Do gangs count as private defense agencies that have gone "rogue"?

[wilderness]

@Natalie

@wilderness

Criminal gangs force kids into the streets and coerce them into criminal activities. I worked with gang members at a youth placement facility. Their indoctrination isn’t as sophisticated as the government, but I’m sure if they could print money out of thin air and coerce people into that the tools at their disposal would expand. Street gangs are small governments in the making, but the bigger government called the State usually keeps these smaller criminal gangs from expanding but in some countries, I hear Mexico, criminal gangs actually have access to the Mexican governments coercive power. Sometimes I hear people wonder who’s really in the charge in Mexico. The politicians or the criminal gangs that supposedly emerged from the streets. They’re the same, one has more power than the other usually proportional to size.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condoning gang violence in any shape or form. But when it comes to mass murder and robbery, gangs don’t even come close to the official governments. As has been said, murder one person and you’re a criminal, murder a million and you’re a politician.

I completely agree. That’s why I included “proportional to size”. I really do see the government as a criminal gang that has been able to pull off a huge fraud in millions of people. It’s a whole other level of gang activity that makes street gangs look like child’s play, in a sense.

@Natalie

From personal experience: I never had been troubled by the mafia even when I lived in the times of the Russian “gangster paradise”. Government, however, was everywhere and impossible to avoid. Businessmen who had dealings with the organized crime (pretty much everyone in that times) swear that gangsters in general were much more reasonable and less greedy than government officials who always looked for an opportunity to coerce a bribe or two. When government regulations hindered the market mafia provided the ways to circumvent them and allow businesses to function.

I think there is a difference between the mafia and a street gang. The latter tend to be very brutish. The mafia isn’t as brutish which allows organization to develop. The street gang members I worked with were constantly watching their backs even from their own and usually each day was spent with friends having to redevelop their friendship, sometimes as if they had to start all over again each morning with each other. Not a physically coercive sense, but in retying their friendship making sure they aren’t trying to back-stab each other. They read each others actions to such a point it took a very long time to gain the keen eye that they have in noticed each others subtle movements in how they behave towards each other. Eye movements, who they walked with and who they didn’t, etc… Their relationships were very weak. I see the mafia having stronger bonds of relationships with each other built on a greater degree of trust than a street gang. Politicians build even a greater degree of trust and their behaviors and ways of keeping fraud hidden is probably a mastering of the street gang art. Politicians took the art to a whole new level, much more than even the mafia. The mafia seems to be on a level between the two. But I don’t know enough about the mafia, there’s stories on how they are actually good, but I don’t know to what extent.

@Natalie

These days, much of the income of international crime comes from voluntary transactions in forbidden or heavily regulated industries (drugs, prostitution, guns, etc.).

I wouldn’t see anything wrong with these types of dealings. As the saying goes, even the mafia thought killing was bad for business. I think they try to avoid it as much as possible, but I’m sure there’s a wide scale as to which mafia or international crime entities are more libertarian lawful and which ones not. [:)]