Source: EconLog
by Pierre Lemieux
“Political violence is violence for political reasons. More precisely and to avoid circularity, the difference between political violence and ordinary violence is that the former is motivated by resistance to, or promotion of, the imposition of some collective choices on others. … Imagine a very different system: a society with no collective choices. To make the model watertight, also assume that there is no demand for political choices: everybody is tolerant of what others do within some traditional and very general rules, such as ‘thou shall not kill nor steal.’ All individuals want laissez-faire and accept its consequences. Even if you don’t think that such a state of the world can exist or remain stable, the thought experiment helps distinguish political violence from other sorts of violence.” (06/19/25)
https://www.econlib.org/political-violence-in-minnesota-and-elsewhere