RE: Privatize the Police!
I don't understand the point you're making here. Security guards and police forces both have liability. If either go around breaking laws or company rules, they get fired, they go to prison (thats assuming that your neoliberal utopia has prisons).
If the a police commissioner presided over officers breaking the law, the officers and the commissioner get be replaced.
To go back to your original anecdote, I want to make two points. Firstly, the police officer wouldn't have shot her if, as is the case in the UK, he didn't have a gun. Secondly, if he shot her in an instant, without really thinking about it, I really doubt the presence of 'economic pressure' would have stopped him - its not as if that hallowed and sublime invisible hand would have descended from heaven to whip the gun from his hand. You want less gun crime? Get rid of the guns - for citizens as well as police. Your proposed solution of giving loads of people guns and factioning those people into separate private enterprises will only lead to violence.
So, in other words, people need to be coerced into doing the right thing because they can't be trusted to do the right thing on their own. And this coercion must be carried out by... drum roll other fallible people. Guns are a thing. To pretend that you could not only remove every gun from society but prevent any future instances of guns being produced is laughably absurd. Second, economic pressure - ostracism, sanctions, and retribution, among others - have a strong downward pressure on preventing bad actions. For the same reason businesses tend not to harm their customers because they want repeat business, people tend not to act like utter shit or harm others if there are consequences to their actions. Those consequences would be amplified and more numerous absent a state, increasing the opportunity costs of being a shitbag or a violent person.
And as for police and commissioners being punished for their misdeeds? Please. As I said before, there is no justice when the arbitrator is party to the dispute. Justice is incidental in the current system; they punish themselves only when they can't get away with it. Police forces have vastly less liability than a security company, and they engage in far more abuses of private property and persons than a security company could by virtue of their territorial monopoly. Again, if a security company violates its contract, they're done. Fired. If they do it enough times, no one will hire them. When's the last time a police department was fired?
I'm getting the feeling we're probably not going to come to any sort of conclusion to this to be honest matey, it's been good debating with you, but i'll probably call it a day here.
Firstly though, I think we'd probably best not get into the gun thing to deeply, but you really don't have to look much further than gun crime statistics to realise that allowing the free sale of guns does exacerbates gun crime (go figure...). Gun deaths per head in the US are 5 - 10 times higher than every other major developed economy in the world. Wouldn't have thought it takes much more explaining but I will do for your sake. I never said gun regulations gets rid of all guns (talk about your straw men huh?) but when people have to smuggle them in illegally via the black market, the costs of acquiring them skyrocket. This is what makes the difference between teenage/young adult street gangs having deadly fire arms and not. you seem to have interest in economics, what happens to quantity and price when supply is squeezed (or , god forbid, the market is regulated ?..... It also makes up a considerable amount of the difference in firearm homicide rates between the UK and US (they're 0.2 and 10.2 respectively)
I'll make a bit of a summary here to finish up overall. Basically... I know you're not some super rich corporate lobbyist who's peddling neoliberal propaganda just to increase your profits... I get that you genuinely believe that what you're arguing for is the best way to improve the justice system in the US. I have patience for your belief that people are fallible, whether they work for the state or work for the private sector. But to think that economic competition and the holy invisible hand are going to fix that problem is just naive, frankly.
If you want to see what the free market does for society, take a look at what multinational corporations are doing in their supply chains in the developing world, free from the regulation of individual states. The result is great for us consumers in the west (cheap clothes , cheap food, cheap coffee etc, etc). Do you know businesses boomed with globalisation since the 1990s? Its because of economic pressure, (a point you've made very well), but not to the end increasing quality of service. It happened because of the relentless pressure to cut costs in developing country sweatshops, plantations and farms. All of the involved countries and suppliers compete for contracts from western companies, which leads to a race to the bottom on regulation. This translates to lower wages, no guarantee of pay, no maternity leave, no guarantee of holidays, no guarantee of any working hours at all, no guarantee of breaks, no guarantee of adequate safety equipment, no healthcare scheme, no pensions schemes. All in all? Shit, unsafe, deadly working conditions. Walmart wants a sale on bananas? Who do you think sees their profit margins drop to pay for it? Not Walmart, thats for sure.
So to link back to your proposal... this is what I mean. When you have a system that driven by profit, profit is the only consideration.... In the free market, profit reigns supreme. Consumers are protected, everyone else can go stuff themselves. Your private security firms would treat their consumers well, they'd quite happily beat the fuck out of anyone else if there was a profit to be made from it. No notion of 'good' 'right', or 'just' would be considered. Yes, these are dubious terms, i know, but we can try. States are incentivized to try, via mass voting - there is 0 incentive for private firms to try , if doing so doesn't (as if often the case) coincide with profit maximisation.
That's my position, I hope you've enjoyed discussing this with me. Cheers.
To your point about gun violence, you would need to implement a worldwide ban on firearms in order to effect a drop on firearms to the degree you'd like, otherwise people will simply buy them elsewhere and import them. As far as firearms violence statistics, firearms violence is close to be statistically insignificant in the grand scheme of violence in the US. Firearms account for less than 1% of fatalities here in the US, and that's including accidental discharges that result in death.
I never made the claim that economic factors would solve anything, only that they were more efficient and effective than a system in which coercion is the method used. Coercion is violence, and as such increases the overall violence in the system. When you rely on voluntary and consensual exchanges instead, you remove that glaringly large portion of violence from the system.
Sweatshops aren't inherently bad. Many people that work in them in the third world have no other prospects besides starvation and death. Would you rather have a child working in a sweatshop or being a prostitute, as is common in southeast Asia?
Are you fucking serious? There's 0 incentive for private firms not to violate the private property and persons of consumers and others? Did you just ignore every comment I've made up till now? What possible motivation would a private security firm have to destroy the private property of others in a free market, where such negative actions would result in unbelievable financial and reputation losses? It's like you're ignoring economic calculation altogether while simultaneously claiming it can't do anything.
States aren't incentivized to try treating anyone fairly. Without getting into a long-winded discussion about time horizons and how democracy is anathema to freedom, elections only serve to soften the electorate to the excesses and abuses of state agents, and they allow otherwise impotent sociopaths a surefire path to abuse and violence.
I appreciate the discussion and your civility, but your blind faith in state government is appalling. You want a group of people to rule other people because people can't be trusted to operate on their own. Nevermind that these are also people, and subject to the same base desires; give them the reins of power! They're immune to their own moral failings! How can you not see how ridiculous that sounds?
To paraphrase a quote: anarchism is no guarantee that people won't rape, kill, or steal. State government is a guarantee that some people will.
So i said i was going to finish there to stop us regressing into endless argument.... but "sweatshops arent inherently bad."?? I'll admit you've baited me here. You're a right tool if you really beleive that... the point was that regulation (national and international) could improve sweatshops, if it was introduced. (As a side point, the effects of poor human rights records dont seem to have really bothered Walmart and Nestle...certainly not to the extent you suggested that reputstional affects would...) But a neoliberal (limited state interference) has blocked it. This has happened largely via multinational corporations lobbying governments against it.
If your anarchism makes you so blind to the merits of state intervention in free markets that you see sweatshops as a genuinly palatable solution to the problem of child prostition in developing countries, I implor you to rethink your position.... appalling ...
So child prostitution is preferable to them working in a sweatshop, even assuming their wages are a pittance. Got it.
You're welcome to stop responding at any time if you don't want to engage me.