A usual statist refrain goes like this: “We don’t need to end government, we need to put the right people in power.” A variant may be “We don’t need to decrease the power of regulators to prevent capture, we need the right people in office.”
I decided to watch one of the videos F4M posted on here, and I found a left-libertarian woman quoting Proudhon with what appears to be a good answer to the above claim:
He applies the same logic to the ministers of a monarch, saying that the monarchy isn’t bad, the people in it are!
While this is initially quite appealing as a possible reductio ad absurdum, it doesn’t satisfy me completely. Statists can argue that the incentives in a democracy are better aligned than they are in monarchy. Of course, regulatory capture appears to suggest otherwise…
Ask them why there needs to be a monopoly in law. If that’s such a good thing, then why isn’t there a monopoly in food production, which they’d surely consider to be even more important?
Reduce it even more, say there’s nothing wrong about a dictatorship, it just neeeds the right dictator. Oh, and don’t forget to offer your services while you are at it!