> Also, I didn't limit government protection to police vs. ordinary crime. Government also has responsibility for national defense, border control, gathering intelligence abroad, preventing terrorism, etc.
Sounds like we largely agree on the earlier points, this where it gets to my admittedly less common/popular opinions. I don't agree with standing militaries, if we're under direct threat and our people are willing to fight then the government's role should be to coordinate and supply this effort.
I also don't agree with most border controls, before enforcing solid borders we should have melted down the Statue of Liberty and sent it back to France (who ironically also doesn't believe in sending them your hungry, poor, or weak anymore). We continue to chase our tails attempting to close borders but never seriously consider the motivations leading to mass migration. If we can't feasibly close our borders we need to reconsider whether entitlement programs are worth the tradeoff and sustainable when someone can walk across the border and add to those budgets. I really don't mean to say I have the answer on what we should do, only that there's a fundamental challenge between wanting to ensure access to what we deem as core necessities when all it takes is physically being here and we can't effectively control borders.
With regards to terrorism, I'm of the opinion that terrorism can't be defeated through primarily military means. Terrorism is a form of psychological warfare against a population, you defeat that by not allowing one-off attacks to stoke fear and drive to over reactions. If we only learned one lesson from two decades of war in Afghanistan it should be that, when it comes to non-state actors, cutting off one head does in fact lead to multiple new heads popping up.
The libertarian in me doesn't either. The realist in me isn't sure we can just stand them down in our current world.
> I also don't agree with most border controls
The libertarian in me would agree with this too, but only in the libertarian version of the US where we don't have a welfare state (which, historically, was the condition under which all previous immigrants to the US came here). You appear to have a similar view.
> I'm of the opinion that terrorism can't be defeated through primarily military means.
I don't think this is true. What is true that, to defeat terrorism militarily, you have to be willing to let your military do whatever is necessary to accomplish that mission, rather than hamstringing it with completely unrealistic rules of engagement. The French, for example, had no trouble defeating terrorism in Algeria militarily. They did it by, for example, not caring about how much civilian collateral damage was caused when the terrorists used civilians as human shields.
The obstacles to, for example, doing in Afghanistan what the French did in Algeria are political, not military.
> Terrorism is a form of psychological warfare against a population, you defeat that by not allowing one-off attacks to stoke fear and drive to over reactions.
Yes, and also by convincing the population, most of whom are not terrorists, that the terrorists are going to lose. If your military gets excoriated in the press every time a civilian is killed as collateral damage, then not just the terrorists, but the civilian population in their country, will understand that the terrorists are not going to lose--because you don't have the political will to defeat them.
Sounds like we largely agree on the earlier points, this where it gets to my admittedly less common/popular opinions. I don't agree with standing militaries, if we're under direct threat and our people are willing to fight then the government's role should be to coordinate and supply this effort.
I also don't agree with most border controls, before enforcing solid borders we should have melted down the Statue of Liberty and sent it back to France (who ironically also doesn't believe in sending them your hungry, poor, or weak anymore). We continue to chase our tails attempting to close borders but never seriously consider the motivations leading to mass migration. If we can't feasibly close our borders we need to reconsider whether entitlement programs are worth the tradeoff and sustainable when someone can walk across the border and add to those budgets. I really don't mean to say I have the answer on what we should do, only that there's a fundamental challenge between wanting to ensure access to what we deem as core necessities when all it takes is physically being here and we can't effectively control borders.
With regards to terrorism, I'm of the opinion that terrorism can't be defeated through primarily military means. Terrorism is a form of psychological warfare against a population, you defeat that by not allowing one-off attacks to stoke fear and drive to over reactions. If we only learned one lesson from two decades of war in Afghanistan it should be that, when it comes to non-state actors, cutting off one head does in fact lead to multiple new heads popping up.