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Feb. 27, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:46
117 Criminals Part 2: The Police
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Time Text
Good afternoon everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is 5.37 p.m.
on the 27th of February 2006.
I hope you're doing well.
This is Criminals Part 2 and I guess it's a sort of subtitle would be validly postulated thusly which would be Yeah, who really puts you in danger?
Who's really scary?
That is a sort of interesting question for me.
And we hear a lot of talk about criminals.
If you're an anarchist or libertarian and you talk about a reduction in the size of government, the first thing that you always hear, except for the wildly imaginative, well, how would we have roads, man?
The objection, or the question, or the criticism, or the problem, or the comment, or the rebuttal, or the rejection, or whatever you want to call it, of... Well, but who's going to protect us from criminals?
And I just can't tell you how silly I find this.
And so I'd like to spend this afternoon just talking about this ridiculous notion called, let's give people lots of violence to protect us from people who might use violence.
Now the one thing that's basically true, and I'm not even going to try and lead up to these premises, I'm just going to And the one thing that is just basically, obviously, logically true is that I can protect myself against criminals.
I can move.
I can get a guard dog.
I can put a gun in my night table.
I can get an alarm system.
I can hire a security guard.
I can live in a bunker.
I can build a safe room in my basement.
There's lots and lots and lots of things that I can do to protect myself against criminals.
And that's kind of important when it comes to looking at the who's your daddy question of who's actually threatening you.
So in the perfect world, and I'm not sure exactly I understand why people think this, maybe they've just seen too one too many Law & Order episodes where they see these rugged people with no lives whose sole interest is to get their man and to find ways to bypass the The sad legal complexities of the system so that they can just put away the people they damn well know are guilty.
But I don't know if it's just propaganda or the way we're all frightened of cops so we tend to cleave to their image even within our minds.
But the idea that the government exists to protect us from criminals and that we face No threat, if the government does protect us from criminals, is completely mad.
It's completely contrary to the evidence that we see in the world, and it's completely contrary to logic, to history, to experience, to everything.
So, I mean, it is a pretty powerful and basic level of propaganda that we're dealing with here.
And so I'll just sort of run through some of the arguments against why criminals should be your number one fear.
Now, of course, this is all pretty obvious and rhetorical, but I still think useful, so I'll just run through them fairly quickly.
So, number one, can a criminal gang put you through the draft?
Can they force you to go and fight for fight and die for their cause?
No.
Can a criminal gang take 50-60% of your income and if you refuse, they will incarcerate you in a house with other violent people or with violent people who will rape you and beat you up and steal your food and make your life a living hell?
Well, no.
Can criminals regulate you with hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of regulations, none of which can be ever in aggregate or in aggregate.
They can't be solved.
They can't be figured out.
You're always going to be able to get nailed for something.
Well, no.
Do criminals have nuclear weapons?
Well, naturally, no.
Can criminals force you to hand over your children for six hours a day while those criminals tell you how wonderful the Mafia is, and how wonderful crime is, and how there's nothing better that they could do than to live a life of crime?
And do they teach them all about how good is evil, black is white, up is down, and violence breeds peace?
Well, no.
Really, of course not.
Can criminals station other criminals overseas where they will rob and cheat and steal and rape and murder and provoke all sorts of hatred against your entire community such that people are willing to come and suicide bomb themselves into oblivion in order to pay you back?
Well, not really, no.
Can criminals take from you 15% of your income in return for some maybe, maybe, maybe promise down the road that some other generation is going to take care of you?
Don't worry about it.
Just give us the money and don't worry your pretty little head about it.
Well, of course not.
Criminals can't institute Social Security.
So, the idea that criminals are the problem It's ridiculous!
As I've mentioned before, a hundred and seventy million.
A million people murdered by governments in the 20th century.
How many people do you think were killed by criminals?
I mean private criminals?
I'm guessing, gotta be less than a million, probably around 500,000.
And, of course, the vast majority of those are people killed by criminal gangs whose sole source of livelihood and power is the fact that the state makes things illegal, gambling, drugs, and prostitution.
So let's just cut that down by half.
250,000 to 500,000 people murdered by criminals in the entire 20th century.
170 million, 250,000 to half a million.
So it's 0.035% or something like that.
It's a tiny number, even if we make it as high as humanly possible, by imagining that all of those murderers were not committed by people raised in the public school system, who had the boom and bust cycle of government depressions, who didn't lose their job because of government regulations, who, you know, who knows, right?
Who weren't killed by people in turf wars for gangs and so on.
So, you know, when you're looking at balancing the threats in your life, even if we just talk about the murder, and even if we forget about the theft and the regulations and the Kidnapping of your children for six to eight hours a day for propaganda for 15 years or 20 years.
Can you really look at that situation and say, you know, the really dangerous thing here is the criminals.
The criminals are what we really need to worry about.
I gotta tell you, I really don't think so.
I really don't think that criminals are the issue here.
If we get rid of the crimes that are committed based on skewed government incentives, based on the destructive effects of government education, based on the virtual subsidizing of organized crime that occurs through state policies, if we just get rid of that group, a crime is virtually non-existent.
I grew up in a bad neighborhood.
I took care of myself.
I made sure that I didn't cross the guys who were bad.
Or if I did cross them accidentally, I just apologized.
Or would do whatever it was that they wanted to avoid a beating.
I've never, other than in my home, I've never been beaten up or hit in my life.
It's unthinkable.
I've never been in a fight.
I've never had anything stolen from me, except completely minor things where it was mostly my fault anyway.
So the idea that I've got to run into the arms of an all-powerful state to save me from criminals is lunatic.
I mean, I suffer far more at the hands of the state than I ever will at the hands of criminals.
I don't care how many of them there are.
Criminals, you see, criminals are localized.
You got some gang that operates out of, I don't know, Montreal, and you run afoul of them, move to Vancouver.
You got the gang in Vancouver, move to Nova Scotia.
Move to Newfoundland.
Heck, move to the other side of town.
They're not going to bother chasing you.
And that's if you run afoul of them.
If they're just in your neighborhood, just move.
Get a guide dog.
Put some bars in your window.
Get video cameras.
I mean, it's just funny to me that people are fussed about criminals when they're paying 50% of their income to a gang of thugs who have a gun to their neck.
Oh, okay.
I guess half of my life goes down the stinking toilet of state corruption and waste.
My formative 14 years of intellectual development were crushed by a mind-bendingly dull and repetitive and maddeningly stupid state education.
They keep changing the tax laws.
What little I get to take home goes on property taxes and 15% up here on sales taxes and gas taxes and liquor taxes.
And I'm worried about somebody picking my pocket?
I'm telling you, it's completely mad.
I'm sorry, I just think that's too funny for words.
Now, I've talked about this on my blog, but I'll mention it here too.
What has the public sector done versus the private sector to protect us from crime?
Well, the public sector, of course, passes all these regulations and laws which really subsidize criminals.
It puts people into these public school educational systems that turn your brain just into agonized atoms.
And they provide all of these perverse incentives for single moms to have kids.
And unemployment insurance for people who don't work, so you get depression, and you get anger, and you get frustration, and you get entitlement, and you get all this kind of stuff.
So, I mean, basically the state is as to criminals as some idiot is to a wasp's nest, sort of poking it and pouring sand down it and so on.
So, the state is actively engaged in inflaming criminal activity.
Because, of course, if there was no criminal activity, then you We'd sort of pretty quickly figure out that the level of taxation that you were undergoing was completely ridiculous.
So the state is very much keen on getting criminal activity going, and when criminal activity is going and does prey upon people, oh, they do nothing.
They do absolutely nothing whatsoever.
The government has no incentive to investigate the theft of your television.
I mean, it's ridiculous!
What conceivable benefit would they have for that?
Oh, we'll put Officer Jones on the case right away and he'll work night and day to go and get your television and bring it back to you?
How does that benefit them?
I mean, imagine, so I put Officer Jones on going to get your television set, versus, oh, you know what I could do?
I could put Officer Jones on trying to hunt down some grow-up drug dealers in Toronto, and we get to steal their house from these grow-up dealers, and we get to throw them in jail, and we get to sell the house on the free market.
That's pretty good to me.
So, on one situation, you have Officer Jones nicely and diligently going to get your television back, hands it to you and says, well, that was great.
I just couldn't feel more satisfied from an economic standpoint.
And on the other side of things, you have Officer Jones can go and bust some grow-up in some suburban neighborhood and they can sell that house for $350,000.
They seize it and they sell it.
I mean, it's just too funny.
What do you think is going to happen?
I mean, this is not even counting things like the seizure capacities that they have for property that's even suspected of being used in drug operations.
This is not, you know, they're going to just go and grab stuff from people who haven't paid their taxes.
I mean, what is a cop going to want to do?
Let's say that your television set has been stolen by the Hell's Angels.
I mean, what's the cop gonna wanna do?
What would you wanna do if you were a cop?
Ah, you know what I'm gonna do with my day?
I'm gonna get up.
I'm going to put on 99 pounds of Kevlar, I'm going to grab a shotgun, and I'm going to go pointing it around a bunch of lunatic psycho hell's angels drug dealing mad jobs, and I'm going to get my frickin' head blown off, I'm going to never see my wife and kids again, or I'm going to spend my entire life in a wheelchair to get your TV back.
Well, it's not going to happen.
I'm telling you, it's really not.
What you're going to want to do if you're a police officer is you're going to want to get up, you're going to want to do some paperwork, and of course 60-70% of cop's time is spent in paperwork, because it's pretty safe.
You get some coffee, you can josh with people, it's nice.
And then you're going to want to go and find the most peaceful, non-gang-related drug operation that you can find.
with some couple of hippies who are subsidizing their lifestyle by selling dime bags out of the back of their Nova, and you're going to want to kick their door in, knowing for sure that they're not armed, and you're going to want to drag these scruffy, mangy, bearded and tie-dyed losers off to prison, and then sell their house and make some money.
I mean, it's a pretty relaxing day's work.
You get to feel like a big hero because you get to go in and take down a couple of super-annuated hippies.
You get to sell their house.
I mean, that's a pretty relaxing day and a pretty profitable day, too.
I mean, as opposed to going deep into the violent underworld to get your TV back when they're going to get wounded or shot.
And, you know, it's dangerous!
And they're not going to make any money.
So, I'm sorry.
I just find this stuff very funny.
Oh, I mean, I know we see this on TV or, you know, you watch the lethal weapon movies where it's like, we're gonna take down these drug gangs and we're gonna, oh, go into those ships in the dark with our guns pulled and we're gonna pull these guys down and we're gonna do... I mean, this is just fantasy camp.
People don't work that way.
If they did, then communism would have worked beautifully.
People don't work that way at all.
And this isn't even counting bribery.
I mean, my God!
Have you not read the papers?
If you think that the police are there to protect you?
Oh, it's lunatic!
It's absolutely lunatic to think!
On the downside, you know, you can go and grab these ridiculous unarmed hippies and drag them off to jail and call yourself a hero and get a promotion and get yourself a bonus and blah blah blah, right?
Or some bright spark, some new guy comes along and says, Hey, you know what?
I know where the Hell's Angels are!
Let's go and get rid of them!
And everyone looks up like, Are you crazy?
Not only is it going to be horribly dangerous, and they're going to be booby-trapped, and they're going to be tipped off, and they're going to be gone anyway, because someone sure as hell is brought out of this precinct, even if it's only one person.
That's all it takes.
So we're not going to get anything.
Things are going to be booby-trapped.
We're going to get injured.
We're not going to get any money out of it.
We're not going to be tough guys.
It's going to be ridiculous.
And also, you know...
But we got a couple of envelopes here with your name on it, with a whole whack load of unmarked bills, that kind of say, maybe we don't mess with the Hells Angels.
So, I mean, this is just ridiculous!
So not only, if you go after the Hells Angels as a policeman, not only are you going to get yourself killed, or maimed, or mutilated, or turned into a paraplegic, or some godforsaken thing, But your income's also going to drop by half.
And the half that you are making is kind of like unmarked bills that you don't have to pay tax on.
I mean, what do you think is going to happen?
I'm sorry.
Oh man, it's just too funny.
I don't know how people are so narcissistic that they think people are going to make these decisions for them like, Yes ma'am, I'm going to go right after into the nest of hell's angels with their bazookas and their booby traps and their pistols.
I'm gonna go straight in there and get your TV back, man, because I live for you.
I have no self-interest of my own whatsoever.
All I do is get up and think, how can I, as an empty shell of social conformity and propaganda, serve the public good the best way that I can, regardless of my own interests?
I mean, these people don't exist.
This is like the idea of the noble cop who's interested in protecting the citizens.
It's like the idea of that sort of piston-armed noble Soviet worker that you see in these ridiculous Art Deco posters from the 1930s.
You know, these burly armed women, these Rosie the Riveter, these all-I-wanna-do-is-help-my-government-by-golly-by-gosh.
I mean, these people don't exist.
They're kind of like you and me.
I mean, okay, with a monopoly of violence and heavily corrupted, but in general, as economic agents, they're kind of like you and me.
Oh, I mean, I could go on, but I think that I may end up having more fun than my listeners.
I'm just sorry.
I just think it's the funniest thing in the world, the idea that we have to worry about criminals, so let's have the police to save us from them.
I mean, it's just too funny.
Oh, dear, oh, dear.
So, you know, how would this look?
I'm not going to get into the whole private police force thing.
I've dealt about it with DROs, so I'm just touching it briefly here.
But, you know, what has the private sector done to help prevention?
Prevention is much better than cure in crime, as in medicine, as in most things in life.
So what has the private sector done?
Well, of course, they've come up with wonderful little things called video cameras.
They've also got those annoying tags that the people you buy your shirts from always refuse to take off, so you have to go back and get them to unclip them, the ones with the dyes.
They've got those clips that go onto clothing, which then, when you walk out of a store, they beep, beep, beep, no matter how many times they put them through.
Actually, I shouldn't say that.
That's too cynical.
They actually work very well.
So, they do that.
They have tracking devices built into cars.
They have credit cards, ATM machines, ATM cards, so that you don't have to carry cash, so it's much harder for you to have things stolen from you.
I mean, you could go on and on, but what the private sector has done in terms of preventing crime is just absolutely enormous.
I mean, you haven't seen the police coming along and saying, hey, let's wire in some security system to your house with a direct pipeline to police headquarters.
No, that's like alarm force.
That's like the private security agencies.
They're the ones who do that.
I mean, the police haven't come up with any of this nonsense, and of course not.
Sorry, just one thing about the Hells Angels, too.
A friend of mine, his brother got his car stolen, and it was a beautiful car.
And he went to the police, and the police basically did nothing.
So this guy hired someone to sort of track it down.
He contacted the car company.
They activated a remote sensor.
And he finally, through his own footwork and working with the company who built the car, he tracked down to where the car actually was within a half a block radius.
The car, he actually knew where it was and he called the cops.
And he said, I know where my car is.
Please go and get it for me.
And they wouldn't.
Oh, we'll get right on that.
We'll get back to you.
And then, of course, nobody was around.
I mean, they don't want to go in there.
I mean, if they're not being paid off, they're going to get shot.
Or they're going to get injured.
Or it's going to be... They're going to end up busting someone who's paying off some other cop that they don't know about.
I mean, remember, there's this whole ecosystem of bribery that goes on in the underworld with cops.
If you screw up some other cop's income, holy crap, you're in for it!
You're just going to get the crap kicked out of you, or you're going to get somebody not watching your back on patrol.
So, when it comes to busting criminals, maybe everyone in this precinct that this guy called was totally clean.
Let's take the fantasy camp and imagine that's the case.
But then, you know, they don't know who these car thieves are paying off in some other precinct, so they go and bust those guys without Checking it out, I mean, they're going to get wrecked, and they're going to get really shunned, and bad things are going to happen.
So I just think that's amazing.
I mean, in the private sector, they even have these things which let you track your car.
And this friend of mine's brother, he tracked down his car and phoned the cops and says, it's here.
I've got the confirmation.
Go and get my car.
It'll take you five minutes to find it.
We'll have to fill out some paperwork.
There are procedures for these kinds of things.
I'll have to check with my sergeant.
My partner is off today.
And of course all they're doing is they're hoping that it's going to be gone if they do end up ever being forced to go and look.
You have these Consumer Reports guys who go and nag Walmart for not returning kitty litter quickly enough, or efficiently enough, or allowing that to happen.
You don't see Consumer Reports with, like, I phoned the cops and told them where my stolen car was and they didn't lift a goddamn finger.
Well, of course not!
Who wants to piss off the cops?
That's a great way to get yourself audited and roughed up.
So back to the private sector.
So the private sector does a heck of a lot to deal with this issue of prevention rather than cure, and the entire reason that capitalism has survived to some degree is that what's called shrinkage in the retail industry, which is just stuff mysteriously vanishing,
That that stuff has been to some degree eliminated, or at least largely reduced relative to what it used to be, based on the fact that the video cameras, you've got more sophisticated surveillance systems, you've got those electronic alarms that go off, you're getting these RFID tags which are going to be able to track things to much greater degrees of accuracy.
You also have much less stock on hand.
If you're sort of just-in-time delivery, or this idea that Walmart I think Pioneer that when something is scanned out in order goes to the deliverer to come and get a new one, means that you have to have much less floating inventory, much less stuff in the warehouse, which is going to diminish people's capacity to steal it.
I mean, there's a bajillion zillion things that the private sector has done to try and reduce or eliminate the problems of crime.
And what has the public sector done?
Oh, it's done sweet, deadly squat.
It's done absolutely nothing to reduce the incidence of crime.
So the idea to me that you're going to go to the cops to protect you versus the private sector is just deranged.
I mean, this is people who've lived in this world of Hill Street Blues and just have no connection with any kind of reality that's going on around them.
So, you know, how's it going to work in the private sector?
Well, in the private sector, of course, there's lots of things that you can do much more proactively to make sure things don't get stolen.
So, for instance, you could build an iPod with a thumbprint recognizer.
The reasons why this hasn't been done are complicated, and I'm going to have to get into them right now.
Mostly because insurance companies don't find it valuable to insure things like that, and the paperwork is too ridiculous because they're basically quasi-state agencies.
These days, in Canada for sure, and I also suspect in the United States as well.
So, you could have that.
So, if somebody steals your iPod, it's like, well, sucks to be you.
You can't use it.
Because you don't have, unless you steal my thumb too, which is probably a little bit gross for most people.
So, you can do this with a lot of things, right?
So, there are now cars which start with biometric readouts.
Well, of course, that's going to make it that much harder for people to steal these things.
If you can't operate it unless you actually have the ownership of it, then it's kind of like passwords on your websites, right?
It's one of the basic things that companies do.
And, of course, my car has this great car alarm system.
It was not invented by the cops.
It was invented by, you know, the nice Swedes at Volvo.
So, the private sector is going to put these sort of tags on things that make only the person who has authorization to use this thing use it.
And that's one of the ways that they're going to deal with crime.
They're going to find ways to lock down physical locations.
They are going to find ways to figure out how best to prevent people from entering into a life of crime.
This is all stuff that DROs are very interested in and that private insurance companies would be very interested in.
And, you know, the whole point is to get it down, really to get crime down, to become such an unproductive endeavor that only the odd sociopath's really going to be interested.
And I gotta tell you, like, who cares?
Who cares?
So let's say that you get crime down to five or ten percent what it is today, and I have no doubt whatsoever that within a free market anarchistic capitalistic system, crime would just be so ridiculously unprofitable that nobody would do it.
It would be like war.
I mean, it's just ridiculous waste of... If you've got to actually pay for it yourself rather than have it subsidized by someone else, Through regulations or direct subsidies like welfare, you're not going to do it.
So when jobs are plentiful, and you get really well paid, and drugs are illegal, prostitution and gambling are illegal, and you don't get welfare, and blah blah blah, then of course it's going to be that much more cost effective to get a job, even a low-rent job, than it is going to be to try and pursue a life of crime.
So that's really where we want to get to.
So we make crime much less of an incentive.
And of course, when crime becomes much less of an incentive, then there's much less profit in it.
When there's less profit in it, you don't get criminals corrupting the police force as you do at the moment, where they'll just pay people off to not arrest them.
I mean, that's sort of the basic idea, right?
You're either going to pay cops so much that corrupt people are going to become cops, or you pay them little enough and therefore the only people who are going to really flourish as cops are those who are taking bribes on the side.
So there's just no way that the public sector is ever going to be able to protect you from criminals.
They're just going to foster them and And feed them, and it's going to be up to the private sector, as always, to come up with the solutions to crime.
And so, once you change the fundamental incentives around crime, you end up with a situation where people don't want to be criminals.
It's just not worth it.
It's not practical.
You've got a DRO system constantly monitoring people in terms of their ability or desire to keep their commitments.
You have almost no taxation.
You have high wages, cheap living expenses, and it's just only the odd, completely sadistic, messed-up sociopath is ever going to be interested in pursuing a life of crime.
And frankly, who cares?
It'll catch up with them.
The DRO will pick them off pretty quickly.
It's not something that's a big enough social issue that people are going to create an entire government for.
I mean, talk about swatting a fly with an atom bomb.
I mean, it's lunatic!
I think, to some degree, people have this, and I know I've called them anal before, and I apologize, but I mean it.
People have this idea that if the world can't be perfect, if you can't eliminate crime completely, if you can't create a situation of pure, nirvanic paradise, then you've got to have a police force.
And I just think that's silly.
I just think that's completely ridiculous.
Yeah, there's always going to be criminals.
There's always going to be sadists.
I don't know if they're genetic.
I don't know if they're bred through circumstances.
I don't know if they just choose to become evil.
There are always going to be sadists.
And so, the last thing you want to do is to create a situation, like a class of people, where sadism can run rampant, like the police force, and be thoroughly protected.
It's the same argument that you make against the government, and the existence of the government in general.
If sadism is a very minor problem, then you don't need a police force.
If sadism is a major problem, then you sure as hell cannot have a police force, because where the hell are all the sadists going to end up?
As the boys in blue, of course!
So if you want people who want to get away with stuff and live above the law and blah blah blah and get something for nothing, if that's not a big problem, then to hell with it.
You don't need a state or a police force.
And if it is a big problem, you sure as hell can't have these things, because that's exactly where these people are going to end up.
Cops are completely above the law.
I mean, everybody knows that.
When was the last time a cop went to jail?
It never happens.
Cops get suspended without pay for two days, or suspended with pay for two months.
Even when they're being investigated for the most egregious crimes, like rape, and theft, and corruption, intimidation, entrapment, they still have their jobs.
It's amazing.
You try being a therapist, who is accused of sexually molesting a patient, and see if you can continue to practice.
Not so much, and nobody funds you either.
But if you're a cop, it's a different planet, right?
I mean, they're completely above the law.
And I also remember seeing, I think it was a 60 Minutes, where they were investigating a mafioso, somewhere in New Jersey, to take a cliched geographical location.
I think it was New Jersey.
And they're interviewing this guy, and he was like, yeah, I was like a hitman for a number of years, and then I became this, and then I became that.
And then, you know, on the advice of some friends, I was a cop for about, I think, seven or eight years, and then I went back into the life of organized crime.
I just thought that was fantastic!
What a revealing sentiment!
What a revealing fact to hear that this guy is a criminal who can perfectly contentedly deal with life inside of the police force.
And there's no cultural thing that says, oh my god, you simply can't be in here because we're good guys and you're obviously a mafia guy.
Or even if they don't know he's a mafia guy, the fact that he's a paid murderer might have something to do with this fact that they might, you know, sort of notice that he wasn't exactly one of them.
So, I think that it's just kind of a slavish, pathetic, you know, the sheep are so broken they worship the shepherd kind of thing that goes on with cops.
And there is also the lunacy of cop shows, right, which never show the fact that cops have no clue what they're doing.
No clue whatsoever.
I mean, remember this Washington sniper, right?
I mean, they didn't have a clue what they were doing.
They missed every single conceivable lead until somebody finally phoned and said, he's in the car over there!
Go and get him!
Or, I'm calling the papers.
And then they finally went and dragged him.
I mean, what do they care, right?
They're not at risk.
So with TV shows, you see this general pattern that really messes up people's heads about what is involved in police work.
And the general pattern is this, that you see You see a criminal committing a crime and then that same criminal is brought into the police and so you know that the criminal did the crime and now it's just a matter of the police connecting the dots and getting everything that they need to.
And you have exactly the same cliche over and over again in cop shows.
I haven't watched them in years because it just got too grindingly repetitive.
Dull.
You've got this whole thing where some sleazy guy is in a junkyard and they're looking for some information and the guy says, well I don't got no information, copper!
And they say, oh, yeah, well, maybe let's check your permits.
Let's see if your permits are really up to scratch.
Let's see if you're whatever, whatever.
Are you in taxes?
And it's like, oh, okay.
Yeah, he's over there.
That guy, the guy you want.
And so of course, this is funny too, right?
Because it justifies the use of regulations and complete brutality.
People don't want to talk to you.
And therefore you'll just intimidate them with licenses and registrations and audits and taxes and so on.
As if, you know, those things are then good, right?
Because without those things, we wouldn't be able to catch criminals.
So, yes, absolutely, regulate the hell out of my hide just so you can go and catch some scuzzball.
But these cop shows don't show the fact that cops are unmotivated to solve crimes that they're not going to profit from.
They're unmotivated to solve crimes.
They're negatively motivated to solve crimes that they're being paid not to solve through bribery.
And even if they are, for some magical reason, completely obsessed with solving a particular crime, they have no clue what's going on.
I mean, who's going to talk to a cop?
They're not going to have people in the underworld.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
They don't know what they're doing.
So the idea that cops are sort of an efficient way of dealing with the aftermath of crime is just kind of a joke.
And what we really need to do is to forget about the criminals.
The criminals aren't the issue.
The state is the criminal.
War is the issue.
The corruption of the police force is the issue.
The fact that cops don't ever say anything like, hey, I wonder if this is a legal law.
Let's say the taxes in Canada just went up another, oh, I don't know, 15%.
Would the cops say, you know, I think that's too much.
I'm not going to enforce that law.
Well, of course not.
They're just paid thugs.
They'll just do whatever the hell they're told to.
Oh, go collect these taxes.
Oh, if this guy didn't pay his taxes, you go hold a gun to his neck.
They don't do any of that stuff at all.
They never question the laws that they're given.
I don't think I've ever seen or heard of a single cop who has ever said, you know, I quit the police force because I really didn't feel comfortable enforcing that law.
No, there's nothing like that whatsoever.
These are not moral agents.
They're just people who are paid to point guns at people.
They're like the army.
In fact, in my view, they're worse than the army.
They're more cowardly than the army, because at least the army is dealing with people that, at some vague nominal level, might be able to fight back.
But the cops never do that.
When was the last time you heard of a gun battle between the cops and the hell's angels?
I mean, up here, the cops descended upon some guy's grow-up, and he shot four of them.
Oh my god, you should have seen the shock and horror!
Because some drug dealer had actually fought back.
Oh my god, he was the worst guy in the world.
It's unbelievable.
You've got hundreds of thousands of these people stuffed in these gulags with these unbelievably wretched jail conditions, and the cops do that no problem.
You know, the cops are like, oh, marijuana's illegal?
Great, I'll go shoot people who resist me arresting them for marijuana possession.
Oh, marijuana's legal tomorrow?
Okay, well I won't do it.
Oh, you're gonna make it illegal again the day after that?
Okay, I'll go back to shooting people.
I mean, they're just evil little robots that do whatever the politicians tell them to.
They don't question laws.
They don't say, well, I don't really think that the Patriot Act is a good idea.
I don't feel comfortable really going into people's houses without a search warrant and searching through all their stuff and then returning it back the way it was without telling them.
I don't really feel comfortable arresting people and holding them without trial and without access to a family or lawyers.
I don't really feel comfortable doing that, so I'm not going to do it.
No, cops never say that!
So the idea that we're going to go to these evil little robots for protection from the odd criminal, I just think it's crazy.
It's like, oh, my hand's itchy.
I think I'm going to cut it off.
Well, I've solved the problem now.
I'm bleeding to death.
But damn it, I don't feel that itch anymore.
Isn't that great?
So, I'm sorry.
I think I've had more fun in this part.
I just find it so ridiculous, this idea.
You know, I can sort of understand to some degree that in the international sphere with the history of war that we've seen and the fact that few of us under the age of, I don't know, 60 or 70 have any real direct experience of war.
Probably 70 or 80 now.
But, I mean, we all have had stuff stolen from us.
We all know how useless cops are.
I mean, they're as useless as a principal when it comes to figuring out, like in school, when it comes to figuring out who's responsible for water, who does what, and how to solve it in a just manner.
I mean, it's a joke.
They'll tail you after you for speeding because it makes them money.
But they're not going to go and break down the mafia.
They're not going to go and do this, that, and the other.
They might get paid informants to rat on people and so on, but that's just to make busy work and give good fodder for the press.
But, I mean, they know where the Mafia is located.
They know exactly where they are.
They know exactly where the centers of drug production are.
But they're not going to go in there guns blazing because, gosh, don't you know, people might be guns blazing right back.
And that's not really what a cop is that interested in.
What he's interested in is dragging some old granny onto her lawn for not paying her wildly increased property taxes, because he doesn't really have much to worry from old granny.
So thanks so much for listening.
I hope that this helps at least explain my perspective of the fabulous cats in blue.
But do let me know what you think, as always.
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