In a message dated 1/10/03 9:03:27 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << What prevents a particular private law enforcement agency from engaging in mob-style "protection"? For example, in Friedman's "Anarchy and Efficient Law", he states that, "The most obvious and least likely is direct violence-a mini-war between my agency, attempting to arrest the burglar, and his agency attempting to defend him from arrest. A somewhat more plausible scenario is negotiation. Since warfare is expensive, agencies might include in the contracts they offer their customers a provision under which they are not obliged to defend customers against legitimate punishment for their actual crimes." (http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Anarchy_and_Eff_Law/Anarchy_and_Eff_La
w.html) First, if war were so expensive relative to peace why does it exist? Maybe peace is more expensive, in terms of risk for example, than open warfare. Second, I might say that going to war isn't expensive, going to war against ME is expensive, because I'm going to recruit the demons who walk the earth. I won't put Charles Manson in jail, I'll put him on the payroll. This is an honest question, one that has been vexing me. >> I'd start by noting that it's a matter of incentives, not absolutes. Governments are motivated by power--the desire of those in government to maximize their power--which they can do by raising taxes, promulgating regulations, borrowing money (raising future taxes), and making war. The Russian government, for instance, made war on the various peoples of Siberia explicitly to raise revenue--in the form of fur tributes it imposed--in order to fund its wars of conquest in eastern Europe. We like to think that our democratcially-elected governments are above such behaviors, but in the American case war has often served as the most effective of reasons (some might say "excuses") for expanding the power of government--as the Civil War, two world wars, and the Cold War demonstrate. That's in fact why, ever time some president wants a new expansion of government power, he tries to make it out as "the moral equivalent of war," to use Jimmy Carter's phrase: The War on Poverty, The War on Drugs, The War on Terrorism (though arguably if people are blowing up buildings and killing people, it really is war, but still a war being used to justify all sorts of increases in government's ability to invade the average American's privacy). Governments thus have a certain incentive to make war. Businesses, however, do not fight real wars, they compete for customers through various means of non-violent persuasion. Businesses thus have the incentive to expand their customer base by serving the desires of the largest number of customers, not by catering to the sick desires of a murderous few. Thus while protection businesses might in fact engage in warfare--there being no guarantees--their profit motive and their customers' general dislike for wars would give the businesses an incentive not to make war. It's entirely possible that some protection businesses would hire former criminals to protect their customers against other criminals, just as the US government once drafted trouble-makers to "harness" their destructive energies, and now forces convicted hackers to help them design hack-proof systems, and as the French used to (still?) fill the ranks of their Foreign Legion with violent criminals. Using convicted criminals against would-be criminals seems a better result than locking the criminals in prisons in which the most violent in effect rule over the less-violent, and where the taxpayer carries the burden for criminals' medical care, lodging, meals, cable TV, libraries, weight-rooms, etc. David Levenstam
