by Scott Lazarowitz Reason and Jest
Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: Dismantle the Totalitarian Monster and Take Control Over Your Own Lives
Murray Rothbard's book, Power and Market, contains a section that promotes a free-market in defense and is republished on LRC, titled, No More Military Socialism.
I'm no Murray Rothbard of course, but I would like to submit a variation on that theme: No More Police Socialism. It is increasingly frustrating that our society continues to support such a scheme, despite its incompetence, its criminality and its horrors.
As I have stated here several times now, there really is no legitimate need to allow a government to monopolize community policing and security.
For those who want a thorough overview of what police socialism is, please check out this terrific article by Anthony Gregory.
But my article here is not intended to provide economic differences between police socialism and free markets, just to present a general case for abolishing the self-serving government police monopoly.
So the way I see it, theoretically, police or "law enforcement" socialism is when government bureaucrats possess the ownership of the means of production and provision of community policing and security while outlawing (at least implicitly) any competing agencies to do the same.
But a more honest assessment of police socialism is this: The people of a community already possess or could possess the means of providing their own security themselves. Those interested in doing so already have the natural right to establish private policing firms or voluntary groups and have a right to possess whatever armaments they wish to carry out such endeavors.
But in the current situation of police socialism, government bureaucrats have stolen from the people their ability to provide their own security, by making such attempts artificially unlawful and through disarmament schemes weakening the people's abilities to physically defend and protect themselves when their lives and property are threatened.
The government bureaucrats have usurped and forcibly monopolized the means of production in security provision at the people's expense. That, in a nutshell, is what police socialism is.
So what do these bureaucrats and monopolists do with their monopoly power, enforce the law?
Well, they enforce the thousands and thousands of made-up laws on the books which make artificial criminals of totally innocent human beings, that's for sure.
Okay, but is such a government-monopolized system efficient? I'll bet Murray Rothbard would answer in the negative.
Do the government police protect people from the aggressions of others? (Hmmm. I hear snickering out there.)
As CopBlock's Peter Eyre noted recently, the government police have no legal obligation to protect anyone.
So why the hell do they exist?
Does anyone have a good answer to that question?
And this police socialism is coinciding with the outright fascism that our Rulers are shoving down our throats, with their gun registration/confiscations/banning, and other State intrusions and violations of the people's rights.
For thorough discussions on socialism and fascism, please see Ludwig von Mises (or read the book here) and Ben O'Neill respectively.
As I wrote recently, the hysterical Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick presented his new gun control measures in January, and signed into law the mandatory collection of fingerprints of school teachers and others who might directly deal with children, including prospective adoptive parents.
Then, during the recent Blizzard of 2013, the fascist Gov. Patrick gave an executive order outlawing driving on all roads in Massachusetts, or risk a heavy fine and/or one year in jail! Can you believe these "liberals"?
During the 1980s, then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Stanley Dukakis had many photo-ops while standing around with his loyal police storm troopers. Dukakis and his fellow socialist/fascists were obsessed with ordering people to wear their seatbelt or face heavy fines.
The truth is, a lot of these police-state driving laws such as mandatory seatbelts are nothing more than revenue-enhancements for the State. It's never enough revenue for them, and never enough bureaucrats and administrators to feed off the fees, fines and taxes.
And it's never enough artificial power and authority to give to uniformed, badged and armed goons.
However, contrary to what the fascists and socialists believe, all human beings have an inalienable right to freedom of movement and to travel freely, and a right to self-defense. This is part of our more general right to life and liberty, to self-ownership, and to be free from the initiation of aggression by others.
Never mind all that, our Rulers say. They own the rest of us. And the Rulers seem to have this pathological compulsion to control our every movement now, with tracking and monitoring and surveillance cameras, and mandatory seatbelts or banning driving altogether, fingerprinting, registering firearms, and so on and so forth.
Alas, these "liberal" politicians just love to have control, they love the police state, for that is what socialism is all about. Our current socialist system of government monopoly in community policing and security naturally develops into a police state, and that is what we have now.
In California recently, out-of-control, "we're really looking out for ourselves, not you lowly commoners" police goons were in a frantic search and destroy of an alleged "cop killer."
In their hysterical fear that "one of their own" had turned against them and may be giving them a taste of their own medicine – of what government police all across America have been criminally dishing out to innocent people on a daily basis – these possibly steroid-laden Barney Fifes and Rambos shot up two different vehicles and injured innocent people, without having the patience to actually confirm whether or not their victims were the actual suspect.
William Grigg very articulately and thoroughly described in this interview the whole story of the cops' criminally self-centered craziness, and how their actions were similar to Janet Reno's Waco fiasco.
Another example of what police socialism gives us was last year when the Aurora, Colorado police ordered many people out of their cars stopped at an intersection, handcuffed all of them and searched their cars, based on a tip that a robbery suspect was among them.
Sadly, the general intelligence level of our "men in blue" has not been up to snuff in recent years. (Of course, when police forces are intentionally hiring applicants with lower IQs, then we might be asking for trouble. And the government schools are no help, as most of us already know.)
So God forbid we should require government police officers to read and understand the ideas of presumption of innocence and due process.
And God forbid we should require prudence, patience and rationality. Instead, rather than think things through when the times call for that, the unthinking short-sightedness inherent in socialism rules the day, and we get disaster and criminality.
Our short-sighted, immediate-gratification society of unthinking self-centeredness also pervades the category of public office-holders. The rise to the top of our Rulers is based not on moral character, intelligence or understanding of the rule of law, but based on rhetorical and demagogical abilities. Obviously, this trend has gotten much worse since Hayek wrote his Road to Serfdom nearly 70 years ago.
Some of the reasons why today's "liberal" intellectuals defend the socialist police state and our criminal rulers such as the Drone-Murderer-in-Chief can be found in Hans-Hermann Hoppe's article, Natural Elites, Intellectuals, and the State.
So we see the collectivism, extreme self-centeredness and pathological camaraderie of those California goons, as their blind obsession to find the "cop-killer" probably wouldn't have been such an obsession had the suspect been just an ordinary civilian-killer.
Just as the ruling bureaucrats become addicted to their non-accountable monopoly powers, their controls over the population and their tax-funded free money and free stuff, so too do the government police become addicted to the power, control and artificial authority to stop, search, arrest and detain, bully and order around innocent civilians.
This increasing violence – institutionalized by the ruling bureaucrats – against innocent civilians, taxpayers, businesspeople, travelers, drivers, students or protesters, breeds the very kind of criminal behaviors which L.A. ex-cop Christopher Dorner was trying to expose, before he allegedly killed four people.
For decades, as the American culture has continually degraded, the socialist monopoly schemes have also degraded, which I believe is inherent in socialism, and the socialist government police scheme has also developed into a sick culture of violence.
But the government police have also fallen victim to a largely self-imposed dangerousness to their jobs, by willingly becoming a part of enforcing stupid and counter-productive laws such as those of the Establishment's drug war, and acting as tax/fine robbers collectors for the State.
So, while the non-government individual civilian should stand up for oneself and one's rights, so should these government police stand up for themselves, stand up to the dumb government bureaucrats who are making all these laws, not just drug-related, but thousands of other useless and intrusive laws, that these government cops are made to enforce.
Such fascism combined with the overall socialist system has turned America into a very undesirable, authoritarian and dangerous society. Uniformed, badged and armed government police order the people around, intimidate and threaten, unlawfully arrest and detain, taser and murder innocent civilians, and they get away with it with impunity.
This outright criminality is institutionalized by socialism. When you let a government monopolize the community's policing and security and restrict the people's rights to self-protection and defense, and when you do not require the armed agents of the State to act under the rule of law, what do you think this will lead to? A peaceful society? A secure civilian population?
And those "law-and-order" conservatives out there – those "anti-socialism" conservatives – this is the socialism they love, because most of them seem to be brainwashed their whole lives to love and worship armed, uniformed authority, no matter how bad it is or how criminally its agents act.
Speaking of our culture of violence, PBS recently did a story on violent video games and their effects on people, especially the younger generation.
Violent video games, movies and TV shows can contribute to the desensitizing of the humanity of others, of the victims of violence. What is worrisome is that many of the younger government police agents may be influenced by the kind of aggression that is promoted in those games.
But along with the increasing militarization of America's government police forces, the federal Department of Homeland Security's purchases of hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition, and Obama and Congress's campaign to disarm the American people, also worrisome is that the DHS and Department of Defense have been engaging in desensitization exercises. And worse, the police bureaucracy has been preparing to desensitize their goons toward firing upon civilians who attempt to defend themselves!
Unfortunately, many people actually believe that it is treasonous to disobey the authority of government bureaucrats and their minions (or who promote state secession from the United States).
But the opposite is true: Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution states that "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort…" This is also referring to the agents of the federal government who would wage a war against the states or against the people of the states.
Yes, Obama martial law criminality and "civil unrest" may be coming to Amerika.
So, in such circumstances, I wonder if the officers of local government police would aid and abet such federal criminality and treason, or would such government police take the side of the people?
In either case, these circumstances are the very reason why the early Americans wrote the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
Conclusion: Abolishing the socialist government police (and national security socialism, too) and promoting a natural order rule of law would make America a much safer and more civilized society, that's for sure.
