But Without Government, Who Would Steal Huge Amounts of Property and Ruin People's Lives for Absurd and Indefensible Reasons?

Sure, we'd still have some wretched villainy from the private sector, but it rarely has the resources or will to devote to life-destruction on the level of this story of the theft of Shannon County, Missouri's, Camp Zoe, as told by William Grigg:

Entrepreneur and musician James Tebeau, whose Camp Zoe concert venue was one of Shannon County, Missouri’s largest employers, has accepted a plea agreement in which he will forfeit his 350 acre property and serve a prison sentence for “maintaining a drug-involved premises.”
Tebeau played bass in an ensemble called the Schwag Band and hosted a number of concert events including the annual “Schwagstock” festival. The agreement stipulates that Tebeau neither participated in drug sales, nor did he profit from them. Yet he faces a prison term of two and a half years and the loss of his property.

According to the Feds, Tebeau’s crime was to permit the sale of marijuana, LDS and mushrooms, while instructing employees to evict people who sold heroin, cocaine, crack, meth, and nitrous oxide. However, the same can be said of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, which abetted the sale of many controlled substances for four years following an August 2006 arrest of two people at the camp for selling hallucinogenic mushrooms. Over that four-year period, informants employed by the State Police conducted hundreds of undercover purchases, including many of the hard drugs Tebeau was seeking to ban from his premises.

Why do we hire people to sell buy drugs to fuck up people's lives for selling drugs? It's the only way to do it, alas, since people involved in a mutually desired trade of drugs for money usually aren't going to turn themselves in....

Read more: http://reason.com/blog#article_159659