Lab e2: Police and security

On planet o-box, private security forces help people defend themselves efficiently and with as little physical force as possible. It is a very safe and peaceful world.

One main difference to the Earth is that the security forces have much less work because they do not need to chase and punish peaceful activities.

What is the same on the Obox and the Earth is that security forces help people defend themselves against bad actors like muggers, rapists, murderers, thieves, burglars etc. This is of course perfectly legitimate under the Zero Aggression Principle. If I get attacked, I am allowed to defend myself with defensive force and I may accept help from bystanders or from security personnel that I contracted. This type of right to defend oneself is sometimes called “negative right” or “negative laws”, which is an unfortunate term. It is negative in the sense that it states what you may NOT do, namely initiate force. Morally they should be considered the positive laws.

The so-called “positive” laws do not exist on the OboxPlanet, while they make up a majority and a growing numbers of laws and regulations on the Earth. Politicians and bureaucrats make laws and rules and enforce them by fines and the threat of imprisonment even against people who have done nothing wrong, who have neither hurt nor threatened anybody. On Earth, you get punished if you don’t pay taxes, if you consume illegal substances, carry too much cash across some border, fail to register your residence, your company, your product or your tax form. There are even fines for loitering, littering and not wearing a mask when the state declares a medical emergency. A great part of todays prison inmates are victims of such laws, like people who have used illegal substances or were involved in their production and distribution. This problem is inexistent on the OboxPlanet.

How does OboxPlanet maintain order without these countless laws on how to behave well? By allowing people to make rules on their private property and enforcing them through discrimination and exclusion. One example are shopping-malls and amusement parks. Although they are often very crowded, they are generally clean and safe without people getting fined for littering or spray-painting graffiti. They do this by discrete supervision and peaceful “nudging”. Another factor is that private properties are better respected than public streets and squares. When things belong to everybody, nobody cares. After all, ”I pay taxes and pay for part of this streets upkeep, I might as well litter”. But probably the most effective form of of disciplining wrongdoers with “defensive force” is to threaten to exclude wrongdoers from the property in the future. This is the way that on the OboxPlanet, all the traffic laws are enforced without any police hassles, fines and imprisonment.

To sum it up: because on the OboxPlanet, security forces can concentrate on helping people defend themselves, the need for such forces is but a small fraction of the need on Earth for police forces and bureaucrats to enforce thousands if not millions of laws and rules for regulating peaceful behavior on Earth. It is a much more peaceful society. And the whole security industry is but a small fraction of the Earth’s and affordable for everybody.

Without a state police force, who does chase the criminals on the OboxPlanet? Because insurance companies insure goods and persons, they have to pay for damages caused by criminals. The less they have to pay, the more competitive their premiums can be. That’s why insurance companies have an interest to help people protect themselves and reward protective measures, for example by offering shooting training. After the damage is tone, they have an interest in finding the loot and the criminal and make him pay. In this, they work together with security firms and whoever ese can help.

Compare this to earth, where the police have little interest in chasing dangerous criminals or recovering loot. Once the criminal is caught, to add insult to injury, the taxpayers, including the victim, must pay to feed the criminals in sometimes rather cushy prison facilities.

What about vigilante justice? Everybody knows that defensive force must be used justly. To shoot somebody for stealing an apple would turn justified defensive force into unjustified violence. This is why there is little room for private revenge on planet o-box and little abuse of defensive force.

What experiences on Earth, past and present, help us understand life on the OboxPlanet?

Firstly, some historic experiences. In the American West, before the US government took control, private security associations took the role of protecting land and property. Where there mafia-like criminal organisations? To quote from the paper “An American Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism: the Not-so Wild, Wild West: 

“Some of the individuals did drift in and out of a life of crime and sometimes did form loose criminal associations. However, these associations did not seem to be encouraged by the market form of peace keeping, and in fact, seemed to be dealt with more quickly and more severely under private property protective associations than under government organisations”

Does the police often abuse its power? The fact that it is a constant and sometimes hot issue, see BLM, should give us pause to think. 

Private Security forces are responsible for the damage they do. State police, on the other hand, has “sovereign immunity”, meaning that they do not take full responsibility for what they do if they can argue that it was in line with their mission. And out of 100 cases against the police, only a small percentage ever finds fault with them.

This is less of an indictment of todays police, rather the illustration of the logic of a power monopoly. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Finally, the big picture. Comparing the overall death-toll by civilian criminals and criminal gangs and by the state security forces, including the military, is an interesting exercise.

In our societies, we could debate how much of all criminal activities are provoked by state prohibitions of “victimless crimes”, notably laws on drugs. Do we count them as private violence or state provoked?

And what about the victims of states that try to enforce political control? “The Black Book on Communism” calculates that the communist regimes were responsible for the death of around 100 million of their own population. That would be about 150 000 per month or 200 per hour – for 60 years.

Things become even starker when we count war victims. After all, wars are fought by states.

Now it’s your turn:

Have you experienced encounters with law enforcement in which you felt helpless, although you didn’t think you did anything wrong? Can you imagine being protected by private police forces or security personnel?

Things we could learn and implement from the OboxPlanet:

Allow private police forces, “opting out” of the state’s services.

References:

American Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism: The Not So Wild, Wild West

Terr Anderson, P.J. Hill

www.mises.org.