[dalke]

There's an easier reformulation, at least for Denmark. Denmark doesn't have a minimum wage. Instead, many wages are set via collective bargaining. (The unions argue that this is more effective than a national minimum wage.)

So for Denmark let's not talk about "poverty" but "below the minimum wage for all private and public sector collective bargaining agreements", which Wikipedia tells us is 109 kroner ($19) per hour.

"There's no infinite money fountain" ... how come with all of the advances in efficiency over the century, we're still working roughly the 8 hour days from factories 100 years ago? While not infinite, surely we should be better at using that fountain by now.

I read "forced to do by the men-with-guns" often, though of course not always, from libertarians. I've always had a problem with that. There's coercion by force, certainly, but there are other ways to coerce. The government can also deny you access to things. For example, to a working water supply and sewage system, to the banking system, to telephones, to health care, to parental leave, to the judicial system, to weather reports, and so on.

Some of that can be worked around, like by going off the grid, but not all. It's very hard to travel internationally if the US refuses to issue a passport. If you don't have access to the court system, then what do you do when your neighbor decides to move the fence 3 meters closer to your house?

Indeed, I can easily consider a government based completely on the threat of the withdrawal of services rather than force. Some very rich people, and certain groups like the Amish, may be able to go it alone. Otherwise, the switching cost of leaving government services will be too high.

So no, I don't think that it's reasonable to think of government as synonymous, even poetically speaking, with coercion by force. You need only look at, say, the Viking sagas of Iceland to see how governments can exist to help reduce the overall need for coercion by force.

[jerf]

"While not infinite, surely we should be better at using that fountain by now."

Simple: We are. Or at least, there's a lot more to go around for everybody, even if overall efficiency may or may not have dropped. However, as long as resources remain finite, there are still tradeoffs; we can not escape that. I think the reason we believe we are so much poorer than we were a hundred years ago is that we got ten times richer, but our desires grew twenty times larger. We are still ten times richer even so. (Numbers made up. Especially the desires one.)

"The government can also deny you access to things." Which they will be doing with force, unless you have this mental model in which the government announces "Oh, BTW, we're not letting you have any water" and your mental model's citizens just say "Oh, OK then, we'll just peacefully crawl over here and die then. Would you like us to bury ourselves for your convenience?" Indeed many people do seem to operate with this model, but I find it models reality poorly and makes bad predictions. I suppose it comes from a multigenerational civilization where government and citizens have mostly managed to live in peace, and it seems to me that seems to produce a dangerous situation in which both sides eventually forget what that peace is built on.

[dalke]

"there's a lot more to go around for everybody"

I think you've made an unstated assumption that it will go around to everybody. If wealth concentrates to the top over time, then most people could be worse off, and a few be spectacularly rich, even if desires remain unchanged.

"Oh, OK then, we'll just peacefully crawl over here and die then."

If the government utilities stop providing water and power to your house, what do you do? (I assume you want those things.)

Yes, you could switch to solar, or a generator. And you could drill a well and harvest rainwater. These are high costs. Can most people afford doing that? And afford the higher maintenance?

Or you might get a non-government utility to come in. Which means they need a line from the power plant and a pipe from the water works, both to your house. There's a lot of people in between who might say "no" to the request to string a power line or dig a trench across their property. (The concept of "right-of-way" requires some sort of coercion.)

Yes, it's doable. There are entire communities which are off the grid. But costs time and money, which most people aren't interested in doing.

Or you could sneak in and hook up to the government utilities, so each time they'll disconnect and make it harder.

Or you could connect to your neighbors. Then the government disconnects them.

This is inconvenience, not violence. Where's the government force in my example? But yet it is coercive, yes?

When I graduated from college, I had to pay off a small library fine before I could get my diploma. The college didn't force me to pay the fee. But the threat that I wouldn't get my diploma unless I paid was a very big incentive. So I know at least one case where this model of mine makes a good prediction.

"what that peace is built on". The "men-with-guns" models simplifies that to the point of farce. There are incentives to having and being part of a good government. There are means of coercion other than force. And there are men-with-guns in places without government.

[jerf]

"I think you've made an unstated assumption that it will go around to everybody."

No. I've simply observed there is a lot more to go around.

"f the government utilities stop providing water and power to your house, what do you do?"

In general, and under the conditions you've stipulated where the government is also preventing me from taking any other options, start rioting. This is what I mean by your model failing to accurate predict the real world; you need only look out there to see this happening. If the government wishes to make this stick, they are going to have to use violence.

You seem to simply be unable to conceive of the possibility that violence is an option for the non-government as well, which will require either violence or acquiescence from the government in response. I assume this is because you live in a place that has probably been civilized for centuries. But it's all ultimately based on violence. Try to not pay your taxes, and not go to jail. Sure, the enforcement starts nonviolently; it isn't in anybody's best interests to escalate that fast. But if you've done anything the government cares about at all, sooner or later the police come out. If they don't, then it is because the government didn't care in the first place.

"Where's the violence?" Why, of course you don't see any. You've carefully crafted your examples to stop right where the violence would start in real life.

"There are means of coercion other than force."

Which, by definition, can therefore be resisted by force.

"And there are men-with-guns in places without government."

Which is actually an important point to why the "men-with-guns" model is not actually bad. Government centralizes the men-with-guns, so they fight each other with methods other than raw violence (voting, bureaucracy, etc.) and allow us to get on with our non-violence-related lives. The government monopoly on violence is a brilliant civilizational innovation, not something to be deplored. But it is also something not to forget. Laws either are backed by violence if you persist in violating them, or are ultimately irrelevant, and I wish people would treat passing laws a bit more seriously, instead waving the laws and consequently the guns around so casually. This is part of how the police have gotten so militarized in the US, by being so casual with our drug policy, among others.

[dalke]

My assertion is that reducing government to "people-with-guns" is not useful, because there are non-force means of state coercion.

You say that without the ability to project force, then a response from someone being denied services is force, and when that happens, the government responds with force.

So be it. Yes, that's almost completely true. At some point, every single action can be trumped by someone with bigger guns, and everything recast into a force viewpoint.

There's a few which cannot and were not trumped by guns. Under the old laws, someone had to plead innocent or guilty before being tried, and lands could not be confiscated without trial. Giles Corey famously resisted the torture of being pressed to death, calling out "more weight!" instead of pleading innocent or guilt. As there was no trial, his lands were not forfeit to the government. Having the biggest guns didn't work there.

As a more hypothetical example, it's hard for you alone to force a doctor to do a quadruple bypass on you, because at some point you will be unconscious, and the doctor can simply stop working. You might try various dead man options, but the odds of success for you are very small. Nor can you and a thousand others, by threat of force, get people to build you a spacecraft to travel to the Moon and back - there are too many points of failure where a single person, through deliberate negligence, can stop that from happening.

In any case, a government does not need to claim a monopoly on violence, nor does civilization need that as a prerequisite. I pointed to the Viking sagas as a case in point. Look specifically at Grettir's Saga. It's acceptable to kill someone, so long as you are willing to pay the weregild. That's part of medieval Scandinavian law, which is not based on a central authority.

In this saga, the people involved could not settle on the payment themselves, so they consulted the lawman. (The lawman was the sole government office of the medieval Iceland.) Thorkel Moon decided on how the weregild was to be paid from the lands. In addition, the killing started because of a disagreement in who gained from a beached whale. The lawman decided "henceforth be it made law, that each man have the drifts before his own lands." Based on the previous paragraphs of the saga, which describe the violence between the different parties, I easily draw the conclusion that people decided it was better to follow that edict than to undergo the deadly fighting every time this might happen in the future.

Clearly civilization can exist and has existed where the government does not claim a monopoly on violence.

Even in US law, the government has explicitly stated that certain types of violence by non-state actors are explicitly allowed, and the government will not interfere. For example, parents are allowed to beat their children, to some extent, even when a government actor cannot do so.

Yes, you can recast this as the government allowing some sort of devolved violence, but as it's indistinguishable from saying that the government has a non-monopoly on violence, and there's clear examples where government didn't have a monopoly on violence, I conclude that your view is too reductionist to be useful.

"Laws either are backed by violence if you persist in violating them, or are ultimately irrelevant"

shrug Everything is ultimately irrelevant. The US will crumble and/or be replaced someday. All acts of violence any of us do will eventually be meaningless in the face of entropy.

In the shorter term, consider the US Pledge of Allegiance, probably the most recited socialist-derived words in the US. US law - the Flag Code - describes the pledge. The Supreme Court in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette said that the government could not force child to state the pledge, as it was a violation of the First Amendment. Further court decisions said that a child could not be punished for not standing up for the pledge, and that recitation must be voluntary.

Thus we have a law which has no "guns" behind it. When teachers have tried to punish students for not saying the pledge, the government courts have reprimanded and fined the schools.

And yet that law has a coercive ability even though there is no state force. It's backed by social ostracism, yes, but that's certainly not part of "the government's monopoly on violence."

[JoeAltmaier]

Its silly to argue all govt ends in violence. I guess all child-raising ends in violence too. And all commerce. Etc.

Of course if you don't follow SOME rules, in the end a civilized society has to attempt to corral you or eject you. What other course do you suggest? Sedation?

[judk]

An unskilled unemployed person in say NYC today has a faaaaar better life than such a person in NYC in 1914.

[dalke]

You aren't helping. This sort of statement is why debates about poverty end up all over the place.

Yes, computers were once so expensive that, quoting Professor Frink, "only the five richest kings of Europe would own them". Now they just about come free in a box of cereal.

The usual solutions are either 1) use something like the OECD approach, where poverty is the number of people making under 1/2 the median income, or 2) use a "relatively absolute" basket of goods concept, which includes housing and food.

Instead, you hand-wave "faaaaar better", without explaining what you mean.

For example, it is not "faaaaar" easier for said unskilled person in NYC to find affordable housing now than 1914. For one, zoning laws and regulations have reduced the number of boarding houses, cage hotels, and flop houses over the last century.

You can have all the bandwidth you want, in your proverbial shelter under the bridge, but it won't keep you warm.