Though they may portray themselves as peaceful, those who favor government solutions to societal ills want to run your life, and resort to violence to do so.

Consent

We intrinsically understand that consent must be at the heart of human interaction. The things we do on a daily basis we do voluntarily. To be forced to do something against our will, without our consent, leaves us feeling violated.

This is with good reason. If much of your day is occupied with forceful association, it can be summed up in one word: slavery.

The Need For Government

As the saying goes, "good ideas don't require force." In much the same manner, anything worth doing is done voluntarily.

This serves as the basis of Free Market principles. Where there is demand, an opportunity exists to provide a solution.

Only programs without the necessary market demand to execute voluntarily require government action. By it's nature then, government exists to force the compliance of involuntary actions.

The Inherent Violence

The Use of Force Continuum displayed above portrays how government agents ensure compliance. Every single law is backed, ultimately, by the use of deadly force.

This applies to laws as benign as jaywalking. It applies to laws without victims and laws where the only victim is the State itself. This applies to all laws, just or unjust.

If you refuse to comply, the use of force is ratcheted up. To ensure compliance, the State resorts to violence.

Socialism Kills

In the 20th Century, governments killed an astounding number of their citizenry.

The United Soviet Socialist Republics killed 62 million people in an effort to establish a true socialist society. Political dissidents, those who refused to comply with the State, found themselves the targets of Joseph Stalin's secret police.

Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution starved 38 million Chinese. The goal was to preserve 'true' Communist ideology in the country by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society.

The list goes on.

The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia killed 2 million, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam 1.7 million. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea has killed 1.7 million and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia killed 1.1 million. Nazi Germany killed 21 million (yes, they were Socialists).

Police Brutality

There is a national discussion in the media regarding police brutality and the shooting of unarmed black men by police. To listen to this discussion, one would think leftists abhor government violence. They give police officers the image of a gang of racist murderers out to kill African Americans.

If this was a genuine sentiment, the call should be for a reform of the laws themselves. The police merely do the job they are assigned. They use the Use of Force Continuum as trained.

Leftists can't, but must, admit to themselves that enforcement of the law is inherently violent. If you insist on making law after law regulating the nuances of an individual's life in some progressive scheme to move society closer to utopia, people will continue to die at the hands of their government.

Rebalancing the Political Spectrum

The first thing a Progressive will do when you point out their violent nature is point the finger at their political opposition. They would be right to do so, but only if you view politics through an outdated paradigm.

Republicans and Democrats do not belong at opposite ends of the left/right spectrum. Rather, Libertarians and Authoritarians are the diametric opposition. The degree of how much faith they put in the State being the differentiation between the two sides.

I must point out that there are believers in big government on both sides of the aisle. All of them considered 'Progressives'.