Resolved: The police should be privatized

Note: Although Ayn Rand is my biggest intellectual influence, believe it or not, she is a moderate compared to my biggest economic and political influence: Murray Rothbard (the guy in my profile pic). Rothbard argued for complete anarchy, or anarcho-capitalism. There have been many theorists following him and anarcho-capitalism has become a very well-thought-out and nuanced theory. For brevity's sake, I will not argue for anarchy here, although I believe it is the ultimate expression and most logical end-point of "small government " tendencies. For our purposes hold everything else about the world and the government equal, just privatize the police. This being stipulated, its not correct to liken private police, in this sense, to the mafia. They would be licensed by, and beholden to the state just like cops are now. 1. "A profit motive with respect to the application of force is not a good idea." In your first counter argument, you list some problematic laws that are on the books now. All of them are taken advantage of by government police, and I happen to agree with you that all of the laws you listed are bad in their own right. Since I have little faith in legislators to stop passing bad laws, the question is how can we minimize the negative effects of these laws? For example: you cite laws that allow law enforcement to seize drug dealers' property. Often time this process involves scoping people out, getting tips from other member of the drug community, planning a swat raids, and breaking in peoples' houses in the middle of the night. But why would private police do any of this? If the drug dealer is their customer, they have every incentive to look the other way. Why would they lock up their own customers and lose their business? If the drug dealer is not their customer, they would have every incentive to look the other way. There is no money to he made, in a free market, by arresting peaceful people. To your point about private prisons: "Private prisons" make their money exclusively from the government. In other words they do not cater to consumer preferences. For this reason they are more of a "quasi-private" enterprise. It is not correct to compare an entity that is paid exclusively by the government to one that is paid by consumers directly. Private prisons, socialist institutions, must lock up whomever the government requires them to. Private police would enforce laws only to the extent that consumers prefer. 2. Your concern that competing security firms would be in constant conflict is superficially plausible. These firms, no doubt, would be in conflict; but only in the sense that competing firms in other industries are in conflict. Policing firms would, in my opinion, confine themselves to serving their own customers. There would be no monetary incentive for them to harass non-customers. Firms certainly would differ in how they enforce laws, but we have laws to regulate their methods and courts to arbitrate disputes between firms. In short, we have more security guards than police in the U.S. now, yet we never hear about firm A harassing firm B for the simple reason that its not profitable. We have every reason to believe that police firms would compete for business peacefully; the same way T-Mobile and Sprint compete. 3. Your third objection describes how police are currently incentiviized to enforce victimless crimes; and you're exactly right. However, this is the biggest reason that police should be privatized. It is hard to imagine that private police, who have no access to tax dollars, would find it profitable to harass non-customers just because they could confiscate their property in certain cases. We know for a fact, however, that most people value safety and would be willing to pay directly for protection from violent crime. 4. As for your concern about rich people taking advantage of this system: Their would certainly by discrepancy in the quality of police protection between rich and poor. But, in my estimation, that is better than universally bad police. Rich people and companies would hire the best firms to protect themselves and their property but there is no reason to think they would hire firms to molest others. Remember, police firms and their customers would still be held to the parmameters of the law. 5. Police would certainly be authorized to use violence in certain situations, namely to defend their customers. But these firms would not be authorized to do anything that the government police can't do now. Firms that abused their authority by "roughing up its customers' personal enemies" ect., would be liable in court and subject to having their government licensure revoked. Having the police be "biased toward whomever's paying the bills" is exactly what we need. The key thing is that they are bound by the parameters of the law so they cannot be part time hit men. Government licensure can keep this connection between law and law enforcement honest while still allowing companies to compete on the market. Somewhere in a parallel universe there is a world where police are private and food production is nationalized. In this world those who argue for private food production are deemed crazy. The fact is that in both cases the market forces companies to meet consumer needs, whereas government has no competition or real incentive to serve people. In the Soviet Union, people staved by the millions because food production was government-run. For the exact same reasons, crime will always be a bigger problem than it should be when the government has a monopoly on policing.