As the discussion of the UC-Davis Pepper Spraying incident has proceeded, one of the best things I’ve seen circulating is this quote from the first few lines of Frederic Bastiat’s classic “The Law:”
The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!
If this is true, it is a serious fact, and moral duty requires me to call the attention of my fellow-citizens to it.
And so, fellow-citizens, I exercise my moral duty. In an extra piece I did for Forbes after the incident, I proposed that police services can and should be provided by private firms in private markets rather than by governments. It’s a proposition that a lot of people would almost certainly find crazy; however, the rash of police brutality that has been unleashed against the Occupation illustrates a deep and fundamental point about social institutions. Market processes create information and feedback that guides people toward effective and efficient solutions to the problems they confront. Political processes do the opposite. A lot of us are irrational, guided by prejudice, or otherwise flawed. These flaws are reduced (albeit probably not eliminated completely) by market processes and amplified by political processes.
21st century technology is allowing us to watch “the law become the weapon of every kind of greed” in real time. This isn’t because bad people are in positions of power, though. At the risk of being glib, the violence is inherent in the system. The problem isn’t that the wrong people are in power. The problem is that there is power for people to seize in the first place.
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Agree with general police-privatization, but the issue is murky.
The ‘UC-Davis Campus Police’ responsible for the pepper-spraying incident… were already a semi-private police organization, separate from the normal municipal/government police in the college town of Davis, California. {They are sworn ‘Peace-Officers’ under California law… but would the general libertarian “private-police” also require some form of government licensing/oversight ??}
The primary problem is that American police generally operate outside normal common-law concepts of assault/battery, kidnapping, false-imprisonment, extortion, etc. They are generally immune from many legal actions that would immediately cause the arrest & prosecution of average citizens {..the ex-Marine UC-Davis cop who sprayed those peaceful campus protestors was put on paid vacation, with no real fear of arrest or criminal prosecution for his illegal acts}.
So the concern is not who pays their police salary (government or private entities)– but how the real-world legal system treats actual “policemen”. Uniforms, badges, and guns tend to generate special-treatment within a society, over time.
The overall American legal system is much more in need of radical reform than merely its ‘police’ subset.
Private police wouldn’t require state licensing/oversight if you are a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist, as there shouldn’t be a state to oversee them. It’s the same as the military industrial complex. Defense contractors are private companies, but they get special privileges because of their ties to the state.
That said, I don’t see how in the current paradigm we could ever have truly private police.
In today’s environment, if you put forward the idea of private law enforcement, people usually balk. The current popular view is very much against this notion. That this was in Forbes, what I consider a largely mainstream publication, is impressive. Good work.
This is one of the most important issues in the fight for liberty. If/when we break the government monopoly on “legitimate” violence, then everything else suddenly becomes a lot easier. Without a monopoly on violence, the state becomes a land association.
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