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Jan. 9, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:20
591 Why there are no private police forces... as yet!
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Time Text
Good evening, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. Steph, idiots!
Just before 7 o'clock on the 9th of January, 2007.
Hope you're doing well.
Well, I'm feeling a little tired today, so I've decided to be crabby instead of entertaining.
I hope that that's not outside the bounds of what passes for civilized discourse between us now.
So, I had a post that was posted, and it was posted on my board for posting.
And it was something along the lines of this, and I'm sorry to the poster if I have incorrectly quoted the post, but it was something like this.
Oh yeah? Well, why aren't there DRO agencies out there patrolling the streets right now?
Well, I'll tell you why, my friend.
Because the DRO would not find it economically effective or efficient to patrol...
Streets. Because streets are held in common.
They're part of common property. No individual wants to pay.
That's the problem with the free rider.
There's this, there's that, there's the other.
And it went on like that.
It was a little bit more concise. Well, no shock there, I'm sure.
And I just find it astounding.
I just find it astounding.
I don't find it astounding that people do this kind of stuff.
I'm just astounded that they do it after over a year of Freedom in Radio.
There's tons of posts, tons of articles, lots of people publish stuff, lots of people written stuff.
It takes a special effort of will to hang on to these kinds of ideas when there are just so many more better ideas that are out there.
You've got to work at this.
It's like lifting weights.
You've really got to strain to hang on to this kind of economic idiocy.
It's not easy. It's not easy at all.
And coincidentally, somebody posted on the same day, and I will return to this point, they posted on the same day, The story of Lysander Spooner and the U.S. Post Office.
The U.S. Post Office, I don't know, mid-19th century, 1851 or whatever, became a monopoly.
The government is supposed to provide it, and so they put a monopoly out there.
It wasn't a monopoly, it was government postal service, and it became very expensive.
As Lysander Spooner pointed out, it cost about the same to send a letter as it did to send a sack of flour the same distance.
It was just a complete pillage of the public, as these sorts of things always and inevitably are.
So, old Lysander decided to do something that it takes a special kind of half-retarded genius and insanity to be able to do this.
I don't claim to have anything close to this.
I'm not sure whether I admire it, but it certainly has provided a valuable lesson to those of us who wish to discuss monopoly service and its provision and what happens when that service is provided as a monopoly by the state to every other possibility.
I'm so sorry about that sentence.
Please go back and resuscitate it if you feel like it.
Otherwise, let's plow on, and I'll try and be more comprehensible.
So, this Andrew Spooner poured over his well-thumbed copy of the Constitution, and if you actually do get a chance to listen to Mark Stevens' Reddit in adventuresatlegalland.com, The Constitution of No Authority by Alexander Spooner, a very good thing to listen to or to read.
So he looked over the Constitution and he said, well, yes, it does say that the federal government has to provide a post service, but it doesn't say that private citizens can't do the same thing, right?
So this should be, and of course, he wasn't dumb by any stretch of the imagination, so he knew that he was going to be in for a fight.
So he started up a postal service, took out a front-page ad at a major newspaper and began chugging along and cutting into the U.S. Post Office's revenue and reason for being.
In other words, here we have a situation that's parallel to a DRO gets formed and tries to field police officers to capture criminals in competition with state police officers.
And here, writ in a much less violent manner, is the story of what would happen.
So, of course, they tried to shut him down, and when they couldn't shut him down, he appealed like crazy, when they couldn't shut him down, They tried lowering their rates.
He just raised his rates lower.
And then finally, to make a long story short, you can read all of this either from the link on my board, freedomainradio.com forward slash B-O-A-R-D, or you can search for it in mises.org.
They finally shut him down and he was broken and financially destitute and wrecked and all this.
I mean, all the stuff that you would naturally anticipate from tangling with the infinite tentacles of the state.
Suction pads take off layers of skin until you're a quivering jelly of leftover muscle.
And this has happened countless times.
People attempting to find alternatives to the state and ending up, unless they're paying off the state, In particular ways.
This is back when I don't think you could put a tax on stamps.
I think that was probably still a little too raw from the British experience.
I'm driving on a private highway now, of course, which is expensive as hell, because we don't have to get into all the economics of it.
It's not exactly a free market solution.
It is competing with the public roads, but of course they're paying off the government.
The government then gets all the taxes without having to have all of this unionized stuff.
So it's pure gravy for the government.
And so this sort of stuff is allowed.
But when you're not paying off taxes to the government, you're just going to get creamed in a really ugly way.
So they just smashed up this kind of stuff.
There's tons of stories of this kind of stuff in the railroads, as we've talked about before.
And you can find this all over the place.
That whenever you go up against a government monopoly, you just get crushed.
They get lawyers on staff.
They control the justice system.
There's huge entrenched interests.
I mean, they just don't... Let you take away their business without going to crush you.
And of course, you can say, well, FedEx and this and that.
Well, FedEx is actually not allowed to charge less, at least the last time I checked, not allowed to charge less than, I think, double the U.S. postal rate for it.
I mean, notice you can't send letters, just a simple letter through FedEx, right?
That is not allowed.
They'll let you send larger packages.
And of course, the government themselves want to be able to send larger packages around and enjoy having that access, the same way the politicians like being able to take the 407.
They can put it on their expense accounts, right?
So for them, it's just gravy all the way around.
But you're not allowed to just start up your own post system.
You just get smashed up. Your life will get destroyed.
You might get thrown in jail. You will definitely emerge almost completely bankrupt from the interaction because legalities are expensive.
This thing went all the way to some high court.
With Lisanda Spooner, it's a big ticket item to work with.
So I'd just sort of like to throw out that the psychological process that goes on is not that people think through the issue.
What happens is they just want to defend the violence.
Exposing the gun in the room makes them uncomfortable.
And you can see this both in the dismissive air, the condescending air, the snappy air, the vaguely belligerent air.
I mean, I think it's only fair, just fundamentally, I think it's only fair to recognize that a good number of people have spent a good deal of intellectual effort trying to solve these problems.
To just sort of get up and dismissed, and I know that I do it to others, but I do it after hopefully at least a series of arguments.
But to just sort of be up and dismissed, it's like, well, it doesn't work, look at Somalia.
Well, you know, civil war.
Well, you know, no DROs, field police officers.
If it was such a great idea, they'd be around right now.
All this kind of nonsense, right?
But... People just dismiss it, and they dismiss it for very obvious psychological reasons.
They've taken the time to post it, and you can see this kind of stuff floating around quite a bit on the boards and in other areas of discussion with regards to anarcho-capitalism and other sorts of moral issues.
People just get snappy and dismissive because they can't take it.
It's a lot of pressure to really challenge your fundamental beliefs.
It's a lot of energy and work.
It's exhausting to do it.
It lands like a meteor in your life.
It disrupts or destroys all of your existing relationships.
Some it disrupts for the better, most it eliminates almost completely.
And people get that, right?
But they don't want to let it go, because there's a vanity.
And again, I don't want to sound like I'm attacking the listener today, but I just sort of want to point out, because I know that there's some frustration from people on the boards about this kind of stuff, and it's just important to know where it's coming from.
It's just important to know where it's coming from.
This has nothing to do with an argument, because this is not an argument that these types of people sort of post.
They think that they're smart, and I have no doubt that they are smart, and that they're very linguistically accomplished, and they know their stuff in a sort of limited kind of way, and deeply in a limited kind of way.
So they know their Keynesianism or whatever.
It's a kind of learning.
It's like, well... I know about the free rider problem.
I've read, you know, a paragraph or a chapter or whatever about the free rider problem.
And, you know, what they say, when you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
When you have a solution, everything looks like it falls into the problem that you're...
When you have a problem, everything looks like it fits into the solution that you're most familiar with.
So, these people will come in and they'll come through the boards and they'll come through and they'll send me emails and post stuff and all that.
And what they'll do is they'll dismiss the ideas.
And it will be peremptory and you'll get things as silly as the communist defending priests.
We had this a little while back.
This lady who's a devout communist was telling us all how wonderful priests are.
And I mean, there's just like, you can't even respect the integrity of the communism.
It just becomes a completely oppositional nature that you're dealing with.
But they'll come in and they'll think that they know a bunch of stuff.
So there's a lot of vanity.
The prickly vanity of shallow learning is something you really have to be aware of.
It can be quite a mind to step on.
And so they come in and they come in sort of storming around, throwing around terms like, well, it's completely obvious and clearly this and, you know, the free rider and the problem of the commons.
They'll throw some generic sort of words in, but they don't seem to be particularly keen on delving into the ideas at any great depth.
And when you ask them for the background reasoning behind their conclusions, they get huffy and dismissive.
And we've seen all this kind of stuff before.
But just so people who are out there who've read this and a few other poster who posted that, fantastic.
I'll give you a few passes at this sort of issue so that you get a sense of the barriers as to why there aren't DRO cops rolling around.
There's a couple of main reasons why DRO cops don't roll around outperforming the state system.
There's a couple of main reasons why DRO cops don't roll around outperforming the state system.
The first and not inconsiderable reason has nothing to do with economics.
It has nothing to do with the problem of the commons, the free rider, and all this kind of nonsense.
It really has to do with the fact that they get shot if they did so.
See, that's something that you might want to look at first before applying thick lacquer-like coats of economic reasoning to a particular issue.
If someone's lying on the ground because they've been shot, it might not be worthwhile to say that they're resting.
If you ignore the violence, it's a little hard to understand the motives.
And I've said before, you have a certain amount of challenge differentiating something like lovemaking from something like rape.
So, where there's violence involved in a particular interaction, I'm going to suggest that it's intellectually, if not to say morally, responsible.
To maybe take a look at the violence first before spinning theories about why human beings are doing stuff.
If you see a bunch of men in a dictatorship shuffling along in the cold in like minus 20 degrees with T-shirts and shorts on and clapping their hands and they got sores and so on.
And there's a bunch of guys herding them with machine guns and dogs.
Saying that they're out for economically effective and efficient walkies might not be the most rational, if not to say compassionate, approach to the problem.
If you don't see the guns pointed at people, it's a little hard to come up with anything vaguely intelligent about what is going on in the interaction.
Wow, that's really nice.
I guess that guy's just given that guy his wallet.
Boy, isn't that nice.
Wow, he must really care about people.
Gun? Well, sure, there's a gun, but what has that got to do with anything?
This is charity. It's a gift.
It's beautiful. Oh, I'm all touched.
I'm verklipped. Kodak moment.
So, in general, I would say start with the guns, the swords, the blades, the rocks, the prisons.
Start with that kind of stuff.
I mean, if you have some questions or doubts about, say, why was there no science?
Why was there no science in the Middle Ages?
I wonder if it was because people were just kind of retarded.
Stupid. They couldn't figure out things.
The human mind went through some vast evolutionary leap forward around the 16th century.
Maybe the brain cells split one extra time.
They could suddenly figure it all out.
Or maybe, maybe, maybe there was something in the water they were drinking that made them anti-scientific.
I wish we could take some of that medieval water to test that.
That'd be great. Really clear things up.
All of those things may be the case, but I would say that that might be a bit of overkill, because the explanation as to why there was no science in the Middle Ages, really not that hard to figure out.
I mean, it's almost impossible to figure out if you don't notice this sort of central basic fact.
If you do notice it, then it's pretty easy.
I mean, the major reason there was no science in the Middle Ages is because you got tortured and killed for being a scientist.
It's not really that complicated.
Do you watch the movie Prison Break or the series Prison Break and go, why don't they just ask to leave?
Just walk out.
There must be some economically efficient reason why they're all staying in those cells.
They must really like getting buggered.
They should just ask to leave.
Well, there must be some economic reason why they don't ask to leave.
Maybe they're afraid of getting jobs, or maybe they like the security of prison, and maybe there's some good reason why they're all in prison.
If you don't notice the truncheons, clubs, rifles, electric wires, guard dogs, and the brutality of the jailers, and arbitrariness of the entire situation, it's probably a little hard to figure out a prison.
If you can't see any locks for whatever reason, right?
Because you're enslaved, I mean, basically by your blindness, right?
If you can't see the prison, it's because you are a prison.
I mean, that's the basic nature of projection.
Everyone around me gets so angry.
Well, maybe you're really angry in provoking them.
Anyway, that's not to do with this particular question, but...
So the most important reason as to why there aren't DROs...
And in particular, why DROs don't offer to protect your property is because they get shot for doing so.
If you start to set up your own police force, you're not going to get very far, frankly.
You're going to get gunned down at some point.
You're going to get a cease and desist order.
And if you don't, you're going to, well, you know.
But let's say you could overcome that.
Let's say that you were willing to Set up your own DRO Guardian Angels dudes and dudettes and go around to roaming the neighborhoods doing whatever it would take to be safe.
Well, of course, that's not what is required for people to be safe.
Policemen roaming around don't do that much.
The way that you deal with crime is not by catching people in the act, by happening upon them when they're climbing out of somebody's basement with a duffel bag of CDs because they don't have high-speed internet or something.
Then you want to make sure that you want to identify the thumbprint on your notebook to make it work or whatever, retina scans to start your television.
Who knows, right? But there's lots of things that you could do, but right now there's almost no economic incentive to do so.
And the economic incentive is not because of the problem of the commons, not because the theoretical free rider problem, but the fact that there are guns pointed at everyone.
That's, again, not to point out the obvious, but hey, that's what I do.
But let's say you could. You could get some sort of police force going, and maybe that was the most effective thing to do.
The problem of crime is much, much more around dealing with issues around childhood, which DROs, as I've written in articles, would be good at doing.
It's about getting rid of things like the war on drugs.
It's about getting rid of the draft.
It's about getting rid of taxation.
All these kinds of things have a lot to do.
It's about making people responsible for the consequences of their own behavior, which is what the government is very good at obscuring for people.
And so all of these aspects are involved in crime and many, many others, but it's not about sending the flatfoots around to peek in people's windows and ask if everything's everything all right.
So, but let's say that you did.
Let's say that you, you know, maybe I'm wrong about all of this and the flatfoots marching around with their batons is the best way to deal with crime.
Well, fine. What happens then?
Well, the DRO is going to catch some criminal through some super special capitalist methodology.
They're going to catch this criminal. And then what's going to happen?
Well, they're going to have to turn that criminal over to the cops.
Oh, oh, how sad that would be after all that work.
He turned the criminal over to La Cap-O-Ramas, and they get into the nonsensical, ridiculous, hurly-burly, once more Kafkaesque world of the modern justice system, where they're back out on the street, and it takes 17 arrests to finally go to jail in the modern system when you're younger.
So there's going to be all this nonsense going on.
So basically, you're going to spend a huge amount of time and effort patrolling public streets, Without really any powers, you won't be able to carry a gun, because that's illegal, at least most places, and you won't have the powers of arrest, and even if you do arrest, you'll then have to turn them over to a cop, and the cop's going to say, well, what evidence do you have?
And I saw him, and it's like, well, that's hearsay, and so on, as the cop's evidence counts, right?
Yours doesn't really, compared to.
So, that kind of stuff isn't going to work.
You just hand it over, and they'll just get released, so what's the point of that?
Here's another reason why TROs don't send people around, even if all the other ones were perfectly valid.
Well, stupid state laws have made crime, you know, pretty vicious.
Particularly the war on drugs and the other sorts of gambling and prostitution and so on.
All of the other vices have been made so violent because the dumbass government Has ended up making violence so profitable that's all people want to do.
So that's another good reason why DRO protection agencies don't spontaneously arrive.
This is the kind of hamstringing that occurs constantly and consistently when you get a state monopoly coming into play, coming into power.
This is the kind of nonsense that just goes on perpetually.
And it's gruesome. And the amount of human creativity that is smashed by the interference of these brutes, these assholes in blue and green, is unimaginable.
We could have had the scientific method 100,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago.
We could be traveling through time.
We could be living on distant planets.
We could be doing just so many wonderful things.
But the gun, the sword, the torture, the burning, always, always, always and forever crushes down human beings to mere atoms of their former selves.
And if you can't see that, then you're going to make up a whole bunch of bullshit.
...about what's really going on in the world.
So, there's so many reasons as to why there's no DRO stuff.
That's why it takes a leap of logic and, to some degree, imagination.
I mean, the people who have trouble with anarchy are also people not just who have problems with logic and evidence, but also people who have problems with imagination and trust of virtue, which means, of course, that they don't trust themselves and they can't picture themselves living in a free society.
That's their fundamental opposition.
And, of course, When you come into contact with somebody really smart, and this happens for some people when they listen to the podcast, it also happens with me when I read other people and listen to other people as well, it's a bit of a shock, right?
I mean, we all think we're pretty bright.
And then you come into contact with somebody who's really bright, and it's just like, ooh, ooh, I'm getting a tan.
Ooh, ooh, wait, no, it's a burn.
There's a certain amount of vanity that gets punctured, and I think that's a very good and healthy thing to go through.
You know, you've always got to keep the false self down a little bit, although I shouldn't say that.
My false self doesn't tweak me too much anymore.
I think he's enjoying the rest, too.
Anyway, so I hope that that's helpful.
I got some donations today.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Oh, my brother, so beautiful!
Now that's a Kodak moment.
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