Saturday, October 11, 2003
(9:16 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
[Screw] the police
I had planned to write a brief discussion of Heidegerrian Ontology for you, just for the sake of some easy Saturday morning reading, but events have intervened. I must speak now of justice.
I am pet-sitting for a former professor of mine, and during my last two trips to her house, I noticed several police officers, more than I've ever seen in one eight-hour period in the Kankakee area. I did not feel threatened, since I was not committing any crime and was, in effect, their employer, due to the regressive state taxes that I pay every day.
Then it occurred to me: why do I need police officers? Or rather, why do I need this many? I am a law-abiding, white US citizen, and surely it does not take many officers to patrol me and others like me. Yet every day, my tax dollars help subsidize larger police forces in areas where people choose to engage in more criminal behavior and thus need more police. In most cases, my tax dollars are supporting police action in neighborhoods in which I will never set foot.
Couldn't the market have come up with a better solution to the problem of crime control? Certainly a range of private firms could make contracts with individuals or with neighborhoods in order to provide the level of crime control they desire. Those neighborhoods that do not wish to enforce laws or have not overcome their laziness enough to gain enough money to afford such luxuries can spend their money on other things, such as prostitutes and "crack" cocaine.
As we've seen in a wide variety of contexts, most prominently in the energy market in California, market solutions always work better than antiquated socialist methods that should have fallen with the Berlin Wall. Why should law enforcement be "off-limits" to such solutions? Is it because the tax-and-spend liberals want to foster a sense of government dependency on their constituents? Is it because they want higher crime rates in order to capitalize on public disorder to push their radical, "progressive" government programs, such as a retirement fund administered by the federal government or basic health insurance for our nation's eldery? Don't they remember that the National Socialist party in Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics also had their own socialized, state-subsidized police forces that impinged on the right of citizens to enforce the law as they see fit? Do they want to turn our great nation into another North Korea?
