Bike thieves and phone snatchers are up at all hours, zooming about wearing masks on overclocked ebikes. How do the police even stop that? It's actually madness.
Discussion
Police more worried about spicy memes m8.
It's better for stats too. Much harder to catch bike and phone thief gangs. Much easier to catch a self-doxxed granny in Facebook complaining lolcry
If only there were some tools available that could be used to decentralize defence so people did not need to rely on police... 🤔
This just doesn't work, even in theory. They go about in groups. What you gonna do always go around in a group??
The theory is that if police did not have a monopoly on violence and people were allowed to arm themselves and organise the defence of their own communities I believe we would live in a much safer world.
Is this even imaginable in a city? I'm finding it hard to imagine how that would even work. Never mind how this would even emerge. Nice in theory tho
1930s Britain, oddly enough.
Sterling MGs in private hands, but a taboo against shooting unarmed "Bobbies".
If most citizens are armed and support the police, then where's the problem?
(The second half of the equation is usually missing these days)
It'll be you with a gun facing 5 thieves with 5 guns. Is my thinking¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And the thieves will back away slowly and find something else to do. Probably stealing something unattended. Those that don't adopt that policy won't live long enough for most citizens to encounter one in a lifetime.
The government doesn't exist to protect the public against the criminals. Its there to protect (big) criminals against the public.
And how would you defend in the new utopia from the big coorporations? They can fund their military anyways. Only small people need stata sponsored Police. The rich would in every escenario without state be much more powerful, since this is just the way any good monarchy was working or is still working today.
Good questions, and I disagree with Rothbard on the answers.
Re police.
Private police will be for rich people, transport corridors and commercial precincts. Like the old days.
Working-class neighborhoods will have an old man sweeping leaves and asking "Oi! 'Oo are you?" if you don't look like you belong. And someone else with a rifle behind a blind on an upstairs window watching to see if you pull a weapon.
Like many "ethnic" areas of my city today. There are surprisingly few f_ckups, when one happens its all over the news for days.
Re corporations.
Without the State, who will defend the Board's interests against their managers?
And who will defend the managers' interests against their workers?
Without Big Daddy Government, tens of thousands of pages of legislation and regulations, and a myriad of tax-fed agencies, Big Business will die so fast you'll think it was a conspiracy.
Yeah, we can still have self-executing DAOs living in some blockchain, but if there's no corporate personhood and State enforcement of their rights, then what happens at the linkage between the DAO and real world assets? Private litigation / arbitration is what, and the DAO structure will be at a competitive disadvantage vis a vis sole traders and partnerships.
Blown up story. But sorry this still is the reality that was before democracies came up. Ones with much power control everything and the poor do have nothing to say. People that have free speech to oppose the powerful are imprisoned or shot directly as they are in Russia, Northkorea or Belarus. Those are states that live with your reality. There is no legitimated state. But this does not result in mor equality or anything like it.
It can be hard to imagine a world without state funded police or how a world without them would be beneficial.
In chapter 12 of "For A New Liberty" Murray Rothbard lays out how such a world could look.
You can read the chapter here:
Just having a quick scan of it now. It all seems p idealistic. Like how does it even work with a scenario of street crime, people travel 14 miles to work. Would there be no-go areas (even moreso than now)? It seems like it will likely be the same scenarios and problems but instead of state police you have private police who can do nothing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not sure when this was written or who the author is, but seems a bit like a lovely theoretical but impractical idea, just as bad as now.
Humanity survived a hundred thousand years without police. And Britain survived ~1820 to ~1950 with unarmed police in a heavily armed society.
Its not just possible, its normal.
We are living in the idealistic experiment, and its starting to spiral faster and faster into suck...
I agree, most people also survive now (part from the ones stabbed to death), most people also survived then (apart from the ones stabbed to death). I see no difference.
Here are a few questions you can ask yourself.
1. Do you think someone would be more or less likely to break into a house or attack someone if they assumed they were armed?
2. In general what provides better service and efficiency, private business or government services? Why would policing be any different?
3. Police are just a group of people. Why is this group uniquely able to provide security and another group would not? Why would we assume that police can offer this service better than every other possible group of people?
The concept of a world without government seems impossible at first but the more you think about it the more you realise that all the arguments for government quickly fade away.
The biggest criticism is that we would just end up where we are now with one monopoly in control but that hardly seems like an argument against anarchism as even in that worst case scenario we end up only exactly where we are now.
For" a New Liberty" is very in depth but if you want a succinct overview of Rothbard's view of the state then I would recommend reading the 60 page "Anatmy of the State" as a good starting place.
You can read it here.
I get the argument and agree that it would add another layer if there was an understanding all people are armed and willing to protect themselves. I have no idea what the stats are on eg street/home robbery from countries or states where firearms are legal and the majority of people carry. I also know of some areas in eg London that have private security.
I'm not entirely convinced that this anarcho thinking isn't just utopian, I'm just speculating if this would just be lots of inefficient private security instead of a state security. (I get the free market will solve this arguments against this too) but also have my doubts.
I should also add I'm not really against it either tho and it can't be too much worse lol. I'm just slightly sceptical ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you are interested in this topic I would refommend doing some reading in this area. I have found it quite rewarding and found my skepticism fade.
Another place that might be good to start is The Anarchist Handbook which had a collections of essays on this topic put together by Michael Malice.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58039014-the-anarchist-handbook
I thought of the legitimation of state power a lot in the last weeks.
One strong point is that the police works under the law. And when they do not behave according to the law a court has to possibility to bring them to the court and into prison for their illegal acts as anyone else too.
A just police corp always ever react, since all citizen need to be seen as innocent until there is proof against it. This means Police legitimized by human rights can never act preventive.
And when we already know that someone needs to have the most power. Why shouldn't it be legitimized by democratic rules?
You raise a lot of good questions and it can be hard to grasp how the police could operate outside of a government structure.
If you really want answers then I would say that the best thing for you to do is read the chapter of For a New Liberty that I linked to the other user.
In brief I think the biggest point that you have wrong is when you say we need someone to have the most power. All security organisations should have equal power. There is no need for a police with extra powers. You also make points on how police are held accountable but so often police are held to a different lower standard than regular citizens. Rothbard makes the point that free market security would be much farer and held to a higher standard than current public policing.
There would still be courts to hold security companies accountable they just wouldn't be monopolised state courts that can choose what to prosecute but would instead be private arbitration organizations.
So you thing the best pacifist is heavyly armed? Or you just consider armed streetcrime to be normal?
I would say yes to both questions.
Street crime should never be considered normal but some level of crime will always exists.
Removing guns for the equation we can just imagine a scenario where there are two men walking down a street both wearing a nice watch.
One is over 6 feet tall and incredibly muscular, built like an athlete.
The other is short and scrawny and looks visibly weak.
If one of them was to get robbed which one do you think it would be?
In this case you can see that being capable of harm or at least imposing means you are more likely to have a safe walk down the street.
The one who is more heavily armed (in this case literally) will have an easier time being a pacifist.
I am very strongly against this story. Since in any case who makes sure there is not just a game of who trusts the least. And because of being afraid to be offended or because of racism someone just kills the other person. When noone sees this and there is no police. Whom is going to investigate this crime?
I think you need to hit the history books, and then add modern forensics back in. Yes, there are private forensics labs even now.
And they are investigating when tho poorest get robbed? When the weakest are attacked? Or only after you pay?
I would again emplore you to read the book or at least the chapter I have linked earlier. All of these most common questions are answered.
I will post here the relevant section discussing this point:
"“But how could a poor person afford private protection he would have to pay for instead of getting free protection, as he does now?” There are several answers to this question, one of the most common criticisms of the idea of totally private police protection. One is: that this problem of course applies to any commodity or service in the libertarian society, not just the police. But isn’t protection necessary? Perhaps, but then so is food of many different kinds, clothing, shelter, etc. Surely these are at least as vital if not more so than police protection, and yet almost nobody says that therefore the government must nationalize food, clothing, shelter, etc., and supply these free as a compulsory monopoly. Very poor people would be supplied, in general, by private charity, as we saw in our chapter on welfare. Furthermore, in the specific case of police there would undoubtedly be ways of voluntarily supplying free police protection to the indigent — either by the police companies themselves for goodwill (as hospitals and doctors do now) or by special “police aid” societies that would do work similar to “legal aid” societies [p. 220] today. (Legal aid societies voluntarily supply free legal counsel to the indigent in trouble with the authorities.)
There are important supplementary considerations. As we have seen, police service is not “free”; it is paid for by the taxpayer, and the taxpayer is very often the poor person himself. He may very well be paying more in taxes for police now than he would in fees to private, and far more efficient, police companies. Furthermore, the police companies would be tapping a mass market; with the economies of such a large-scale market, police protection would undoubtedly be much cheaper. No police company would wish to price itself out of a large chunk of its market, and the cost of protection would be no more prohibitively expensive than, say, the cost of insurance today. (In fact, it would tend to be much cheaper than current insurance, because the insurance industry today is heavily regulated by government to keep out low-cost competition.)"
You know that the free market itself only exists because law and order are enforced? The free market itself is against law and order and in no way enforcing it. The justice system is not some natural building that even exist without the justicial system that upholds it. And concouring security firms are like opponents in war. Its armed forces that have the will to be the only. So just destroy opponents. Since there is no force defending from it. And then comes maby an other force to do the same. Only that none of those has any democratic legitimacy.
I disagree with your first point.
I see the free market as the natural state of the world. The "free" in "free market" meaning free from restriction - meaning the only special condition that must exist is you do not hinder the natural state.
The rights we have that are protected by laws exist independant of the laws.
For example the right to free speech is not some magical right that a benevolent government grants us but rather a natural state that the governments promises not to infringe on.
Your points about warring security firms are also discussed in the book I linked. If you are interested your questions will be answered there.
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I think the fundamental point of difference between us is that you view the government as having the ability to grant us something that we do not already have when I see them only as an organization that is able to place restrictions on what we can do.
The government has no power to create anything that its people could not independently. It has no power to grant any fundamental rights.
The only thing a government can do is violate rights, impose restrictions and enforce those restrictions through violence.
Are the Statist police, now?
LOL we both know the answer. Prostitutes and the homeless go missing all the time, at best a rookie cop will ask pro forma questions of the nearest random. But they can move heaven and earth for a politician's niece, or a fellow cop.
Even under Anarchism, the poorest are SOL unless they have family who care and are willing to pay someone or go out and investigate themselves.
That's a step up from where we are now.
The police do not come out looking like this when the weakest are threatened, they come out looking like this when the government is threatened.
Anyone who thinks that primary concern of the police is protecting the average citizen vs protecting the state is not thinking clearly.
How could a crime lower the crime. It is a dilemma.
Cheaper than motorbikes too. They were formidable opponents in Afghanistan.