I don’t need to tell you that policing has been in the news quite a bit lately. Nor do I need to tell you that, while opinions in regards to policing as a whole as well as in regards to specific incidents are all over the place, the two loudest and most dominant voices in public discourse today are as follows: abolish/defund the police or lionize them as public servant heroes.
As someone who refers to himself as a libertarian, despite some recent disillusion, it is my instinct to lean more towards being critical of the enforcement wing of the state; this is of course not an unsafe position to take within the libertarian sphere.
But despite that critical eye, the libertarians who espouse such views — especially right-leaning ones — have laid out feasible theories as to how the police can be privatized, as well as other various alternative security options. In contrast, the best the defund/abolish segment of the Left can come up with is in diverting police reform to the social work field. (I worked in a subset of the field for 6 years and definitely dealt with violence, but we weren’t equipped to deal with every form of violence.)
However, despite my affinity for the alternatives that right-wing libertarians put forth and despite my belief that these alternatives could not only work but would also be better than the current system, I believe we often get stuck in the theoretical world that’s been laid out and that we either forget or neglect to live in the real world that lays before us.
Policing, of course, is not the only subject in which this has been a common issue. But it is at present one of the more hot button issues, and it’s resulted in some frustration on my end, especially in regards to libertarians using the language of “all cops are bad,” or ACAB as it’s commonly termed on social media.
Hans-Herman Hoppe is probably my favorite libertarian (anarcho-capitalist) theorist to read, and while he might not have been the first person to lay out a strategy of creating more autonomy for individuals through a libertarian “takeover” of cities — as a form of decentralization and not a Silicon Valley “privatization” (more on this in a future post) —, he was the first person I’d heard the idea from.
Hoppe is also the first person from whom I learned the concept of time preference in regards to the process of civilization. I can’t do the entire theory justice, but, in short, someone having high time preference possesses an “I want it now” worldview, while someone with low time preference is willing to play the long game in order to achieve desired ends.
So in putting it all together, libertarian oversight of a city — whether that ends up manifesting itself in becoming a libertarian republic, ancapicity, or even a libertarian monarchy — is something that would require low time preference. And within this particular strategy one plan of action would be to permeate the police department with libertarians, with the intention of eventually getting one elected or appointed as sheriff, which could then result in the department not enforcing un-libertarian laws such as civil asset forfeiture and nonviolent crime imprisonment.
None of this happens, however, when going around parroting the rhetoric of ACAB. Engaging in such rhetoric is a high time preference reaction to the current state of policing. Because while it might cause one to feel edgy and morally superior in the moment, it’s actively counterproductive as it works against desired future ends.
I understand that one might immediately be turned off when reading a proposition that essentially advocates becoming a thing that currently works against liberty as a potential solution towards more liberty; it seems to go against the grain. But whether it’s framed as time preference or not, not many can argue against that many sorts of achieved successes that have been gained through playing the long game.
We’ve heard the phrase “don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.” Well, let’s also not let the distant ideal keep us from working to improve the real.
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