Category Archives: Racism

The Business of Policing

We live in curious times when it is the left getting broad traction on what up until a few weeks ago had been the domain of only the most radical of the anarchist-libertarians. They are demanding that the state (what some people call “government”) vis-à-vis its enforcement arm (the police) should play a diminished role in our lives. Unchecked abuses of authority (or rather “privilege”, literally Latin for “private law”) accumulated over space and time have finally reached a boiling point. To be clear, we libertarians have expounded for decades upon the obviously predictable and empirically proven flaws inherent to any state socialized monopoly system such as the police. But I suppose it isn’t until our predictions bear enough fruit that anyone wants to listen. So be it. The police are single payer security: monopoly service coupled with an extortionist payment scheme and zero liability has finally overflowed onto the bathroom floor of modern American society. It is heartening to see that people are finally awakening to the results of flawed incentives while equally depressing that so many have had to suffer death and injustice in order for people to finally take notice en masse. For those that are only capable of binary thinking, I’m not saying, “all cops are bad”. I’m saying that bad incentives produce poor outcomes because of a systemic lack of error correction.

For those communities looking to make a change to their policing system the obvious question is “What will you replace it with?” The simple answer is, “I don’t know.” And that is actually the point. This is why we have (free) markets, to give individuals a space in which to experiment to see which ideas work and which ones do not. Markets produce better outcomes not because of magical capitalist pixie dust but because given a problem to be solved, more minds are better than fewer. State monopoly systems fixate on only one way of doing something and then enforce that method upon all. Any variance from The One way is either outlawed or so heavily regulated as to make any attempt pointless. The state, lacking a profit motive, is incapable of rapid negative feedback (the loss part of profit/loss) if it implements a poor solution; it takes decades of public suffering for anyone to notice the accumulating damage of the failure. 

This movement to “defund the police” is the best thing for that industry –  in the same way that Obama’s ‘defunding’ of NASA with respect to the Shuttle program has spawned a whole new market for orbital lift companies (Space X, etc.). So how could this private policing/security model work in the real world? The beauty of any market is that it is inherently self-regulating due to the profit motive. For example, one vertical market possibility is this: client—>insurance company—>security company—>training academy. The entity to the right has to work to satisfy the demands of their customer to the left; if they don’t then the customer seeks out a different supplier and that former supplier suffers a loss. Without the state imposing the privilege of qualified immunity the individual police/security officers would carry their own indemnity insurance for their actions or their firm could cover them on their policy, but in either case, officers with a poor claim record would quickly become unemployable in the same way people that have multiple car accidents quickly find their premiums skyrocket. This is the market telling them perhaps they should seek a different career. The desire to prevent this would induce the self-regulation of more stringent training and screenings imposed upon the security firms by the insurance carriers seeking to minimize their claims resulting from rogue officers. Security firms that produce the best outcomes (solve or prevent crimes) would excel and gain more paying customers, those that do a poor job would go out of business – profit guides firms to delivering what the consumer demands: safe, effective, and efficient security. 

One common rejoinder to this model is “but what of the poor that can’t afford such security?”: well, please tell me about how “the poor” are receiving such great policing service in our current system? I’ll wait. But in all seriousness, there are many options in a market system, no doors are closed: community policing, á la carte subscription models, insurance pass through protection, charitable organizations, and many more I can’t envision. The next objection is typically “but what about law enforcement?” An indirect benefit of privatizing security/police is that it instantly nullifies all victimless crimes; no victim, no crime to solve and certainly no one to pay for it. Perhaps the laws stay on the books, but without an enforcement arm they are effectively null and void. Good. Nearly half the current prison population is for drug “crimes.” Ending the drug war in this way would create a huge public dividend of the billions not spent on pursuing such cases as well as dramatically reversing the current racial disparity in the prison system. 

While it does seem no one is currently calling for anything as radical as what I’ve outlined, the mere fact that the general populace is actively looking for some alternative is encouraging. Even if one community experiments and succeeds it would be the perfect empirical template to show that separation of police and state is no more radical than the separation of church and state.

Reparations Roller Coaster

The political landscape in the Democratic Party has become so chaotic that in order for a presidential candidate to distinguish him or herself it is no longer sufficient to engage in safe, conservative levels of vote pandering e.g. free healthcare for all. Now one must step up with über-insane policy positions like slavery reparations. Several candidates have put forth pro-reparations platform positions recently. Any self-respecting black person should reject such talk outright. The whole notion is preposterously insulting. Why? Ok, hold up your hand (any race) if you think your “success” today is even marginally affected by the life events of one or more of your sixteen to thirty-two second-great or third-great grandparents? Can you even name a single one of them? The argument is basically that all succeeding generations over 150+ years have been entirely impotent to advance in life because they lacked a check from the federal government – all other forms of welfare and assistance not withstanding (12 years of free schooling be the main one). Perhaps you could make that argument (as with apartheid in South Africa) if every single black person were dirt poor today. But that’s not the case. In fact there are numerous highly successful black individuals today (doctors, lawyers, business owners, actors, politicians, athletes, etc.). This alone should conclusively prove that race no longer plays a meaningful role in holding anyone back. While the poverty rate for blacks as a whole vs. whites is higher, it is not earth-shatteringly so (20% vs 8%). To hear the pro-reparations people talk you’d think black poverty was 90%+ in this country.

The time for reparations was immediately after emancipation, to the actual slaves. That is how reparations have operated for more recent state-level atrocities (Germany, South Africa, etc). Locate the victim and compensate them. That is correct and just (although monetary compensation can never truly make one whole for these kinds of state sponsored crimes). Reparations should have been made in the US shortly after the Civil War (and indeed this was done for a short period, General Sherman’s Special Order 15 was quickly reversed by President Johnson). That this did not occur is a crime against those former slaves. However, there is nothing that can be done to fix that now. History is like that. Bad people did horrible things, but navel gazing hundreds of years later isn’t going to put the toothpaste back in the tube. If my grandmother were raped but the culprit never served time nothing is served by putting that guy’s grandson in prison today. However that is exactly what reparations would do, only worse (it would be like grabbing some random person off the street and putting him in prison merely because he’s a man). Were reparations to come to pass it would be funded by some new tax. But many millions of Americans (like myself) are recent generation Americans. All of my great-grandparents entered this country over 50 years after the end of the civil war – why should I be taxed to pay for something that neither I nor them could ever have conceivably benefited from? Indeed, these great grandparents were initially treated harshly (yes, the Klan hates Catholics too) by the “nativist” populations they emigrated to. Should I get reparations too for how they were held back by such incipient hatred on arrival? (In case you were wondering the  answer is “no” to this rhetorical question).

Some would argue that even post Civil War emigrants enjoyed the privilege of all the wealth brought about in this country through the labor of former slaves who built this country. Ok. Except that is totally backwards. This country was made poorer, not wealthier, because of slavery. The reason for this is simple: automation. Cheap slave labor meant there was no incentive to explore more efficient means of production. Without slavery the south would have been pushed economically to explore efficiency improving automation that much sooner. As we recall from high school history, the north was regarded as wealthy while the south was considered poor. The primary reason for this was the difference in automation. The highly industrialized north was highly automated in its output. Just as paper beats rock so to do machines beat humans every time in the output Olympics.

Even if we were to pay reparations there is no practical “fair” way to do so. The whole thing quickly spirals out of control into a general welfare check. Such a check would be far out of proportion to what those individuals might have had had actual reparations been paid in 1865 to the forefathers. If it were in proportion it would amount to only a few hundred dollars and politically such a small amount would be a non-starter. So it will have to be disproportionately larger. So how does this idea go from only for descendants of slaves to everyone? Well, first if it were constrained to only those that could prove a genealogical connection to a slave, accusations would fly of unfairness for all those unable to claim their rightful inheritance because of paperwork lost to the ages. Ok, so now anyone who is black (DNA test) gets it, but how much “blackness”? 90%? 50% 25%? No matter where you draw an arbitrary line someone will complain so just make it 1% or more then no one will complain. And of course the DNA tests will have to be free, otherwise this too would be deemed as unfairly keeping those most in need from obtaining their due. Next is the problem of payment ratio. Should it be a ratio of your DNA %, e.g. you are 10% black so you get 10% of the reparations payment? Or what if you can only prove one out of 32 ancestors was a slave; do you get 1/32ndof the payment? The mind boggles with the logistics of handling this all. Even if you assume a generous $100k reparations payment to each former slave this would be rapidly diluted to only a few hundred dollars today after applying the various race and generational dilution heuristics. Is a few hundred dollars really going to change anyone’s life?

And lastly, this must be a one-time payment. Anything other than that is not reparations but simply welfare. If you have made each “victim” whole, then there is no more reason to continue payment to them or their progeny. So under the only possible “fair” model of reparations Barack Obama would qualify. That’s a good thing, just think of what he could have accomplished had he not been black!

The NPC’s Strike Back

My recent editorial at the Oconee Enterprise brought on a somewhat misapprehending response by guest columnist Anthony Potts. My response to his response is below:

White people are racist when they blankly stare, because power, or something.

This column is in response to Anthony Pott’s guest column last week. Some of his points are understandable since the editorial staff altered (for space reasons) a more nuanced statement in the opening preamble. The column (as submitted) did not state that “(racism) is dead” but rather “that legacy, at least as a tangible society-level property, is now dead.” Nor did the column state racism was isolated to the 20thcentury, rather that there was a parochial conception of it in the US at that time. The interested reader may see the full article, as originally submitted. My observations were focused on American society, not at any particular individual. It’s the same as noting that Americans are generally regarded as being over-weight without excluding the possible existence of thin people within that collective. 

The rest of his response, however, is a collection of deliberate distortions of my column. Nowhere will you find explicitly or implicitly the statements “black people are the racists now” or “whites are now the oppressed group.” These mischaracterizing assertions reveal much about the liberal/progressive mindset. People are not viewed as individuals; but rather as part of a collective, mere cogs in the machine. The individual is the collective and vice versa. An attack or defense of the individual is seen as applying to their collective. Therefore, unsurprisingly, when presented with clear, unambiguous, video proof that Group A was accosted by Group B, the progressive will regard the argument being made as ALL members of Group A are victims and ALL members of group B are aggressors. 

Finally, I must point out that it is Potts and his ilk that have an utter misunderstanding of the definition of racism. He claims I don’t know what it means, and I’ll admit I’m a bit old fashioned, but the last time I checked a dictionary there was nothing about “societal power dynamics.” The dictionary defines prejudice as “unreasonable feelings, opinions or attitude esp. of a hostile nature directed against a racial, religious or national group”. Gee that sounds a lot like racism to me, which is defined as “a hatred or intolerance of another race or other races”. If we allow the left to redefine racism to mean “people who (perceived to) hold “power” in society are engaging in racism whenever they interact with someone (perceived to) to not hold power” then like the wordsmiths on the right with their “war on terror” we will ensure never ending culture wars.  You can’t win a war against a label whose definition changes. 

This “racism is rampant today” narrative is further bolstered by the leftist media’s periodic outrage du-jour of a white on non-white incident that in 99.9% of cases today (i.e. the 21stcentury) turns out to be a hoax or misunderstanding. Mark my words, the “Jussie Smollet” incident mentioned by Potts will be found to have been a fabrication within 6 months 6 days and will be quietly swept under the rug.<Just call me Nostradamus – I wrote this when nearly everyone and their brother was convinced of the veracity of Smollet’s story… how quickly did that unravel…hmmmm>

Racism is but one flavor of prejudice. There are many others (e.g. sexism, anti-Semitism, jingoism, etc.) Nowhere does “power dynamic” come into play. That doesn’t mean a prejudiced individual can’t impact your life if they hold power over you in the context of that interaction but the mere holding of power does not do the reverse, it does not make them acquire prejudicial beliefs. Individuals hold power in society, not groups. Those that define you based on your perceived group memberships are the true enemies of the people for they seek to gain power (political, social, or economic) by appealing to one group while demonizing the other. The left does it. The right does it. Let’s cast off these imposed identities and interact as the individuals we are.