Hey, thanks for the reply. I should say, I did find your article interesting to read and so i'll give you a follow. My position is this.
I don't exactly believe people need to be coerced into doing good. I think people need the threat of coercion to stop them from doing bad .
Without any source of coercion to call the shots when people start falling out with each other, they will tend to violence in the long run (though i realise thats no exactly what you're advocating). I don't think everyone is a blood thirsty monster, but there is certainly enough greed, arrogance and stupidity in humanity to undermine the trust we have for the average stranger in a situation without police force... misunderstandings will happen, followed by action, revenge, reaction, and ultimately violence cycles.
So whats the solution? We regulate violence a single force responsible for the monopoly of force - a judiciary and a state police force. The reason i think that police force shouldn't be privatised is that private companies are motivated by profit, we don't want our justice system to be motivated by profit. You're just asking for corruption. At any rate, what happens when two or more armed private police forces disagree about what who the criminals are? Without a central authority and law to refer to how will they decide? Whats to stop them from just declaring each other obstructions to justice and entering all out war?
Also, in reply to your question: "Surely you don't prefer being coerced to not being coerced, do you?" This is a false dichotomy. I'd be under coercion in both cases, either by the democratically elected politicians who control the state police or by private security services (essentially someones henchmen by the sounds of it lol) controlled by people over whom i have 0 control.
How would that be the case? Unless you're trespassing on someone's property, what interaction would you have with private security?
Well the police do a lot more than just protect private property. I would be at the mercy of everyone who could pay for a bigger private security for than me
That's right. They also extort people for victimless, so-called crimes. They violate and damage persons and property, many times without cause or justification.
How would you be at the mercy of a private security company hired to protect the property and persons of those they're under contract with? I think you're misconstruing what private security means.
Well, for starters, war is extremely expensive. It doesn't seem like it is in this day and age because it's happening everywhere, but the only way that it's funded is by massive amounts of borrowing and taxation. To put it into perspective, the only reason the US has kept the dollar from failing is by enforcing a monopoly on what currency is used to buy and sell oil (the petrodollar peg). That's literally the only thing keeping the dollar from going the way of the lira or the ruble in the 1990's. Without a central bank that can offload the debt, engaging in war is a matter of how much you personally are willing to spend on it. Most hired security guards aren't going to care enough or be paid well enough to want to engage in that, and those that do have enough money to pay their agents well enough are likely too busy engaged in productive enterprise absent a state.
You seem to be misunderstanding my position. The paradigm we exist under now needs to be done away with, for many reasons - including the ones I mentioned. Private security doesn't strip anyone of their rights. In the same way a business park hiring private guards to secure their property isn't infringing on anyone's rights, hiring a firm to protect my property doesn't take away anyone's rights. You don't have a right to another person's property or person.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "just asking for corruption." Are you saying that private security companies wouldn't operate according to their contracts with their customers and instigate conflicts on their own behalf?
By corruption i mean that the carrying out of justice wouldnt be neutral, it would be determined by who could pay for the biggest best security force.
What do you suppose happens when two people stake a claim to the ame property? Their respective security services would fight. This is what i mean by war
What happens now when there's competing claims to property? Do individuals bidding on a plot of land or a house try to kill each other off? Do we regularly read reports of police preventing bloodshed over two people trying to buy the same car? No, we don't.
Moreover, you're ignoring all of the problems I mentioned in my article. Justice is not blind or neutral with a state. In point of fact, it can't be, because the state arbitrates disputes to which it is a party.
"Do individuals bidding on a plot of land or a house try to kill each other off?"
No, but we have a police force to ensure that this wouldn't be a profitable course of action - thats the whole point of a state police force. lol so thanks for validating my belief that the currents system works (by and large at least ;)).
One of your key arguments is that you don't like having a monopoly on power. But if we had private security and no state to guarantee our protection, monopolies in the industry would form anyway. This is natural and inherent in the free market. Furthermore, since state regulation of the free market has receded with the rise of neoliberalism in the US and EU over the last 30(ish) years, we've seen MORE monopolists forming. If we
had no state to stop an economic entities from becoming too powerful, democracy would crumble. Plutocracy would take over - as every aspect of our lives, including our own safety in determined by those who can afford to pay.
Monopolies are not natural. There are only two ways that monopolies form in a free market. Either the firm is the first on the scene (first-comer advantage) or they are the only firm in a given area providing a product or service. Monopolies are prohibitively expensive to maintain for any significant period of time - unless you control all the guns or know the guy who does (government). Absent a state, a would-be monopolist would have to continually expend vast sums of resources to buy out competitors or operate at continual losses to try to run them out of business. Regulations on industries are numerous and all over the place, so I'm not sure what state regulations you're talking about. There are tens of thousands of regulations in the US federal ledger alone covering almost every conceivable kind of market transaction, and every year more are added.
I never said the current system doesn't work. It does, and I said as much; the state providing security proves it can be done. It's vastly inferior to a private solution and unethical for the reasons I mentioned, without even mentioning the economic calculation problem.
Monopolies most certainly are natural. There are many essential industries in which private companies are never the first to operate because the initial fixed costs are too high. No private company has ever created a rail network or a national grid. Any situation in which supply is sparse and a company has control over resources through exclusive supplier agreements, intellectual property rights etc. Monopolies are natural, and states have to intervene to stop them from forming. For example, here in the UK the government recently had to block a merger between O2 and Three because the result would be that one economic entity would controll too great a share of the market.
Are you kidding me? Rail networks and energy grids were created by private companies first prior to them being nationalized. I never said monopolies don't happen absent the state, so you can take that strawman and torch it. What I did say, however, is that they are unsustainable and will not last, because the costs associated with maintaining an actual monopoly are astronomical and continue to increase over time. Every regulation passed on an industry increases the costs to enter said industry, which reduces competition. Less competition = more market share for existing firms that can bear the brunt of those costs. There's no way you can argue against this; regulations increase costs, and increased costs put a downward pressure on new firms entering the marketplace, which reduces competition.
What happens if i cant afford private security? Am I not allowed justice?
What do you mean by justice? Have you ever lived in an apartment or community? When I worked private security, I contracted with HOAs, apartment complexes, and business parks. The cost of providing security was diffused among those actually using the service.
There are strict limits to what those private security firms in apartments can do. They can't, for example burst into someones private flat without good cause (thank god). Without a monopoly on power, those rights are not guaranteed by anyone. He who controls the security guard's pay check, controls what they're allowed to do. I'd rather it be democratically elected politicians, who can be ousted from power, instead of the richest person on the block
What are you talking about? Liability limits what they can do. I realize things are a little bit different in Canada, but economic pressures exist regardless of where you are. When the security guards and the company are the only ones bearing the cost of bad actions and mistakes, those security companies have to be much more mindful of what they do. To use a different example to illustrate the idea: how discerning are you when you buy a car with your money? When you know that its your money paying for something and you're responsible for all the negative externalities from your decision, are you more discerning about what you choose to do? Or less? How much more frugal are you when your resources are limited?
I don't understand the point you're making here. Security guards and police forces both have liability. If either go around breaking laws or company rules, they get fired, they go to prison (thats assuming that your neoliberal utopia has prisons).
If the a police commissioner presided over officers breaking the law, the officers and the commissioner get be replaced.
To go back to your original anecdote, I want to make two points. Firstly, the police officer wouldn't have shot her if, as is the case in the UK, he didn't have a gun. Secondly, if he shot her in an instant, without really thinking about it, I really doubt the presence of 'economic pressure' would have stopped him - its not as if that hallowed and sublime invisible hand would have descended from heaven to whip the gun from his hand. You want less gun crime? Get rid of the guns - for citizens as well as police. Your proposed solution of giving loads of people guns and factioning those people into separate private enterprises will only lead to violence.
So, in other words, people need to be coerced into doing the right thing because they can't be trusted to do the right thing on their own. And this coercion must be carried out by... drum roll other fallible people. Guns are a thing. To pretend that you could not only remove every gun from society but prevent any future instances of guns being produced is laughably absurd. Second, economic pressure - ostracism, sanctions, and retribution, among others - have a strong downward pressure on preventing bad actions. For the same reason businesses tend not to harm their customers because they want repeat business, people tend not to act like utter shit or harm others if there are consequences to their actions. Those consequences would be amplified and more numerous absent a state, increasing the opportunity costs of being a shitbag or a violent person.
And as for police and commissioners being punished for their misdeeds? Please. As I said before, there is no justice when the arbitrator is party to the dispute. Justice is incidental in the current system; they punish themselves only when they can't get away with it. Police forces have vastly less liability than a security company, and they engage in far more abuses of private property and persons than a security company could by virtue of their territorial monopoly. Again, if a security company violates its contract, they're done. Fired. If they do it enough times, no one will hire them. When's the last time a police department was fired?