Michael Strong Asks a Question

He asks,

Has Romer “thought seriously” about a large scale government that can put people in jail? Not to mention ubiquitous police abuse and civil rights violations.

Apparently, Paul Romer is skeptical of private police forces.
My thoughts:

1. Suppose I were to fly to Honduras for a vacation, and I encounter individuals in uniforms who have the power to enforce laws, including putting me in jail. Would I prefer that those individuals be employed by elected officials or by a private corporation? It is not obvious to me that I should place more confidence in the former.

Actually, I think that most people are like Romer in that it does appear obvious to them that police accountable to elected officials will be more trustworthy than private police. This could be a self-fulfilling equilibrium. If people believe that their voice gives them status under a state, they may be more inclined to obey the laws of that state. When people confer legitimacy on the police and the state, the police need to employ less violence in doing their jobs. This reinforces the trust that people place in the state.

2. FOOL rules. I think that the issue of the power to put people in jail illustrates the importance of Fear Of Others’ Liberty. When one thinks of it as “the power to put me in jail,” it seems hard to trust anyone with that power. But when one thinks of it as the power to put an incorrigibly destructive person in jail, one wants someone to have that power. For example, I bet that if you took a public opinion poll after the non-stop television coverage of riots in Baltimore, the support for police incarcerating those involved would have been overwhelming.

Because of FOOL, I think that most people are willing to tolerate the existence of police and of punishment, including incarceration. I think that once you accept that those institutions will be present in a society, the best one can hope for is that laws are just and that they are justly enforced. I do not think that we can reach an ideal in practice, but I would like to see competitive forces at work. It seems to me that if we had competitive government with free movement of people and businesses, then perhaps places where laws are unjust or enforced capriciously would tend to lose population. Or perhaps one might see a pattern where different laws are considered just by different cultures.

3. If you think about how people actually choose where to live, they tend to place a high priority on avoiding areas with reputations for a lot of crime. This tends to produce a population distribution in which some areas are safe and affluent, while other areas are relatively dangerous and also poor. Police work in the former is relatively simple, and police work in the latter is relatively difficult.

4. As an aside, note that the three-axes model has predicted the reactions to the events in Baltimore among progressives, conservatives, and libertarians with uncanny accuracy.

9 thoughts on “Michael Strong Asks a Question

  1. There is a gravitational pull toward centralization or government or whatever. That is their null hypothesis. And since nothing ever achieves the status of being counterfactual their null hypothesis always wins.

    • Here is a proposed mechanism for FOOL and ITOGWLCE (Implicit trust of government with little corroborating evidence). I suspect that the loss aversion and downside risk profile of other people’s liberty is assumed to be pretty boundless. Not only that, they just don’t like it much. Freedom seems to be used for weird stuff we don’t understand. The government is implicitly trusted to have a narrower stochastic range of outcomes, and any errors at least aren’t to us personally and probably can be corrected over time. So, people will have a tendency to pay the devil they know (taxes and a loss of liberty they didn’t use anyway) in order to protect from imagined unbounded risks.

    • Or, rephrased, a private police force has the worst abuses when it is given government monopoly powers.

      • How can we configure a police force, public or private, without such power? Police are inevitably the authority of last resort, and that’s the core of the problem. Privatization only works when it opens things up. Put a private firm into a closed ended situation and there is no benefit to be had.

        • I never made that claim but I would start with smaller jurisdictions.

          If blacks want separate police and more lenient laws, and I could justify this on economic grounds- people doing poorly should be allowed to try more freedom- then maybe they should have that option.

          The next question is can you have overlapping jurisdictions. I think that has been demonstrated. Every cop movie of the 80s and 90s had feds, city cops, and locals chaffing over jurisdiction. We seem to have worked that out by settling on the equilibrium of over-enforcement.

          Next I’d make sure that everyone knew that all street cops are are citizens, first among equals. We need debate over what that means.

    • Good point, the profit motive without the possibility of being fired could be seen as the worst of both worlds.

  2. There might be a kind of short vs. long-term thinking going on here. If a private security agency in Honduras starts arbitrarily locking people up, it may be some time before word of this gets out and people start choosing the Exit option which encourages reform. Years, maybe. Meanwhile, in our present circumstance, politicians are always looking forward to the next election cycle and thus are hyper-responsive to the expressed concerns of voters. Of course, that doesn’t mean that any meaningful reform ever actually takes place, thanks to public choice issues, but nonetheless, you can easily goad a politician or two into making a speech or statement on virtually any subject because they of course don’t want to look uncaring, aloof, or unresponsive, and thus it at least FEELS like something is going to happen or at least might happen.

    • Since most people just want to feel like “someone will take care of it”, I don’t see how that would ever change.

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