Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok suggests that private bounty hunters are not only more effective than the subsidized police force, but less violent.
Regardless as to the current empirical data on the subject matter, government-subsidized police services exist solely because they are given a legal monopoly to do “policing” (whatever it may be).
And ironically, one thing the police purportedly to do in exchange from money they coercively take from their “customers,” is to protect the customers from other individuals and firms that would take money from the customers.
“Preventing coercion through coercion” — that is their business motto – they will stop a criminal from robbing you, so as long as he is not from the tax department.
More on private policing: 1 2 3 4
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You are a disgrace to our national honor and a danger to our national security. Potentially causing your readers to doubt the efficacy of their local home/neighborhood defense forces and road patrol should be a capital offense, and I hope you are convicted and duly executed should this law ever be made retroactive.
Doubt should be a capital offense? Off to the gulag with ye!
I like this tamu guy, he should live in Nazi Germany, because there was no doubt that the Gestapo was always right…
Due to our WW II experience, Germany has one of the most lenient police forces in the world. They seldom use inappropriate violence and have almost no backup from the law when they use excessive violence.
That’s one thing the USA has still to learn.
Tamu:
On what criteria do you judge the local home/neighborhood defense forces efficiency? There is no economic indicator in the public sector to figure out if our current system is efficient or not. In the private sector, private security forces have to use profit and loss accounting as a guide for efficiency. Publicly provided security has no guide for efficiency and is a beauracracy, which makes them budget maximizers instead of profit maximizers.
How dare you claim anyone who questions an idea should be executed, that is bad rhetoric Tamu and that in and of itself is what evil is.
I thought that this post, from another weblog, was a rather interesting take on a closely related theme:
“For two people to interact in any reasonable and productive way, both must first have accepted some basic caveats: At the very minimum, they must agree to not commit physical harm or property crimes against each other. In a world without this, everyone would live in fear of everyone else and what could be productive collaboration, instead becomes conflict. One’s entire lifetime is spent protecting their lives and property from their fellow man, and individual potential goes the way of collaborative potential and is wasted.
When two people can agree to not physically harm one another and not steal from each other, we can call this, for lack of a better word, basic socialization. Getting people to surrender the ability to steal and kill – what are essentially freedoms – is the basic element of mass socialization; such a massive surrender of these freedoms requires coercion.
(Coercion is necessary because, while reasonable people benefit from a society where they are forbidden to kill and steal, there are times that a reasonable person will see murder or theft as the reasonable option.)
The type of coercion necessary to keep people from killing or stealing is typically referred to as the police power and requires, either real or perceived, superiority of those charged with the police power. This superiority serves as a deterrent to these destructive behaviors, (the promise of many police officers better prepared to use weapons better than we are, keeps us from stealing each others possessions, even if that is a beneficial and reasonable thing to do. The police power makes it unreasonable).
This is the most basic human interaction requires this socialization, although this is not a justification for “society” as it is commonly used. As you have said, these same ends could be accomplished by a committed group of individuals, who among themselves have agreed to not kill or steal. Such a collective of wealthy, reasonable people could hire a police force to protect them from those who are not part of the collective and to enforce the social contract among the members of the collective.
If the members of the collective have all agreed of their own free wills to be policed, then it cannot be considered tyranny. But to enforce the agreements of the collective’s contract on people who have not signed into the collective (by means of protecting the collective from outsiders who have not pledged to not kill or steal) is tyrannical.
How does this collective amount to anything but a government? Such an arrangement where wealthy individuals, no matter how benevolent their intentions, can enforce their private laws on others is tyrannical aristocracy.
Simply put, no government is unreasonable. Mass society is a beneficial arrangement for people, because we don’t have to wonder who has and who hasn’t agreed to not kills us or steal our possessions. As we all benefit from society’s security, it is acceptable that we share the financial burden of that security.
To assume that people are born believing to not kill or steal is to tread into a philosophy that requires a god or gods prescribing morality, something that Ayn Rand rejected and society cannot reasonably rely on. And, while reason dictates we not kill and steal, it only does so because of that coercive enforcement mechanism of police power. And anyone who believes everyone now living makes decisions using only their rational mind is obviously neglecting their own.”
To me, it is so far out of bounds, I’m not sure to begin. If anyone feels charitable enough to offer the poster, of the above, a clue, please do so, in Spades.
@ http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=12369301&postID=114521753715391958
or http://philosophizer.blogspot.com/
in response to the Ayn Rand post, on July 16th, at the bottom. Some, if not all, may be helped )
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