The Front Range Voluntaryist Issue #7.pdf
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Policing as a Private Affair, Article by
J. Allen Barnaby of the Free
Association Center
Policing, the protection of person and
property, can and should be handled
privately for reasons both ethical and
prudential. This simple truth is often hard for
most to swallow, especially those looking to
rationalize the various forms of centralized
control they'd like to continue exerting over
the entire populace within a certain
geographic area.
Decentralized policing services can and
should be provided by the individual
landowners or users who truly find any
particular protection service more valuable
than its cost. The competitive pressure made
possible by decentralizing decision-making
aligns the incentives of security providers
much more closely with those of the marginal
customer relative to a centralized political
system where some fraction of the population
enforces their preferences upon the whole. A
political process allows those holding its reins
to externalize the costs of services onto
unwilling dissenters who may have better
options on the table in its absence.
But what about the poor, you ask? The
working poor almost invariably rent homes
and travel on roads owned by others. Those
owners make their livings providing low-cost
services to the poor and have strong
incentives to pay for cost-effective crime
deterrence on their properties in order to
prevent damage and provide their customers
relatively safe passage to and from their
businesses in order to continue making their
living.
Insurance
companies
(think
homeowners' and life insurance) can and
would discriminate between customers who
take various deterrence measures and those
who don't, charging owners and individuals
higher premiums depending upon their
varying risk profiles. By making assets more
profitable year in and year out, the benefits of
protection services become capitalized into
the value of the properties themselves. We
must acknowledge, however, that we do not
have Utopia on the table from which to
choose, so we must make a comparative
judgment
between
centralized
and
decentralized provision of protection.
Centralization poses grave risks of abuse, and
as will be explained below, offers little
relative benefit to the poor and powerless in
practice.
Regime economists of course, even those
espousing free market rhetoric across any
number of other areas, readily object to the
proposition that policing can be provided
without centralizing said service by force.
They teach us that policing is a prototypical
"public good," and that the "optimal amount"
of policing services can't be provided without
some kind of forced centralization.
The first problem with this approach
generally is that, while positing that
decentralized decision-making might lead to
the under-provision of a service, it
completely ignores that centralization is even
more likely to lead to an over-production in
terms of cost while offering little assurance
against under-production in terms of the
actual service quality enjoyed by those unable
to wield political power for themselves.
What's worse is that those who advance this
position usually offer the pretext that without
centralization, the poor and ostensibly
powerless would lack access to quality
service, even as their proposed solution often
fails to serve this very group.
The second problem with the public goods
rationalization is that "prototypical" services
like policing don't even obviously meet the
theoretical requirements of a public good on
their own terms. We're told policing is
non-excludable, meaning that the cost of
keeping non-payers from enjoying the
benefits of the protection service prohibits the
optimal level of protection from (cont. 4)
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