>People want protection, that's why this gets approved.
You're missing the most important detail: especially in Western/Northern Europe, people are taught from childhood on that the state is there to protect you, and protecting yourself is a risk. Europeans aren't just lazily asking for protection, they simply weren't raised to defend themselves from trespassers and assailants without the thought of potentially suffering consequences (even if it is just defamation).
Of course these people are going to beg the state to do it, handing over whatever privacy or independence they believe not needed. They don't know any better. They've been raised on 'knives will be used against you' from toddler age.
> You're missing the most important detail: especially in Western/Northern Europe, people are taught from childhood on that the state is there to protect you, and protecting yourself is a risk.
Yeah, and we call that “civilization”.
If you cannot rely on the state for security, then you're basically living in the contemporary version of the pre-modern world (South America bas manu good examples of that, but the US isn't really, people do rely on 911 more often than not)
> Once enough people realize that "the state" can't be everywhere at once
That's a (ideologically driven) myth though: if there's just one thing to learn from the twentieth century, it's that even with limited available technologies, a State that wants to be everywhere, can be everywhere, and it's only getting more true as technology advances[1]. And NSA alone collects enough information today to be able to solve the large chunk of unaddressed crime in most of the developed world, it's just a matter of political will regarding resource allocation (with a little bit of Baumol's cost disease, but it's not the main factor at play).
Having a state that is effectively everywhere is of course not something desirable either (again, the lessons from the past century) but the state abandoning its role is a politically constructed situation (it's what you get when laissez-faire becomes a religious theme).
[1] and it fact, it is because the reach of state steadily increased during the early-mid modern period that we've reached the current state of things. It's not that people haven't yet learned that the state cannot be everywhere, it's that states spent several century building the ability to be everywhere, which in turn led to this confidence from the population (and unfortunately to totalitarism sometimes…)
As opposed to what in the United States? Anyone advocating for a reduction in the authority of law enforcement is pretty quickly relegated to the fringe of either party or actively beaten down depending what the conditions call for (the American public couldn't rubber-stamp the patriot act fast enough).
As far as property crime against businesses is concerned, we absolutely should be telling people it's a risk to intervene. We should actively dissuade drugstore clerks from risking life and limb to stop someone from stealing a cart of sudafed in exchange for minimum wage at will employment with no benefits.
You're missing the most important detail: especially in Western/Northern Europe, people are taught from childhood on that the state is there to protect you, and protecting yourself is a risk. Europeans aren't just lazily asking for protection, they simply weren't raised to defend themselves from trespassers and assailants without the thought of potentially suffering consequences (even if it is just defamation).
Of course these people are going to beg the state to do it, handing over whatever privacy or independence they believe not needed. They don't know any better. They've been raised on 'knives will be used against you' from toddler age.