The irony of the "defund the police” crowd is they’ll end up having way MORE of a police state when the conditions become intolerable. Everyone wants a tidy paradigm that’ll solve humanity’s problems once and for all. The socialists just think if we tried real socialism, the communists want “real communism,” the anarchists want “real anarchy” but none of that shit works in practice. We had anarchy, i.e., the nasty, brutish and short state of nature, we’ve tried communism, and it killed > 100M people last century. There are no isms, no paradigms that will solve the problems of humans living among other humans. Best trade-off I can come up with is top-down fascist government but only to the absolute minumum extent necessary to foster the conditions for maximum bottom-up prosperity. That’s messy though because once you have a top-down government, you have to watch to make sure it’s (a) doing it’s job (keeping order, protecting its borders, arresting criminals); and (b) not overstepping its job by undermining bottom-up prosperity with regulations, cronyism, onerous taxation, bureaucracy, etc. You have to have a government and keep it within these narrow bounds. Does too little, you slip into anarchy. Does too much, you slip into communism/totatitarianism. It’s like water — too cold, you get ICE (no pun intended), too hot you get steam.