The images of non-violent people being rounded up and brutalized are disturbing. To state-sympathizers, these events have been shocking; but to libertarians who have documented the long history of police brutality against peaceful people, it is not unexpected.
Here’s one point I hope the protesters don’t miss: they were not aggressed against by Wal-Mart managers, McDonald’s franchise owners, bank executives, wall street speculators, or corporate CEOs - they were aggressed against by agents of the state.
Perhaps these agents of the state were indirectly acting at the behest of said corporate bad guys - but said bad guys are powerless to aggress with impunity without the protection of the state. Clamoring for a bigger role for the state to play in order to ostensibly “control capitalist greed” only gives the same greedy corporatists the very system and mechanisms they use to extract more wealth and protection for themselves.
As I’ve previously stated: “The protesters are right, of course, to deplore much of Wall Street and the myriad ways it uses force to achieve its goals without our voluntary consent, the ways it uses us to protect themselves from their own failures. But Wall Street cannot do any of this without its protector, the state, using its monopoly on force. … Wall Street can only get away with the atrocities it does because the state allows and compels it to.”
Spot on.
