Ep. 164: The Ring Wing Case for Abolishing the Police.

The Mindcrime Liberty Show discusses the non-leftwing case for abolishing the professionalized, well paid, legally protected police and law enforcement. Contrary to what some people on the so-called conservative movement might think, police forces are a relatively recent invention. The City of London in the 19th century is credited with something that is arguably similar to what modern police forces look like although the scale still pales in comparison. Police and other law enforcement agencies assuming different names largely grows alongside the managerial industrial state. The police and law enforcement itself steal more money through civil asset forfeiture in the US in some years than burglars. For all their budgets and expensive military style equipment many crimes go unsolved. Furthermore, things like traffic safety, as reported and studied by Strong Towns, can be better enforced through street and road design. Speeding tickets don’t make roads safer. Police and law enforcement officers who get away with planting evidence or murdering suspects, far from “defending law and order” are undermining it with their flagrant legal privilege. The right should be careful about any class of persons granted this much authority and legal privilege considering the general skepticism which they have of human nature. If humans were Angels they don’t need police and if humans aren’t Angels you shouldn’t dare trust someone with that kind of power. Most of the procedural reforms which many progressives and minarchists advocate might make a dent in the most flagrant cases; however, the police and law enforcement funded by taxation in industrial managerial societies face a kind of sociological selection problem. Law enforcement attracts “rot.” The people who become cops are closer to the genuine criminals in society on a sociological level than most. The police and various other law enforcement agencies are a kind of “gang.” The members themselves tend to stick up for each other when another member is accused of wrong doing. They recruit from the lower ranks of the bourgeois and working classes like many gangs. When it comes to genuinely violent insurrections or crime, the police themselves often are a combination of inept, cowardly and corrupt. Instead of defending the police the right, not just libertarian anarchists, should advocate for a combination of self-defense, private security and militias to deal with crime.