"In a fully free society, taxation - or, to be exact, payment for governmental services - would be voluntary." - Ayn Rand
"In a fully free society, taxation - or, to be exact, payment for governmental services - would be voluntary. Since the proper services of a government - the police, the armed forces, the law courts - are demonstrably needed by individual citizens and affect their interests directly, the citizens would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance." - Ayn Rand
You pay for the services of firemen and you neighbor does not. His house catches on fire and the fire services come out and hose your house down to keep it from catching on fire, and let his burn. If a society is not willing to do this, then the system of voluntary payment for services would not work.
This is but one example but there are many that could be used. While I like the concept in practice it does not work so well unless society is willing to allow the full ramification of choices land in the face of those who make poor ones.
I am not sure I could sit by and watch my neighbors house burn in the example above, and I am not certain I would want to live in a society that could do so. Lots of pro's and con's to it.
If it can be done (IE charge for the service like a company would). It should not be a government service as it can follow the model of private business and should be privately held and done for profit. .
As
There is nothing to stop a community from imposing costs with an explicit contract to be part of that community. Nor is it at all unethical. But having government presumptuously take over more and more services and types of business with a so-called unsigned implicit "social contract" is quite different.
What your talking about is largely how it works, most fire is private (and should be) where I live as well. Some cities however have public fire and you pay for it as part of your property taxes.
I'm not quite sure how that would work with the Fire services, but I'd certainly be in favor of giving it a try.
The problem is that the combination could also create a conflict of interest (moral hazard). If your police service is also your theft insurance agency, and they decide to rob or burgle you, they will certainly rule that your claim isn't justified. Now try to prove them wrong, when all the evidence is in their hands.
Moral hazard only exists in the context of coercive monopolies such as we have today.
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The main reason a public police force must exist, and take precedence over private guard forces, is to keep everybody on the same page regarding the management of physical force. Otherwise, private guard forces turn into warring militias, or even gangs!
We can hope the competing police forces will standardize the law and agree to mutual enforcement and mutual conflict resolution. But we have no guarantee of that. That's why Rand said we needed a government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcxGX...
But as regards recovery of stolen goods, and pursuit and interception of perpetrators, here you're into retaliation. Where does retaliation end and improper initiation of force begin?
The government may not regulate force in clear cases of defense of life, liberty or property. But how do you regulate force in retaliation? Or do you count a good, once stolen, as lost forever and not subject to recovery, in order to avoid scenarios such as that which Rand feared?
Privatization doesn't change that, because privatization can't be allowed to go so far that you have protection agencies that won't recognize rulings from the same set of judges. If it does, then the problem in Rand's example exists, and the agencies fight a war until one side defeats the other.
Friedman's apparent ideal -- and mine -- is something like the Icelandic system he talks about, in which the highest courts belong to the state but enforcement is something each injured party has to obtain (or do) for himself. That results in a very minimal state, but it is stable only as long as no faction controls anything close to a majority of the enforcement power. In effect, preserving it becomes the puzzle of how to enforce an "antitrust law" on the enforcers themselves.
Ultimately, that state, like any other, will fail if most of the people stop wanting it to succeed.
Then, on 14 February 1929, several men, disguising themselves as police officers, stood seven other men against a wall--and facing said wall. They then withdrew--and a squad of other men carrying Thompson submachine guns proceeded to execute those men summarily.
And instead of committing a fresh atrocity of his own, the leader of those seven, severely injured himself in an attack his rival co-ordinated with that summary execution, did something gangsters weren't supposed to do. He broke the Code of Silence. He said, "Only [Alphonse Gabriel] Capone kills like that!"
The perpetrators of this Saint Valentine's Day Massacre all came to ignominious ends, some sooner than others. But that did not satisfy a badly frightened and disgusted public. Rather than believe none of them need ever suffer from such an attack, they voted for whoever promised to crush the gangs. With the result we have today.
In short, the general American population tolerated the gangs.
The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre changed all that.
It's all very well to cite the example of Galt's Gulch in AS. But membership in the Gulch was by invitation only. Membership in any other society is an accident of birth or of movement, at least in the United States and to a lesser extent in the European Union and its various member nation-states. Conflict will arise. Murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault--the Big Four--represent the worst instances of conflict between individuals. Now I ask you again, and I ask you to repeat it here, not give a reference or a command to run an engine search: how do you propose to resolve that conflict, when criminal and target have different police agencies "protecting" them?
Let's look to a real-life example, shall we? Pitcairn's Island after the mutinous crew landed HMAV Bounty there, got off, and burnt and scuttled the ship. Within a generation, all but two men on that island, and maybe two or three of the women, were dead--the rest having killed one another. Those two survivors decided they would rather enjoy one another's company. So they decided on a set of laws to go by. But they did not leave it at that. They formed a government--a fully independent government, that had no horizon beyond the island until a Yankee whaler discovered them a few generations later, but a government just the same.
I have to reject any simplistic answer that assumes without warrant that men will naturally get to a point, before it gets down literally to two of them, that they would rather have one another's company or decide every man needs every other man to trade with. I follow Hobbes. "Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." That is life without something we truly call "police."
The best scenarist who described what happens when duly constituted authorities decide to take their own dishonest gain, and only private militias exist to keep order, was not Robert A. Heinlein. It was Mario Puzo.
For us to get close to that situation, the best weapons (things only the military has now, not just machine guns and grenades but tanks, rockets, and weaponized drones) would need to become available to everybody. Which may happen sooner than we think, if the stories about drones being successfully taken over by radio are true.
If it does, then those western countries that have largely disarmed through gun control laws are going to be at a big disadvantage in the next major war. Because I don't think the military on any side will be able to keep civilians out of the line of fire as they have in the past.
In my school days, people could behave badly toward me with no consequence. I can't tell you how often people stole or simply damaged my property with obvious malice aforethought. And let me once answer in kind, and BOOM! Detention.
The transition period would necessarily be Hobbesian. You seem to propose that the only defense be self-defense, that property, once stolen, be counted as irretrievably lost, and that he who cannot by himself--or by dint of his own personal hire--defend himself and his goods, have no recourse at law, because courts of law would not exist.
As to self-defense, an 80-year old woman, as long as she can pull the trigger, all of a sudden becomes as powerful as a 300 pound gorilla - a weapon is a very effective equalizer. And you may find that many of those bullies that you've mentioned, when hit back, learn to behave very quickly, even if they are not the brightest examples.
That is a concern you could raise when you were shopping around for a firefighters' service to buy. In a free market, a service which meets its customers' needs and addresses their concerns will succeed.
The issue of private vs. government services reminds me of this article I posted about a private police service in Detroit: https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post... With it, some people pay, but even non-payers benefit.
you gotta read between the lines with a perverse sense of humor
One of the real problems we have with our current system is that it encourages free riders and taxes the daylights out of everyone else to pay for it. I am not so much against communal services like police and fire departments as I am the free rider problem that seems to go along with it. We pay for garbage, sewer, and utilities services, we should be willing to pay for fire services the same way.
And I'm not sure if anyone notices, but we already pay for the roads in our fuel taxes. The funny thing there is that the government is both complaining about the decrease in fuel taxes while simultaneously mandating more fuel-efficient cars AND encouraging the use of electric cars! Talk about shooting one's self in the foot!
I'd much rather see all the roads privatized. Neighborhood streets would most likely become owned in single blocks by the people living on them, and would be gated. Through streets would be tolled, but with transponders there wouldn't need to be any toll booths. And in cities where people still live on major streets, some redevelopment would take place so that locals wouldn't have to have through traffic on their streets. The best feature of this system is that nobody would have to ask permission to build or widen a road -- just buy the needed land and build away.
And regarding gated communities, what about the ancillary traffic like delivery trucks, moving vans, relatives coming to visit, etc.? Anytime you want to restrict access, you're going to have to pay for the administration and overhead of running such and then charge fees to cover those costs, hold neighborhood meetings (and get everyone to agree) on policies, etc. Sounds like a lot more work than I want to deal with.
http://www.firerescue1.com/fire-depar...
stripped down to its proper function: to protect man
from force and violence (including fraud), and to
punish same. (As to firemen, fire companies could
operate as parts of insurance companies; and also, there would be no prohibition on volunteer fire
departments).
As to paying for government, there could be
payment for actual services when rendered;no-
tarization of contracts (percentage of the mone-
tary amount concerned); if you don't want to pay
for it, don't get it notarized, and take the conse-
quences of the risk (I got that idea from Ayn
Rand, who also mentioned a lottery); also, there
could be something like the present local sales
tax; if the store owner declined to pay it, he
wouldn't get his Law Enforcement Fee sticker to
put in the window, and, if held up and he called
911, the police would refuse to come.--As to
buying things over the Internet, the same prin-
ciple could apply; the government would de-
cline to prosecute cases of identity theft which
might take place over a website which did not
agree to pay the Law Enforcement Fee.
Also, people already pay to have the govern-
ment register their patents and copyrights.
This (the above) could take care of local and state law
enforcement. As to Federal and national defense, there could be a certain percentage of
whatever was in the state coffers (for instance,
25%) to go to the Federal government for these
purposes, so that a man would know, when he
paid his local Law Enforcement Fee, he was
also paying for national defense.--
Would this pay for all the things the govern-
ment does now? Of course not!!--But that is
part of my point. I don't want the government
to do all the things it does now. And if it were
so much smaller, and leaner, people likely would
not be so unwilling to pay for it as we often are
now.
"Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow, you're always a day away." -- The Musical Annie.
If the population was to grow, with the basic principles of Objectivism as the ethical base, and the children had grown up with those principles both taught and illustrated by people's actions...well, who knows? It might happen.
Police, by definition, are a State agency. Period. End of memo. The first police, or literally "rod bearers" (Greek rhabdouchoi, from rhabdos a rod and echo I have/hold) were municipal slaves, armed with sticks, assigned to keep order at public events in ancient Alexandria in Egypt.
What you propose, are competing guard forces, not one of which is accountable to everyone in the community, and not one of which would be accountable even to a Committee of Safety within a community. Therefore, if one guard force decided to protect the "interests" of its customers, no matter how unreasonable said interests might be, who's going to stop them? The result is the Mario Puzo scenario. Young Vito Andolini di Corleone assassinates Don Fanucci and becomes the new Don in his stead. Eventually he takes the title of "Godfather" and "makes one an offer he can't refuse."
I once had to deal with a bully who was as brave as you could ask for, and worse: just plain crazy. Sociopathic. (Only when they are minors, one calls it "conduct disorder, socialized, aggressive.") That guy would have killed me one day, if my parents had not physically intervened and applied physical force to him, and threatened to sue his parents. Under your system, I would have had no recourse save to try to train my totally unco-ordinated eyes to squeeze off a straight shot. Under your system, if a man can't shoot straight, he has no rights.
Now. Do you want to try your argument again?
Laws are a dead letter without one voice speaking to uphold the laws for everyone.
You lament the obviously lawless behavior of many levels of government today. You lament certain sheriffs who have forgotten their Constitutional duty and who have made themselves little more than lackeys for the half-Communist, half-poor-man's-caliph who now (illegitimately, I maintain) occupies the White House. As you should. As do I. But Don Vito Corleone is a poor substitute for an honest speaker-for-all in matters of law.
This is not to say that the police should have a monopoly on force. It means only that if anyone challenges the police without cause, the police have to respond.
Of course the police ought to allow each stakeholder to arm himself and his guard force to the extent he can afford, to protect himself and his employees, relatives, and associates, as appropriate. Of course the police--which again I define as the upholders of the law for everyone--ought to work in concert with any guard force that does not behave like the fictitious Dons Fannucci and Corleone and the very much real-life Alphonse Capone. But when some guard force gets out of line, and goes from being guard force to gang, someone has to have the authority to stop them, or at least to raise a posse comitatus to stop them.
Even the Gulch, I maintain, had a Committee of Safety. It consisted of the largest stakeholders, or their proxies. John Galt attended as proxy for Midas Mulligan. Francisco d'Anconia attended as a stakeholder in his own right. Ragnar Danneskjöld brought to the Committee its sole offensive, power-projecting capability--for offensives against the world, that is. But we do not hear of enforcement actions in the Gulch--because if anyone had any criminal tendencies, John Galt would never have invited them.
We come together here to plan law enforcement for--what did John Galt call them? Ah, yes--"such outposts of civilization as you will build." Crime will occur. Someone will have to deal with it. At least a Committee of Safety would be a recognizable entity everyone would acknowledge as speaking for everyone--and not even charging them for it. Security for those beyond the Committee would be a commensal, not a charitable, function: members of the Committee serve their interests by ensuring a law-abiding community of end-users. But if even that does not exist, a venal Don arises. As Al Capone did in real life, even before anyone ever heard of the word prohibition.
For instance: education...I do not have any kids, I should not have to pay for yours. My parents did their part and paid for mine until of age to pay for my own.
I am sure there are other examples like this but not many.
It seems, the way Ayn stated the premise, it is true that we do share much and rightfully should share the cost.
the second is I agree to split the costs as listed equally with all the others There ten The Cost is $50 we each pay Five. Not a penny more nor a penny less.
Part two is remember government is a service and therefore government employees are servants and all employees need to be monitored. That is a responsibility that goes along with the particular right be serviced.
It cannot be delegated.
Most of the government practices today are a distinct disservice and should be paid for by no one. They should be abolished. These are not legitimate functions of government. Many are not things that can or should be done by anyone or any group.
Let's eat some federal level alphabet soup to make much of it go away.