LW - Defunding My Mistake by ymeskhout
Description
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Defunding My Mistake, published by ymeskhout on September 4, 2023 on LessWrong.Confessions of an ex-ACABUntil about five years ago, I unironically parroted the slogan All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB) and earnestly advocated to abolish the police and prison system. I had faint inklings I might be wrong about this a long time ago, but it took a while to come to terms with its disavowal. What follows is intended to be not just a detailed account of what I used to believe but most pertinently, why. Despite being super egotistical, for whatever reason I do not experience an aversion to openly admitting mistakes I've made, and I find it very difficult to understand why others do. I've said many times before that nothing engenders someone's credibility more than when they admit error, so you definitely have my permission to view this kind of confession as a self-serving exercise (it is). Beyond my own penitence, I find it very helpful when folks engage in introspective, epistemological self-scrutiny, and I hope others are inspired to do the same.How Did I Get There?For decades now, I've consistently held plain vanilla libertarian policy preferences, with the only major distinction being that I've aligned myself more with the anarchists. Whereas some were content with pushing the "amount of government" lever to "little", I wanted to kick it all the way to "zero". There are many reasons I was and remain drawn to anarchist libertarianism, and chief among them was the attractively simple notion that violence is immoral and that government is violence. The problem with moral frameworks is that they can be quite infectious. To pick on one example for demonstration's sake, I notice that for many animal welfare advocates a vegan diet is heralded not just as the ideal moral choice, but also as the healthiest for humans, the least polluting, the cheapest financially, the best for soil conservation, the most water-efficient, the least labor-exploitative, et cetera & so forth.There's a risk that if you become dogmatically attached to a principled position, you're liable to be less scrutinizing when reflexively folding in other justifications. I suspect that happened to me with prisons, for example, where because I felt immediate revulsion at the thought of the state forcing someone into a cage, I was unwilling to entertain the possibility it could be justified. Ceding the ground on this particular brick was too threatening to the anarchism edifice I was so fond of.Obviously if you advocate getting rid of the government, people naturally want to know what will replace it. Some concerns were trivial to respond to (I'm not sad about the DEA not existing anymore because drugs shouldn't be illegal to begin with), but other questions I found annoying because I admittedly had no good answer, such as what to do with criminals if the police didn't exist. I tried to find these answers. Anarchism as an umbrella ideology leans heavily to the far left and has a history of serious disagreements with fellow-travelers in Marxism. Despite that feud, anarchist thought absorbed by proxy Marxist "material conditions" critiques that blame the existence of crime on capitalism's inequalities - a claim that continues to be widely circulated today, despite how flagrantly dumb it is. As someone who was and continues to be solidly in favor of free market economics, these critiques were like parsing an inscrutable foreign language.I was in college around my most ideologically formative time and a voracious reader, but I churned through the relevant literature and found nothing convincing. Instead of noting that as a blaring red flag, I maintained the grip I had on my preferred conclusion and delegated the hard work of actually defending it to someone else. I specifically recall how Angela Davis's 2003 book Are...
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