The NO FAKES act has changed, and it's worse

Unfortunately this is the inevitable outcome of information and computation (and therefore control) becoming cheap. Liberal political systems can no longer survive in equilibrium. The 21st century will be a story either of ruling with an iron fist or being crushed beneath one :(

there is a huge difference between having strict laws and enforcing them and "ruling with the iron fist"

the later inherently implies using violence to suppress people

That is always same thing.

All laws that you want to be strictly enforced, requires violence. This is why people should ALWAYS remember when making laws: "Is this worth killing for?"

I remember some years ago on HN people discussing about a guy that got killed because he bought a single fake cigarrete. IT goes like this:

You make a law where "x" is forbidden, penalty is a simple fine. Person refuses to pay fine. So you summon that person to court, make threats of bigger fine. Person ends with bigger fine, refuses to pay anything. So you summon that person again, say they will go to jail if they don't pay. They again don't pay, AND flee the police that went to get them. So the cops are in pursuit of the guy, he is a good distance away from the cops for example, then they have the following choice: Let him go, and he won, and broke the law successfully... Or shoot him, the law won, and he is dead.

This chain ALWAYS applies, because otherwise laws are useless. You can't enforce laws without the threat of killing people if they refuse all other punishments.

I don't know if the guy you were discussing with is right or not, if digital era result in the need of "ruling with the iron fist", but make no mistake, there is no "strict law enforcement" that doesn't involve killing people in the end.

Thus you always need to think when making laws: "Is this law worth making someone die because of it?"

In most places, shooting by law enforcement is not allowed unless there is a clear and present threat to life.

Your whole post falls apart right there.

Person 'x' refuses to pay a fine - OK, well there are mechanisms where a fine can be automatically applied in some cases, or taken from their assets by court order, or docked from pay. In some places bailiffs/repo men can be called to take assets after fines have been delinquent for long enough.

Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine, even a 'strictly enforced' one.

All countries exist as distinct entities because they can maintain what Max Weber called the monopoly on violence within their geographic bounds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_force_continuum

In countries where we don't have trigger-happy cops, the story continues this way:

* The person commits a crime or tort. Your courts fine the person.

* The person doesn't pay the fine. You extract the fine forcibly from their bank account (or force their employer to dock their wages, or forcibly obtain and auction their assets; let's go with the bank example)

* Why does the bank comply? Because you can revoke the bank's right to trade.

* Why doesn't the bank just trade anyway? Because if they do that, you can enter their buildings and take their equipment, arrest their employees, etc.

* What if the bank tries to stop you doing that? Then you send in armed police.

* What if the bank shoots back? Then you send in the army, and at worst case encircle the bank and lay siege to it.

* What if the bank has their own army which they use to break your siege? Send in your bigger army. Also have laws against private armies, and spend your time detecting private armies and breaking them up before they get bigger than the state's army.

Most people comply with the state at the earlier steps in this chain, and the state runs all the smoother for it. But you can see in failed states, one of the main reasons for the failure is some group (or groups) inside the state have managed to develop a bigger army than the state itself, or parts of the official army break away from the current government or attempt a coup. At that point, it's not the current government's country any more, it's up for grabs. The government (and the entire system of law it represents) has lost the monopoly on violence.

The point of the GP's post is that all laws are ultimately backed by violence. Most rational actors don't let law enforcement reach the explicitly violent part, but it's still there.

To bring it on topic, what this highlights is it is much better to fight against bad laws while they are just proposals, it is much harder to fight against bad laws once enacted.

> Why doesn't the bank just trade anyway? Because if they do that, you can enter their buildings and take their equipment, arrest their employees, etc.

Or just cut off their power (or network access, or whatever)?

I know "monopoly on violence" is the term in the literature, but I think it's more like monopoly on coercion than monopoly on violence per se. The latter is one way to implement the former, but not the only way.

To give a hypothetical larger-scale example, if the population relies on a dam for water/power, then an implicit threat to destroy the dam could coerce them without any violence.

There is no functional difference between behavior coerced by violence and behavior coerced by the threat of violence.