just old stuff, nothing worth seeing
Today's news features various crimes, or fear of crime. Ending crime is simple. Let each person choose their own government. Then each person will have the culture they want, and will be happy to have all the surveillance they need, and so crime will be impossible. It's that simple. But instead, we have a system where everyone is forced to live with rules they don't want. And crime is the price we pay.
posted by Chris Tolworthy at 8:56 AM
I think land rent will solve all the world's major problems. judge for yourself.
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4 Comments:
The problem with that line of reasoning is that it ignores the perspective of the victim. Just because perpetrators think something is not a crime, does not eliminate the suffering of those who are acted upon.
Let's look at the perspective of the victim. Imagine that I am a criminal and I set up my own country. My victims leave and complain loudly to my neighbors.
In order to maintain my borders, I have to make agreements with my neighbors. They charge me a lot of money (because they have to build high walls and pay expensive auditors to check what I do). So my costs are higher. Meanwhile, people don't trust me so my income is lower. So I cannot compete with honest people. Honest person can generate more wealth from my land, and this sets the level of land rent. I cannot afford to pay the land rent, so I have to default on my agreements and sell my land. In other words, the presence of victims guarantees that my government won't work, so I have nowhere to hide.
In comparison, our present system allows criminals to hide behind inefficient laws and secrecy. A land rent system would give more power to the victims.
If we had to rely on ourselves for enforcement then we would have to surrender the benefits of the division of labor. Instead of doing what we are best at, we would be preoccupied building walls. That is assuming that we have the surplus resources for this activity, which is a big assumption. It seems to me that this prescription is a one way road to Hobbes's state of nature.
I agree with you that crime could be fought more efficiently. But ultimately, some level of crime will persist under the best of circumstances because it happens to be a feature of the human condition. The inefficient crime suppresion is an implication of classic collective action problems, especially since safety from crime is a public good.
The benefits of the collective with respect to safety from violence are so great that I suspect that they will outweigh the benefits of any plan that may require isolation. A single zebra, for example, has a one hundred percent chance of being targeted by a predator. If it is one out of two zebras the probability drops to 50%, for fifty zebras to 2% and so on.
Of course, you may want to argue that you can have groups of individuals that submit to various codes of conduct. Cheating becomes the obvious challenge.
If people were given the choice then everybody would join the collective were murder, rape, and theft are criminal. Some because they are sincere, others because of the opportunities of cheating.
After the crime, cheaters would not leave on their own. It is not in their interest. They would have to be expelled by other members of the group. At which point the problems of contemporary law enforcements reemerge.
I agree that individual government (even small government) is extremely inefficient. That is one more reason why balkanization will not happen. But we must have the freedom to leave, or we have no freedom at all. The only people who could afford to secede would be those with genuinely better ideas.
I disagree that crime is a natural part of being human. I live in a small village, and crime is almost nonexistent. Some people here leave their keys in their cars over night.
As for law enforcement, every state has the right to have the laws it wants and enforce them how it wants. If I choose to stay in a community, I also choose to be subject to its laws.
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