The Disconnect: Why Government "Services" Suck

in #anarchism8 years ago

The Disconnect: Why Government "Services" Suck

How can we hold, let's say, a baker, a butcher, a cleaner, a grocer, or pretty much any other person offering goods or services on the market accountable? How do we influence and direct their behavior so that a certain standard or quality is maintained? One way, the peaceful, civilized, non-statist way, is simply by deciding whether or not we do business with them. If I, one day, buy a loaf of bread from a baker, and it turns out to be of very poor quality, I will probably not go to that same baker again, but rather take my business elsewhere. This process, the process of uncoerced deliberation, choice, and action of individuals in a free market, allows customers to either reward businesses they deem proper with more business, or correct businesses they feel perform substandard by going to a competitor, and thus guarantees a certain level of quality of the goods and services provided. Pretty straightforward, right?

Now look at services provided by state agents and see if the same applies. Look at, for example, the police. People scream for "police accountability". However, since there is a disconnect between police "revenue" (in quotation marks because it's amassed through taxation, and "revenue" implies a voluntary interaction, which taxation isn't) and the services they (supposedly) provide, there is very little that can be done to hold them accountable, other than just trust them and politicians to solve any issue. "We've investigated ourselves, and found we did nothing wrong." Sound familiar? The same goes for every other product or service funded through taxation. And we all trust civil "servants" so well, don't we? Politicians in particular, amirite? Do you see the problem? The only way we could possibly have some meaningful influence on the behavior of police, is if we could switch to another "safety-provider", but since agents of the state have violently monopolized this sector, there's no escaping their control. The only possible way, really, to try and deal with the problem of "police accountability", is to eliminate the role of the state in the protection sector entirely and let the free market run its course. I mean, would you support a violent gang of thugs calling themselves "the police", whose primary "job" is to harass, aggress against, and extort peaceful people, by voluntarily giving them your money, like you would a baker?

Please don't jump to conclusions and assume that this is a plea for some sort of "justice for the rich only"-type society. Think about it, seriously. The majority of people isn't rich. For a free market justice system to work, its players would have to be recognized as legitimate and respectable. There's no way a majority of people would view them as such if they served the well-off only (which is pretty much what the "justice system" is amounting to now, under statism, since rich, well-connected assholes have the money to bribe or otherwise influence (e.g. blackmail) power wielding agents of the state, which would be impossible, were there no power wielding agents of the state to bribe to begin with). Do you see what I'm getting at? Please, don't fool yourself, and acknowledge this problem. It's uncharted territory, which might be scary, like so many things new, sure, but it's not something we can't overcome. The people over at Peacekeeper and Cell 411, for instance, are working hard to provide a voluntary, community driven alternative to state "protection", and the possibilities are endless. This is only the beginning. Not to mention that there is already a market for private security and justice. Its potential is just being squandered by state violence.

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain." - Frédéric Bastiat

If you have a hard time envisioning protection and justice provided by the free market, I suggest you check out some of the following material.

Have a great day.

Sort:  

Welcome to Steemit, Roman.

I had an "ah-ha" reading the firsr paragraph... didn't quite go in the same direction as the rest of the article, but like, "hey. Ya. We don't have any choice of government service providers. They can do a shit job. And we still are forced to pay. What a scam."

Never considered it like that before.

Keep up the good writing, and enjoy the ride here...;-)

You're preaching to the choir here.

Might I just say though, I've always been very happy with government services in New Zealand.

That said, we have a lot less corruption here, our public servants are well paid, and there isn't really enough money flowing through NZ to corrupt them.

I'm rolling around the idea of protectionism and justice in the free market. (Thank you for the extra links, btw. Great way to add value to your post and keep us thinking.)

I could see this working in an HOA (Home Owner's Association). People voluntarily sign an agreement, when they buy a home in the HOA's boundaries, to pay the HOA a yearly fee, and in return they get certain benefits. One benefit might be that the community contracts with a local helicopter flight service where if one of the community members suffers a serious injury, the pilot will immediately fly over and airlift the patient to the hospital. (I saw a community doing this recently.) One might be to have a private security force patrol the community.

So let's say you're not in an HOA community. You're just in a neighborhood with about 150 homes, and there's a movement that the owners would like to get together, pool some money, and hire a security force.
What happens with the homes that don't want to participate, for whatever reason? (Perhaps they don't like the idea, perhaps they simply can't afford to, etc.)
I guess the ones who were working together to hire the security force could hammer out details on that with the force itself. Perhaps if the force seems something hinky going on at a non-participating home, they don't take action.

Either way, the non-participating owners are still going to get the benefit of having regular patrols and therefore reduced crime in their neighborhood, even though they aren't paying.

I can see this rankling the members who are paying ("I'm having to pay for their safety!") and as the old lessons go, if one person isn't pulling their weight but still gets the benefits, others stop pulling their weight, too. The system falls apart. (We saw this in the first colonies here in [what became] the US.)

I realize that the de-facto response to a hypothetical like this is always "Well how is what we have now any better?" and/or "The current system of state violence is a much worse system than your hypothetical", but the fact is that we live in a society where fully half of the households receive monthly financial support from the government. They're vested in the system because they're dependent on it, so you'll never get them to change their minds. In short, until the economy collapses, the government implodes, or something takes out the power grid and knocks us back to the 1700s, we're stuck with this. Rather than simply saying "well what we have now isn't working/is more violent", we have ample time available to explore hypotheticals like this and come up with some reasonable answers.

Who knows, maybe we'll save some communities some precious time in the future, when they find themselves in a voluntaryist community and come across this issue.

We need to get Tom Woods to post on Steemit.

I explain this here as part of a blueprint for Anarchy.