> as all human beings should be cared for under modern society

Why on earth would you conclude that? What's wrong with Darwinian processes? Why must people be protected from the cost of their own misfortune, failure or inadequacy? Why must this cost be born by others?

He clearly indicated that he believes it leads to societal instability, violence, and collapse.

Basically that people cannot be expected to accept their own fates with dignity? I would make the case that overwhelming violence is an appropriate consequence for violating the peace. Good policing techniques are very effective in maintaining social order, in spite of economic inequality - see Japan.

Why do you think the only weak people that deserve protection are the wealthy? The idea that the only legitimate function of government is to protect the status quo is strange, and in a world where everything is assigned an owner is a maxarchism not a minarchism.

In a real Darwinian world, rich people wouldn't be able to walk the streets without a huge amount of security, and eventually that security force would kill them, take what they have, and pass it to their children. The idea that the people who own everything are the intellectual and physical champions of the world is a version of the efficient market hypothesis within a idealized police state whose only duty is to keep these people from falling to their level. It's really just a neofeudalism that will result in neohapsburg lips in 100 years and infant kings.

I'm saying that "society" is basically an agreement to peacefully coexist, using due process to resolve disputes. It's not an agreement to cooperate. Just because the processes by which some some succeed and some fail are non-violent doesn't mean that those successes and failures shouldn't be total.

> people who own everything are the intellectual and physical champions

They're not, and I never said they were. All I said was that if they acquired their wealth through legitimate means (ie without the use of force), then they are entitled to keep all of it and do with it what they please.

Say we live in a society with 10 people, each with one dollar. Now say one member of this society invents something useful and sells it to the other nine for 75¢. The wealth gap in this society will have grown dramatically. What exactly entitles the other nine to any of their money back? What does it matter how the entrepreneur spends his money?

Since two other commenters answered your question, I’d like to add to your 10 person society example.

What if a government taxed every one of their transactions by 25%, spent or redistributed 80% of those dollars within the society, and uncharitably donated 20% of all dollars away to another society. How long would it take for that society to have a rounded $0 and the other society to have a rounded $10?

> What does it matter how the entrepreneur spends his money?

Lets take your scenario one step further. The entrepreneur now uses his newly gotten weatlh, buys up some neccessary infrastructure that everyone relies on (for sake of argument lets the food supply) and raises the price to 26ct, everyone in the society but him starves to death and no violence was used. At what point, if any, should a hypothetical state step in?

Nowhere? If you sell your only milk-giving cow, don't be surprised if the prices of milk increases. You're using "buys up" like the people selling had no choice. They have plenty of choices: they can refuse to sell, they can refuse to cooperate with the new owner, they can go and build new infrastructure. Ultimately, a property owner is not a monarch, and can't force anyone to do anything. These techniques have been used in to remarkable effect in the past to peacefully compel good behavior. See Charles Cunningham Boycott or Mahatma Gandhi.

Is the history of revolutions/social collapse really marked by despots, dictators and royalty not using overwhelming force?

Most recent revolutions and social collapses have been marked by the idea that we should seize property from some and redistribute it to others.

This is an orthodox Marxist view that wasn't borne out by history. There was the objection that was foreseen: that socialism in one country was impossible because capitalism in other countries would just destroy it. There was also the one that wasn't: the ability of domestic capitalists to collaborate and collectively give concessions when society seemed as if it were about to upend, then to withdraw those concessions as the crisis died down and gradually replace them with violence.

There's no inevitable historical process that results in utopia. Nominal "socialisms" tend to combine the political outlook of Trotskyist Marxist-Leninism with the Whig history of liberalism, resulting in the worst of both worlds; the belief that 1) all answers have already been discovered, and 2) that they will inevitably be implemented as the people recognize these answers to be truths and decide that in the world of technologically provided abundance created by capitalism, there's no reason to wait.

They believed that the ultimate expression of history is democratic socialism, and that capitalism is a necessary step to get to there from feudalism. To believe that democratic socialism is the ultimate expression of capitalism itself is very strange - capitalism has no moral center that needs to be expressed. It's a physics metaphor that believes that the greater good can be emergent without a moral center.

Democratic Socialism, as seen in European countries, is a system granted and implemented by the US after the devastation of WWII, intended to keep them out of the Soviet orbit. It was funded by the intense military expenses of the US which allowed Europe to ignore military expenditure (for social expenditure), and regulated in the beginning through intense covert operations in Europe using the stick of assassinations to break up parties and eliminate influential people ambivalent about or friendly towards the Soviets, and the carrot of employing well-known socialist intellectuals through unprofitable foundations and public expenditures on their weirdest art and expressions as counter-programming to a Nazi-redolent (i.e. degenerate art) Socialist Realism and Stalin's hatred of modernism.

European democratic socialism was a strategy of capitalism to suppress change, not to encourage it.

What does socialism mean to you, because it seems to me that you aren't talking about the same socialism I'm thinking of (social ownership of the means of production). It sounds like you are talking about the opposite of that (tyrannical control of the means of production).

I meant the democratic socialism of many European governments.

The problem with this interminable argument about government and force is that it implicitly involves unreasonable people.

What allows the government to collect taxes? Lethal force!

But also...

What keeps people from driving on the wrong side of the road? Lethal force! What keeps people from dining and dashing? Lethal force! What keeps from using park benches as toilets? Lethal force!

For the most part people are reasonable and if you indicate that they need to do something or refrain from doing something, they go along. If they don't, you can write a law with some enforcement mechanism, and then they go along. If they still don't, you can increase the bite of the enforcement mechanism. Rarely do you have Bartleby the Scrivener types who simply refuse to cooperate, and even then, the consequence for them, like for Bartleby, is generally fines or time in state custody, not lethal force.

The government, through its agents, often does employ lethal force with tragic consequences, but this is usually the result of the agents enforcing their own special laws -- respect my authority or I will kill you -- not the actual laws and their legal enforcement mechanisms. Many nations have no death penalty. Many have police officers who vary rarely kill their citizens. These nations are often very nice countries to live in.

Or use subtle force, like it is done today in capitalism. You just need to leave people with no choices.

Pay the rent, or you and your family end up on the streets. Pay your insurance, or you will be left to bleed out and die. You have no other choice but to take any job, no matter how bad it may be.

Then foster a culture that gives everyone the hope that they also have a chance to get a good life, but only on the condition that they must only think for themselves and compete with the other poor to ascend the social pyramid. That's meritocracy.

This is how the rich (the capitalist ruling class) gets everyone else to do what they want, which is to trickle up enormous amounts of value from everyone to a handful of people.

Then if we want to talk about lethal force, capitalists used overwhelming amounts of it troughout recent history, in order to preserve the status quo that advantages them. It's not a secret and it just takes some honest study to know it.

Good question!

As with most choices, the level of force required to achieve compliance is more or less linearly related to the harshness of the choice.

Pay a small amount of taxes? Little force required.

Give full authority over your life to a faceless central planner? Great force required.

Give full authority, with no chance of escape? Lethal force required.

I'm not sure why this is a concept that seems to be a mystery to advocates of "Socialism", though.

"Socialism would work great, if only you pesky rich, free people would just give up and let the state take everything and let your children starve!"

:)

I'm not a strong proponent of socialism, but this seems like an outrageously loaded response to a genuine question.

It was a genuine answer.

Is force not linearly related to the gravity / undesirability of the mandate?

Are increasingly draconian mandates not rebuffed by more and more people?

Are there not plentiful examples of "Socialist" societies attempting to enforce more and harsher mandates, against anyone not willing to "give their fair share"?

If people are allowed to leave such systems for ones more to their liking, do they not flee, unless forced not to?

If those who don't "give their fair share" try to leave and are forced to stay, and staying means that they or their children may die, will they not fight to the death to escape?

>Are there not plentiful examples of "Socialist" societies attempting to enforce more and harsher mandates, against anyone not willing to "give their fair share"?

You mean like if you don't pay taxes you go to jail? or if you don't work you live on the street?

There are certainly harsher places to be, but the US is not friendly to people who do not "give their fair share." It's already mandatory.

And, most people are fine with it, and those that aren't are completely free to leave and pursue their lives somewhere with "better" rules.

I think we're agreeing; perhaps I'm mistaken?

I guess, but "completely free to leave" is a bit of an illusion... it's not at all easy to do so, and even if you do... you still owe taxes until you renounce citizenship.

I also don't really see barring people from leaving as an inherent requirement to socialism, if that's what you were saying.