Law-Enforcement Socialism

By Anthony Gregory

Every year, more prisons are built, more money is funneled to police departments, more criminal law is written and yet domestic crime remains a major problem.

Explanations abound as to why this is. The Left blames the economic system for fostering inequality, which supposedly causes crime. The Right says the police have their hands tied by political correctness. Libertarians typically argue that the government wastes precious time and resources on victimless crime and has insufficient tools remaining to deal with the genuine predators.

There is a more fundamental explanation, however, which makes logic out of the entire mess but is almost never voiced: Socialism. Law enforcement agencies, courts, prisons, legislative bodies — all of the key institutions that are supposed to produce justice are owned and maintained by the state.

Outside of some small academic and activist circles, most Americans reject the radical ideology of socialism as it pertains to the economy as a whole. Hardly anyone believes that the state should maintain the means of production and that private enterprise should be abolished. Most people understand the folly of divorcing all industry from private property ownership and running an economic sector completely through central management.

It is interesting, then, that most people still believe in total socialism when in comes to providing services of security and justice.

There is a considerable literature exploring how the market might handle law, but rarely are people exposed to it. Murray Rothbard, Bruce Benson, David Friedman, Robert Murphy, Samuel Konkin and others have made insightful contributions to such theory. However, we do not need to know how exactly the market would deal with this to know that socialism has institutional limitations that prevent it from achieving its advertised goals; and there is no reason not to apply this understanding to the question of law enforcement.

Just as when the means of production of any good or service are monopolized by the state, the result is havoc, we see similar problems when the state owns the means of production of the service of protecting the innocent and going after the guilty.

Mises identified the inability to engage in economic calculation as the key practical limitation of socialism that rendered it unworkable. This incapacity to divert resources to their most urgent use is one of the most conspicuous results of a socialist criminal justice system. Thus do we see police expending hundreds of thousands of dollars arresting, prosecuting, and punishing an individual for a victimless crime, when it is hard to imagine a private institution finding such a witch hunt economically viable.

The state, unlike a participant in the free market, gains its market share and resources through violence. The more it spends, the more it expands and the more it is able to spend. It sees spending money not as a cost to be balanced against income it brings in. Rather, the state's resources are not its own and its very success as an institution is determined largely by how much it spends. It is eager to spend money, to expand its operations and to reward its privileged class of individuals with jobs and other benefits.

Rest of article at:

http://www.mises.org/story/2423

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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Schopenhauer

War and criminal justice are two things that should never fall into the hands of the market. There is a reason the government has a monopoly on force- to keep force from becoming the norm. The last thing we need is companies to make a profit off of violence and population containment.
The main problems we have with the justice system, according to the article, involve that the government needs to show its purpose. Some other offenses occur when the government seeks revenue through prosecution. Somehow I doubt that tossing a profit motive into the system will help. Who's going to pay for it anyway? And what will happen in the areas where not enough people pay? Sounds like the building blocks of a Mafia...
In fact that's kind of how the Mafia started out.

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"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside

Actually the mafia's rise to power came as a result of government action:

"Mafia activities were restricted until 1920, when they exploded because of the introduction of the prohibition. Al Capone's Syndicate in 1920s ruled Chicago."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia

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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Schopenhauer

That's when they got big in the US.
Their origin is as a protection racket in Italy, almost a shadow government. They offered protection for a price... and gave those who didn't pay a reason to need it.
Without a government to ensure that such a practice doesn't occur, how can we expect anything other than protection rackets?
And who protects the poor who obviously won't be able to afford good protection? As opposed to the freeriders in rich areas who don't need to pay for protection because others do?
Granted, we already see such a stratification in our society... but privatization would not solve that and would likely make it worse.

I agree that we should reduce the number of laws and quit imprisoning everyone who ends up committing a victimless crime... but I think we need a police force that is accountable to all the people, not just those who pay (again, unlike our current system... but the problem is that people do make profit [prison businesses, quota revenues]...) Police service needs to be more socialized, not less.

__________________
"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside

Well, the mafia still exists with government. They'd paid off numerous government officials and rarely get caught.

Anyway, my point in posting is just to provide an alternative viewpoint - and that's why I post the views of some people who are either Anarcho-Capitalists, or close to that viewpoint. My views have not changed. I still support having a branch of federal law enforcement (preferably paid for by tariffs rather than taxes).

But the police are used to punish criminals after the fact, they do not exist to protect citizens as the Supreme Court once affirmed:

'Castle Rock v. Gonzales - the Supreme Court found that Jessica Gonzales did not have a constitutional right to police protection, even in the presence of a restraining order.

By a vote of 7-to-2, the Supreme Court ruled that Gonzales has no right to sue her local police department for failing to protect her and her children from her estranged husband."

http://www.allsafedefense.com/news/CopsDontProtect.htm

South v. Maryland - found that law enforcement officers had no affirmative duty to provide protection to private individuals (1856)

Bowers v. DeVito - the Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit held, "...there is no Constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen." (1982)


Who will protect the poor? Ultimately the poor are responsible for protecting the poor. As we are all ultimately responsible for our own self-defense.

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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Schopenhauer

Yeah, expand the capacity for private enterprise to profiteer from crime..sounds like a great idea

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"If you stand for nothing you'll fall for anything" - Malcolm X