It is though. Lack of a formal structure for who is sovereign in deciding disputes is what gets us the chaos of gang warfare. That’s … why there’s the warfare part.
We have a formal structure for who is sovereign in deciding disputes - civil society and the courts.
The actual problems of gang violence are endemic - poverty, trauma, systemic racism, underfunded education, poor nutrition, easy access to guns, lack of role models, the romanticizing of criminality in pop culture, to name a few. Nowhere on the list will you find "lack of clearly defined rules for setting order of initiative."
> We have a formal structure for who is sovereign in deciding disputes - civil society and the courts.
We do.
But other people reject that system.
And we (in the universal sense, in this case) also have a system of resolving that dispute, and it’s, in practice however much it gets gussied up in theory, to borrow a phrase, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.
I would add an enormously profitable market for illicit substances to the top of your list. If you legalized all drugs, gang violence would evaporate practically overnight.
I think it’s highly unlikely that people who have rejected outright the means by which civil society settles disputes will suddenly embrace them if you take away their mechanism for making an income. I’d expect the opposite reaction, actually, and would imagine a doubling down.
In fairness to your argument, I don’t think gang violence is a problem that can be reduced to zero, and think that there’s probably a low level equilibrium point that’s optimal for both parties (civil and non-civil society, for lack of better terms). So I’m probably not the audience for a total libertarian solution to the issue.
