This is one argument that many anarchists make; the truth is that (at the very least) an order of magnitude more people were killed by their own governments in the 20th century than were killed by their fellow citizens. Hobbes was wrong.

Is it accurate to imply that the Soviets and Chinese had any sense of ownership of their governments? Especially with the forced starvation of Ukraine, it was practically a foreign occupation (this is muddy, Kyiv is a historic center of Russia).

I don't think it's a refutation of Hobbes that a dictator could seize control of a state and perpetrate mass murder.

Hobbes made the case that a totalitarian dictator was the least likely to perpetrate mass murder; according to his ideas, the democracies would be more violent.

Hobbes was wrong.

http://popten.net/2010/05/top-ten-most-evil-dictators-of-all...

No democratic country has killed millions of it's own citizens. Even Hitler waited until he changed the law to give himself dictatorial powers.

That's all asset forfeiture, not civil. Read your own article:

> A big chunk of that 2014 deposit, for instance, was the $1.7 billion Bernie Madoff judgment, most of which flowed back to the victims.

Obviously nobody reasonable is endorsing civil asset forfeiture, but you don't have to falsify numbers to make that case.

That would be true if we found Trump was a criminal and took his $10B or whatever -- that would surely dwarf petty burglars' total thefts. The mere "is this number larger" criterion is not sufficient for your insinuation