence doesn't necessarily mean that self defense and defense of property is illegal.

The US governments have a monopoly on violence and sanction self defense and defense of property.

If the government comes for you, good luck explaining the officers you don't accept their laws and that you're just defending yourself. You'll end up in jail, a fugitive or dead - unless you're in GTA.

That doesn't conflict with what I wrote

But the legal system probably wouldn’t treat these types of thugs as nicely as garden-variety squatters, no? Otherwise such gangs would have already taken over France.

I think in order to avoid open conflict from law enforcement, these types will try to avoid residing at the scene of the crime. Instead, they will rely on referrals for repeat business, while keeping things on the down low.

Or forcing out legitimate residents and becoming the squatters themselves. Privatized legal enforcement comes with a whole lot of problems.

Regular state-employed cops can and often do employ largely the same strategy but on a much bigger scale.

Oddly I have a simplistic view that this is how the Feudal system began. Meaning the populous realized their current government wasn't protecting their property and safety, so they got together and hired some people to do that for them. Over time those men took power for themselves. This theme is played out time and time again in history, if a government can't protect the property of its people it will eventually be replaced. Sadly this may take many decades to occur but the trend is there historically.

I think it arose in the opposite direction. Rulers realized that they didn't have enough centralized power to effectively rule their territory, so they hired lower-level rulers who would get land in exchange for military service.

Part of the motivation was economic: armed horsemen, the dominant military units of the time, were expensive to maintain. The breakdown in the economy in early medieval Europe meant that centralized rulers didn't have money to pay them. They gave them land instead, so they could support themselves in return for military service.

You might say it was a medieval take on the military-industrial complex.

The problem is that the big guys will very soon figure out: hey, squatters good, make business for us! And before you know it, the thugs themselves are doing the squatting. And before you know that, the biggest thugs are doing that because they beat the weaker thugs in the squatting turf war: there are no bigger thugs you can call.

You're not thinking far enough. Squatting property will only pay the bills. Stripping literally everything of value out of the property before using the husk as a pop-up drug lab is the way you make real money

This entire thread is covered in the OP.

There's really no problem you can't solve, with the law or otherwise, by paying people to commit violence on your behalf.

You apparently live one hell of a privileged life in a fully functional country with a good legal system if you're saying such simplistic things. Striving for such nice conditions in all jurisdictions is laudable, but the practical reality is that in much of the world, a normal person subjected to abuse often has to resort to extralegal and sometimes violence recourse. The law is next to useless in these places. I live in one such country and your platitude would have just maintained a status quo of abuse against innocent people in many situations where they had to use or pay for violence by others to solve major problems.

We live a civilized life, because our ancestors banded together, fought, and died to establish a government that was stable. That's not privilege, that's a way of life bought and fucking paid for. It doesn't just happen, and has to be guarded and cultivated. Unless and until similar costs in lives are paid, I honestly don't see a path to civilized life in much of the world.

It keeps getting proved over and over that first world, well off countries can't pay or train or subjugate other cultures into civilized engagement with the world or even their own people. Nation building is an awful joke of a policy, and at some point people have to figure their own shit out.

There are legal and illegal immigration and asylum possibilities all over the world, or you can take up arms against corruption and tyranny. It sucks, but being born doesn't entitle you to anything unless there's a culture and civilization to make good on those entitlements.

"you can take up arms against corruption and tyranny."

Taking up arms is thr easy part mate, there is no shortage of thay going round. creating a functional society is the difficult one.

There are lots of examples to use as templates. You can have hyper religious militant sharia, or you can have civilization compatible with the rest of the world. If you try for both, the community of nations is not going to let you participate meaningfully. I guess "hermit kingdom" is option 3, if you can get nukes.

Forget sharia, from Russia to Brazil many countries are still struggling with crime and corruption, despite drawing inspiration from existing examples and templates.

To pretend this can be easilly achieved is just folly

Okay, let me put it to you this way, straight from examples right here in the city I live in and many others in my country: You and your neighbors get along in the small residential/commercial community you inhabit. Things are fairly peaceful even though otherwise your country is riddled with corruption, police that are WORSE than useless (they're often highly criminal and/or collude with criminal gangs) and your little community of neighbors is trying to get by and largely watching over their neighborhood.

Then, one day, a small group of thieves starts entering and assaulting stores, trying to extort people and robbing others on the streets, threatening more violence if people don't cooperate better. You try calling police, but they either don't show up at all or only do so late and never investigate anything worth a damn (remember, they collude, and they're likely colluding with your newly arrived local thugs).

So, your neighbors and you organize together and ambush these thugs the next time they come along with their attempts at violence. You catch and badly beat a few of them then toss them out into a public area where an ambulance can pick them up. It sends a clear message, the extortions stop.

Is this ideal? Nope. It's awful, but you want peace for your business, community and family, and what other recourse do you have? Should you and all your neighbors just spew platitudes about ideals of law and order while being assaulted regularly? Or should the whole neighborhood, as you say, apply for overseas asylum and wait months or years for a response (likely negative)? Maybe they should abandon their homes and everything else of their culture to illegally flee, letting the country sink further into chaos?

They mostly won't do these things. because they want a peaceful home that is their real home, and with legal options having been marginalized, communities and groups sometimes really, no-shit-no-other-option have to take matters into their own hands.

Maybe that clears things up about perspective from within a highly functional, lawful country that had decades or centuries before you were born to become like that, letting you simply enjoy it and criticize others who aren't so lucky yet.

It's really clear. If your home is invaded and there is no rule of law, you ambush and kill the thugs. If that's not feasible, or if the retaliation can't be handled, then you leave for a place where you aren't chattel for a gang of thugs. Because it's no longer your home. If your country won't or can't protect you and your neighbors, it's not your country, so yes, fleeing is the only rational move. They can't extort you if you're not there anymore, and you run the chance of grouping up with enough like minded others that you might be able to return and take back your land with force.

I'm not criticizing the people who find themselves in shitty situations. I'm criticizing your statement that the civilization I am fortunate enough to live in is "privilege." It is a carefully guarded and deliberately constructed civilization designed precisely to defend individuals from mobs and strongmen. That is a right, not a privilege, secured by violence and death and sacrifice.

When there is no rule of law, might makes right. Securing civilization from lawlessness universally starts with blood and death and is a horror show. It's that, or leave for a better place. By staying, you're giving power to the exploiters. Worse, you're giving them the means to abuse and exploit more people, and more generations of people.

There are no good or easy choices in such situations. You kill, you leave, or you perpetuate the hellscape, inflicting it on your local society.

The idea of the state having a monopoly on violence is the foundation of all successful civilizations. The idea being that if there is no monopoly, the right and responsibility to use violence falls to individuals, and when individuals are wielding violence without consequences, rule of law is meaningless.

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

I mostly agree with the ideas you're expressing, and that they're a vital part of any decent, functional society. My strong disagreement is with criticism of vigilante reactions under dysfunctional circumstances, and with the perhaps unintentionally flippant insistence that people should just leave their home if they live in partly lawless places, or that they can at all easily do this, with families and precious possessions included.

Staying isn't just a casual preference for most people, it's a basic economic necessity and an emotional attachment to the idea of not giving up and ceding one's home to abusive people because things got tough.

People aren't normally thinking in some abstract sense that "I should leave this country and stop giving abusive social elements the means with which to perpetuate themselves". They're more often thinking. "This is my home and where my family is from, why should I flee everything I know instead of fighting back however I need to?".

There are a couple, in particular I imagine violence won't be much help when the law has one of its psychotic episodes and refuses to reflect reality in a sensible way.

So stuff like people being declared dead incorrectly, identity fraud. I'm also reminded of an incident in the Netherlands that lead to the fall of the current (still acting; it's complicated) government, where the tax agency was somehow convinced people had fraudulently received particular subsidies and decide to get the money back plus interest, which it turns out tax agencies are very good at.

Good luck finding anyone to beat up there. You can scare people but you can't intimidate red tape.

> You can scare people but you can't intimidate red tape.

The history of Scientology versus the IRS suggests otherwise.

The detail you forgot to mention there was the criteria the tax administration used to decide the "people" they fought were fraudulent. And the detail of the documents they destroyed when parliamentarians tried to investigate the issue. There is the law and there is above the law.

There's a lot of details I neglected to mention, simply because it's impossible to succinctly explain on just how many levels things went wrong.

If your violence isn’t working it means you just aren’t using enough of it.

Well I suppose one way or another the problem stops existing or stops being worth solving.

No violence, and not breaking the law. The way it works a couple of big loud slobs moves in and starts a 24/7 party. They are squatters too so police cant throw them out, and your problem tenants quickly give up after slipping on vomit , listening to music all night and being unable to use kitchen/bathroom.

I can think of one. What if your problem is that someone with more money than you is paying thugs to commit violence on their behalf?

You'd have to band together with other people like you to stop them. I guess you'd also need some mechanism for restraining the worst impulses of the mob we've just organized, like a governor restrains a steam engine. We could call it a "government." I bet it would be a hit.

Except maybe curing disease, self fulfillment etc

Well, unless you're going against someone much bigger than you.

Hit first, hit fast, hit hard.

Squatting is also violence.

You can't solve violence without violence.

Your definition of violence appears to equate things done to objects and things done to people.

Failing to differentiate between these things makes me wonder are you some sort of animist?

Doing things to objects that belong to other people is doing things to those people.

Sure, for two different definitions of "doing things". But the existence of different definitions is precisely the point.

Unless you are claiming that cutting someone's paper is equal to cutting their skin?

Eh, one would need to cut a lot of skin to hurt me as much as one would by cutting one of my father's paintings

I like this statement; at first blush, it appears uncouth and brutish - upon closer inspection however, it reveals the "natural state" of nature itself.

French too, this was attempted ofc, we have documentaries about big guys employed by desperate home owners trying to kick squatters out of their main property they "lost" when going to vacations, and it doesnt work.

They get sued, it often becomes very violent, because to have the balls to seize the property of someone who s in short vacations you need to be quite violent yourself, children are always involved and well meaning outrage artists always point out the poor children being sent back to the streets etc.

I live in Hong Kong now where real estate is "a dream". You can rent anything with just a pile of cash and 30 minutes because if you dont pay rent they know the police just enter, throws everything out and put you in jail awaiting trial.

I d recommend France to try, not sure what we d truly lose.

While it may be a solution to your immediate problem, there can be consequences to developing a "relationship" with those who operate outside the law. (Because now 1) know your identity; 2) know you are to some extent nonchalant about operating within the bounds of the law; 3) know you have money; and 4) now have evidence of your extralegal actions.)

Working to reform suboptimal laws may be difficult, but it is a better investment than handing your money to organized crime.

> better investment than handing your money to organized crime

it is, but this investment is costly, because it takes a lot of time and effort, with no real guarantee of success, and when you are eventually successful, other people could easily free-ride off your investment (since it's a non-excludable outcome).

So what a "rational" actor would do is wait for someone else to expend their resources doing this, while they themselves pay to gangs/organized crime to obtain their own property back in the mean time.

This is a hard thing to get across to people coming at it from a perspecitve of being higher up on some imaginary natural hierarchy.

Also, real organized crime immediately flips on you when people notice their loud obvious daylight crimes and there is blowback.

A team of Romanian/Bulgarian/Polish big guys will take care of your squatter problem for less than 1000 Euros...., then they can squat in your house.

They could.

Once you decide to go outside the law, you take responsibility, do your research and prepare as best as you can.

See, these people don't exactly want to be criminal gangs, they just want a quick Euro for little risk.

So, your house and you want to kick out squatters - yeah, sure. Someone else's house and you want them to break in - no way, we're not insane.

Most of the time.

If you deal with some crazy cunts, they can burn your house down.

Generally why the legal way is preferable. But if you're desperate, you can look at alternatives.

But that's bad for business, see.

Is there no risk of retaliation? They know who you are and where you live, and presumably, they do not have much to lose.

It’s probably a safer strategy for a full-time landlord than someone who wants to kick squatters out then move in themselves.

There's a company famous in Spain dedicated to that, they appear on TV news constantly.

They're all over the BBC article this post is about. In fact it reads like an informercial

Don't give the big guys money. They'll be coming for more.

Try offering them something else.

The citizen seized the the monopoly on violence to the state under the condition that justice is upheld. If that condition is violated, the contract between state and individual is broken.

> The citizen seized the monopoly on violence

I think you meant to write "ceded". To seize is to grab hold of, to cede is to give away.

Right, thanks.

Yeah, you go do that, see how well that works for you in The state’s courts.

Cover your delicate ears, it's a real world out there.

While I don't agree with the idea in the comment.c this person is speaking from experience (supposedly). They should be allowed to share it, and their viewpoint

it's not the point of covering delicate ears. it's just not proper. substitute the eastern european nationalities the parent refers to for the term 'black' and tell me how does it ring to you :)