CRIME 32 Society in Jail

April 10, 2006

“What are you in for?” the inmate of Lee County jail asked the new prisoner. “Rolling through a stop sign in my subdivision,” answered the new inmate, to gales of laughter from others languishing in the same cell.

As they laugh, crumbs from their hard, dry sandwiches—distributed by the wardens twice per day—flew from their mouths to add to the debris of filth on the floor that was ground up by the cracked plastic sleeping mats and absorbed by the old, thin blankets inmates use to keep warm in this cold and wet eight-by-eight room.

The new inmate today joined 500 other prisoners, among whom were some of the most violent threats to society—but also people who, like Inmate 501, are no threat to anyone.

He had been trying to make his one phone call, to which you are supposedly entitled when you land in the big house. The phone would only call collect, even for local calls. That meant that it couldn’t call cell phones. Most local services don’t even have collect-call options anymore. So you dial and dial but the phone might as well be a prop on the wall. There is no way out.

There is also no way for you to be called, by anyone. You have no cell phone. No laptop. No book. No watch, and there is no clock on the wall. No one knows what time it is. No one who does know will tell you. Not even a single scrap of paper are you allowed to take into the cell after your arrest. You can only stand there in your paper-thin prison clothes and plastic sandals.

“Man, this is jail,” someone screamed as the new inmate tried to dial for the tenth time. “Jail! Phones don’t work in JAIL!”

So Inmate 501 stood for an unknown number of hours, hoping that he would be bailed out by his wife and kids, who had seen him handcuffed and dragged away from home after Sunday brunch. He also hoped that this would happen before he needed to use the toilet, which was filthy and frontally exposed to everyone, including the women coming and going.

The saga began last October, when he rolled through the same stop sign in front of a private swimming pool that he and fifty others roll through several times per day. He thought he had paid the ticket but he hadn’t, and the court date came and went. He received no other notices.

But something interesting was brewing in local politics after he received the ticket. The local newspapers ran a series that claimed to unearth ticket-fixing going on in the Auburn city government. It seems that some friends of powerful people were getting their tickets dismissed. Auburn was already known for its lax enforcement but this had the whiff of corruption.

The papers lacked details but there were hints that the whole story was a result of a dispute between an elected official and an appointed city manager. The city manager later resigned or was kicked out.

The suggestion of corruption was enough to attract the attention of the FBI, which made some inquiries. The combination of the media pressure and FBI curiosity was enough to force a change in city policy. The new policy in Auburn would be total crackdown on ticket violators, particularly those that didn’t pay and didn’t show up to their court dates.

Now, usually people who don’t show up for court dates for petty issues such as this are just contacted and eventually pay. But technically, they can also be arrested, just as this person was. When the city government is under pressure to show that it is not corrupt but good and clean and tough on crime, the result is that the fine print becomes a license for just about anything.

So in the last several months, the city has been busy issuing warrants for people who have outstanding tickets of any sort. Cops have been tracking down people in their workplaces, homes, on the streets or anywhere, and treating them all like violent offenders.

The new prisoner, for example, who had never been arrested in his life, still had discolored marks on his wrists where the handcuffs had been slapped on.

We tend to think of the law as some sort of oiled machine that works according to the regulations. The truth is that the law is administered by people with a great deal of discretion over how others are treated. The wardens and correctional officials can choose to humiliate a person in whatever way they want. They can put you in prison clothes that fit or in some that are way too tight. They can tell you the time or not. Leave you to languish or make a call for you. They can insult you and lie about your status or be kind.

The only sure way to elicit something approaching humane behavior from them is to crawl and beg like a dog. You are worse than a slave, because you have nothing of value to offer your new owners. You are worse than an animal in a zoo because you are of no value to your captors. They really don’t care if you live or die. Those who do care cannot help.

No one has more discretion than the judge, who holds your life in his hands. You are dependent on his mood of the moment. If he lets you off easy, he considers himself benevolent. If he sentences you to 10 years or a life in prison, he is only doing his job. It’s always your fault for not having been sufficiently subservient at the outset.

The dramatic change in Inmate 501’s life occurred in the course of minutes. All it took was a knock on the door. It mattered not at all that the supposed crime was completely innocuous. Once you are on the wrong side of the law, your life is officially worth nothing to anyone but those who can do little or nothing to help you.

People talk of government compassion. But there is no compassion in jail, which is where anyone who resists the state—even in the smallest way—ultimately ends up. People talk of social justice but to implement it means requiring everyone to make a choice: obey or face humiliation and servitude.

Yes, people can “file grievances” or “sue,” and that is always the first thought of anyone who finds himself in the hands of captors. But to whom do you appeal? Whom do you sue? You are here again appealing to the same class of people, the same group of coercive agents, who have robbed you of your freedom. Your rights extend only as far as your masters allow them to extend.

People who criticize government as nothing but beating, killing, and hanging—to use Mises’s phrase—are sometime accused of using exaggerated and hyperbolic language. Surely government is more than that and is not always that. Something as simple as a stop sign doesn’t beat you or kill you!

And yet, what the critics of government mean is that all law, even that which appears to be a mere guideline and a help, must ultimately be enforced at the point of a gun. It represents a threat to obey or lose all freedom.

This insight applies to all law, whether it results from a constitution, or from legislation, or appears out of nothing more than a regulatory body. Every regulation, no matter how small, is enforced at the point of the gun. Every tax can result in handcuffing and jailing and even killing those who fail to fork over. Hidden behind each mandate is an armed tough in jackboots and a bulletproof vest who is prepared to beat and kill to serve the state and its laws.

As legislation extends, so does the coercive arm of the state, its police powers, its jails, and its reach over society. It is like a poisonous fog that descends and grows by the day, seeping into every nook and cranny of life: schools, businesses, homes, churches. Nowhere is exempt. The sound of the jailer’s key rattling grows louder and more ear-piercing. The culture of the jail, where people are treated worse than animals, proliferates. You can’t move without risking life or limb.

At some point in his day, Inmate 501 heard someone holler out his name. The electronic click on the bars sounded and the door opened. He had been bailed out, $500 in cash having been extracted from his bank account and forked over to the city police. He was now free—pending payment of the ticket and another court date.

He left behind 500 others who are not so fortunate. Some of them are hardened criminals. Others are in jail for smoking pot. Others were in the same boat as he: a minor traffic violation gone wrong. None have rights. All are captive, like citizens in a city under military occupation where there is only violence and no law.

But how free is he really? He lives in a society where nothing takes place outside the purview of the state, which is to say that he will always live one step away from the prison cell that was his home for a day. One or two wrong moves and he has lost it all. All of society is not yet a jail such as you find in totalitarian societies or a society under occupation due to military conquest, but with every expansion of the state, the jailers get that much more power over all of us.

Their power is not always overt but it always lies in wait. This was triggered by a zealous cop looking to fill a ticket quota, and an attempt to clean up government from corruption—prompted by a media-driven non-scandal that attracted the attention of the Feds. It resulted in personal catastrophe. We really don’t get all the government we pay for, and thank goodness. Lord protect us on the day that we do.

33

Victims on Trial: The Everyday Business of Courts

December 17, 2007

It is inherently implausible, if you think about it, that the state could be an effective administrator of justice, for which there is a supply and demand like any other good. Shortages, inefficiencies, arbitrariness, and high costs will be main features of such a system. And because we are dealing here with the meting out of coercion, we can add the presence of inhumane treatment and outright cruelty.

Even so, nothing had prepared me for what I witnessed in the courtroom the other day. Like a fool, I thought I might be able to beat a traffic ticket I received a block from my home. The policeman says I slowed almost to a stop rather than completely stopping at a three-way stop where there were no cars in any case. So my prize was a ticket.

The officer assures me that I’m not declaring guilt, but I have to sign this form anyway. I can challenge it on my court date. So, again foolishly, I decide not to go the route of everyone else—admit guilt and cough up—but instead to exercise my citizen’s right to make a challenge.

I show up at court. Except that on my appointed date, the judge wasn’t there. Why? They wouldn’t say. Is he sleeping in? No. Taking a family vacation? Outrageous that I should even ask! Ok, then, how about I see the substitute judge? There is no such thing. But if I hadn’t shown up I would go to jail for “failure to appear.” How is it that he can fail to show up and everyone acts like this is normal? The clerk rolled her eyes.

Silly me. This is the state. Different rules apply to it as versus me. So I am given a new court day, six weeks later.

I show up again, and tell the clerk that I plan to say that I am not guilty. This moved my papers to the bottom of the stack, which is a very bad omen. I would end up sitting in the court room all morning, listening to some 40 cases of people who are not so foolish as to protest the judgment of the officer of the law.

But then again, it wasn’t so bad. I got an education. It turns out that in a courtroom packed with purported criminals, not even one of the people who appeared before the judge was a danger to society. Nearly all were in for victimless crimes. The two who had perpetrated actual crimes—petty theft from Wal-Mart and the local mall—could have easily been dealt with without involving the state. So far as I could tell, the place could have been emptied out completely and our little community would have been no worse off, and massive human suffering could have been avoided.

But that’s not the way it works. These people, overwhelmingly black and poor but dressed very nicely in the hope of impressing the master, found themselves entangled in the web, and thereby elicited the glare and killer instinct of the spider. How painful it was to watch and not be able to do anything about it.

The first case turned out to be typical. This was a person picked up for “public intoxication,” which amounted to overcelebrating following a football victory and daring to walk on the government’s sidewalks under the influence of one too many. Arrested, jailed, bailed out. Now was the time to face the judge.

What is your plea? Guilty, your honor.

What do you have to say for yourself? I’m so sorry that I did this and I won’t do it again.

The judge then decides to be lenient. He gives the minimum fine plus court costs. I couldn’t find any consistency in this pricing scheme, but generally it amounted to between $400 and $1,500. The judge asks the person to pay it now. When he says that he doesn’t have the money, the judge considers a payment plan, contingent on the guilty declaring his income to the courtroom; it averages $400 per month.

How about you pay $100 per month? Fine.

Oh, and there’s one more thing. The criminal’s driver’s license is suspended for six months. How can he get to work? That’s his problem. It is a very special problem since the court has decided to loot the person of a quarter of his income during this very period. How can you keep your job? Hard to say. Life is tough. And that’s the price you pay for drinking a few beers and daring to walk on the sidewalk.

So on it went for person after person. Tragedy all around. Pointless suffering. There were other victimless crimes. There were a few people who smoked pot—and one who had carried a joint clip or some other drug paraphernalia in his car. There was a person who made a “false report,” which seems to be lying to the policeman. He was dragged off to jail on the spot.

Another victimless crime of which these people tended to run afoul: “resisting arrest.” I’d never thought about this charge much, since it is a rather stupid thing to be disobedient to the police. Still, we must ask questions. To protect oneself from danger, threat, and capture is the most basic of all human instincts. We resist criminals. We duck when someone tries to hit us. Maybe we fight back if we think we can win. We lock our doors to deter invasion and to protect our property and person. The right to resist being captured is the very heart of the idea of security.

Why is it that we are expected to utterly gut our instinct for self protection when the cops, for any reason they happen to manufacture on the spot, say we must? It doesn’t matter if we are guilty or innocent, whether the cop is wonderful or wholly corrupt, or whether the crime was tiny or big: we must immediately turn into human rag dolls and obey our masters. And if we do not, and instead we walk away or run, we can be tasered and shot unto death. (The highly disturbing video of the Utah cop tasering the fellow who didn’t want to sign a ticket provides fundamental insight here.)

Think what it means to criminalize what they call resistance. It means what we believe to be our rights and our freedom are really grants of privilege by the state and they can be instantly revoked on the whim of anyone with a badge. These poor souls in the courtroom were all under the illusion that they were free agents; they therefore ran and resisted when confronted with danger to themselves. Now they are learning otherwise.

But what about the actual crimes in the courtroom that day? A lady had stuffed a package of sliced ham or something into her purse while shopping at Wal-Mart. She was fined $800 and had her license taken away.

What do you have to say for yourself, asked the judge. “I’m very sorry. I need to find other ways to deal with my lack of money,” she answered.

Yes, you do, because “we will not tolerate theft in this town,” unless, he might have added, it is done by the judge under the cover of the law.

Oh, one more thing. This lady was banned from Wal-Mart for life. Now, this sounds extreme, but it was the only decision taken that day that had the feel of something potentially reasonable. Might Wal-Mart have handed down this penalty itself? Isn’t this a good principle, keeping the thieves away from its store? Makes sense, perhaps not for a lifetime but perhaps for a year or two.

But there is one problem. Wal-Mart can’t do that. Its shopping space is considered under federal law to be a “public space,” even though it is entirely privately owned. You can’t decide who you are going to let in or out so long as you charge no membership fee. You have to accept all comers. Only the state can ban people from public property. And so Wal-Mart must use the state’s services. It is coerced like everyone else. A compassionate and reasonable private solution is against the law.

But keep in mind that this was a case of theft. The others had done no harm to anyone.

The machine continued to operate. The judge hardly looked up, not even to notice how well these nice but exceedingly poor people had dressed in an attempt to impress him. They and their lives meant nothing. It was all about keeping the machine working.

Finally 11 a.m. rolls around. The court has already raised for itself some $20,000, from my calculation. The judge says that there will be a short recess before he hears the not-guilty cases, mine among them. He will then assign public defenders to those whose income is low enough and then schedule jury hearings.

In other words, I would have to wait and then return at some later date. I realized that there was more involved in beating tickets than I knew. I would need to make it my vocation—and might not prevail.

My kids, who had come with me, persuaded me that this was hopeless and ridiculous and very costly. I should declare my guilt and pay the $200 and be free. They didn’t want their dad entangled anymore in this system. This is what I did, and I was free to go and join the multitudes who put up with this system of blackmail and money extraction every hour and know better than to attempt to use the system to challenge it.

Most people in my position would have never gone to court, and they will never see just how cruel this system is for the poor, for minorities, and for everyone who gets tangled up in this web of coercion and legalized plunder.

But now I understand something more fully that I once only understood abstractly. I see how utterly ridiculous it is to think that the state can be the right means to help those who are poor or living at the margins of society. The state is their enemy, as it is for everyone else.

34

Officer Kanapsky, is it?

September 9, 2008

It’s a suburban neighborhood, on Sunday morning. There is a three-way stop at which hardly anyone ever goes the other direction than the main one. But you often see a police car in the nearby parking lot, keeping his sharp eye out for evil lawbreakers. These are the dangerous criminals who slow down almost to a full stop that causes the car to shift back the other direction, but don’t quite do this. Instead they do what is sometimes called a “rolling stop” which stops short of full immobilization.The policeman in the car regards this as “running a stop sign,” as if you paid no attention to it at all, and he’ll give you a ticket whenever he catches you doing it.

From the policeman’s point of view, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. One recent empirical accounting at this intersection (I dragooned some neighborhood kids into keeping count) observed that more than 9 in 10 people do not come to what the law regards as a “full stop.”

I should know about this because, try as I might to be a law-abiding citizen, I have now received my fifth ticket this year at this very intersection one block from my house. That’s not a typo. Five! I know it sounds crazy—why the heck can’t I obey those who are ordained to keep me safe?—but when you consider that I go through this intersection several times per day, I’m actually doing rather well.

It goes without saying that this is a racket. The city is many hundreds of dollars richer because of my penchant for lawbreaking alone, and probably hundreds of thousands richer if you include everyone else’s.

But it wasn’t until someone drew my attention to this link, (http://www.motorists.org/blog/traffic-tickets/police-officer-raise-stop-sign-tickets/) that I understood the full extent of what this whole racket is about. Yes, it’s about money. But there is more to it than that. You see, it turns out that I’m an archetype, a person who rolls through stop signs in my safe neighborhood and then gets outraged when the ticket is issued and attempts to “fight authority” rather than pay up. So, fool that I am, I actually believe in “challenging the system.” I take seriously the claim that I’m innocent until proven guilty. Can you believe the naïveté?

It’s typical of suburbanites. We challenge tickets, especially frivolous ones. And this, it turns out, is precisely what the police want us to do, for reasons explained below.

So on the appointed court day, I leave the office to go to the courthouse to fight this ridiculous ticket. I sit for hours and hours until I’m given a chance to declare my innocence. All the while, the cop who stopped me stands at the back of the courtroom with his arms folded over his bulletproof chest. He is heavily armed. I, on the other hand, was searched before I even walked in.

If at this point I declare my innocence, I am given the opportunity for a trial with my own attorney, whom I must pay because I’m not poor enough to have the court appoint a lawyer even if I wanted it to. This trial is scheduled for sometime in the future, which means another trip to the courthouse, and another opportunity for the cop to enjoy the air-conditioned surroundings of the courtroom he rules. What chance is there for me? In the end, I would probably have to declare myself guilty of something or other, and pay a lesser fine; meanwhile I will have missed at least two days of work.

What’s going on here turns out to do with the way policemen are paid. According to federal labor law, they are only allowed to be scheduled for patrolling up to 40 hours per week, just as the rest of us can only be scheduled to work up to a certain number of hours. Courtroom time—and by subpoena, they have to be there—often counts as overtime, meaning 50 percent more than they are paid for patrolling during regular hours.

In the case examined by John Stossel on 20/20, a policeman named Officer Kanapsky made an additional $21,562 over his regular pay just by standing around in court. The more tickets he issued, especially for minor issues that outraged people are likely to challenge in court, the more money he made. This is a result of labor law. As the Department of Labor says, “An employer who requires or permits an employee to work overtime is generally required to pay the employee premium pay for such overtime work.”

Now it starts to make sense.You and I—his employers, so to speak—are paying a premium for his court time, which is why he spends his patrolling time trying to goad people into going to court. The policeman is being paid time and a half to waste our time and to cause our insurance rates to rise.

In the private sector, permission to work more than 40 hours per week is a real benefit to the employee and the employer, though the terms ought to be left to the contracting parties. But in police work, this overtime permission results in a scam that causes police to engage in low-risk, high-revenue-earning activities that exploit the population.

It occurs to everyone who is given a frivolous ticket: surely the cop’s time would be better spent stopping real crimes, not harassing nonthreatening citizens. Now we can better see why they do this. It may be a product of federal overtime rules, another case in which the ghost of FDR haunts us every day.

But what to do about it? Denounce the cop on the spot? That’s not a good idea. It strikes you immediately when you are stopped by a policeman that there is a huge disparity of power at work here. You are effectively captured by them. You must comply no matter what. They have the legal right to use any method to keep you quiet and docile and to punish you to the point of death if you resist.

YouTube is filled with clips showing people being subjected to the latest weapon of choice: the taser gun. The police love the taser gun. It leaves no trace of physical injury. You are shot through with electricity, which causes frightening physical and mental convulsions, but there is nothing you can take a picture of. No bruises. No wounds. No broken bones. This is all the better for them—and all the worse for you.

Never forget what happens to you if you decide to run instead. That’s a death sentence. Forget that the instinct to evade your captors is universal and deeply embedded in our mental/biological equipment. The state operates on the assumption that you are its slave when it wants you to be, and otherwise free in name only. This is especially true in the age of Bush, in which all police at all levels have morphed into militarized “security personnel.” The friendly, helpful policeman of old civics texts seems to be a thing of the past.

In any case, the phenomenon of Officer Kanapsky raises fundamental questions not only about federal labor law but also about the role of the police in any community. Do they really stop crime? Sure, they arrive after a crime has been committed; they take fingerprints (those only seem to work in the movies) and file reports. In real life, however, crime prevention is due to the private sector: locks, alarm systems, and the like.This is what prevents crimes from taking place.

The police aren’t so hot at prosecuting crime either, but for people who commit crimes like slowing down at a three-way stop. Yet we are all somehow under the illusion that the police are the reason we are safe. It is the core mythology of our civic religion.

If you do not believe that they do more good than harm, consider the unseen costs. What kind of private alternatives are being crowded out by the very presence of the police?

It is also deeply troubling that most people believe there aren’t too many police but too few. How many are too many? What if one in three people were a cop? One in two? Maybe we should have two cops for every one civilian. How safe we would be! Really, there is an ethos in this country that you can never have too many cops on the street, and the idea of hiring more nearly always garners public support.

And yet, when it comes right down to it on the particulars, we can’t stand the police. We keep a constant lookout for them when we drive. We dread being pulled over. We know in our hearts that they are out to get us, and represent more of a threat than a security for our freedoms.

In the end, we need to realize that the police are like all other government employees: self-interested, living off tax dollars, parasitical on our liberties. The case of Officer Kanapsky shows precisely how and why.

35

The Creation of the Bureaucrat

August 29, 2003

During the airport-security reform debate of 2001, Congress had the option of permitting the airlines more discretion in securing themselves from the threat of hijacking. Airline security had been imperfect—Federal Aviation Administration regulations prohibited commercial pilots from carrying guns, for example—but airlines themselves were capable of improving, and had every incentive to do so.

With the experience of September 11, airlines learned that the old wisdom concerning hijacking (calm the hijacker down and get him to land the plane) no longer applied. Instead, pilots needed the ability to protect person and property. Airlines discovered the dangers that might lurk in luggage and passenger carry-on bags. They were ready to screen passenger lists more carefully. Consumers, meanwhile, were more alert to security issues, and the airlines would have had to compete on the basis of the most superior security, in addition to the usual considerations of price, reliability, and comfort. The industry could have responded to real threats without creating unnecessary passenger inconvenience.

But instead, Congress, with the blessing of the White House, short circuited the market process. Paid by government, working for government, and identifying with its interests, the bulk of political decision makers naturally see government as the answer to every major problem. They view the “market” as uncertain and untrustworthy, something to be granted liberality on unessential matters but to be restricted and restrained in all essentials.

Hence, the laws regulating airline security were not liberalized. Instead, Congress created a new bureaucracy, the Transportation Security Administration, to be put in charge of airline security. A National Screening Force was established to examine all bags. Not only that: the government decided to charge consumers a fee (who could object?) for the right to enjoy its newly provided security. This is after taxpayers had already shelled out trillions of dollars to the government to provide defense against terrorism, only to discover that there really was no security against suicidal militants carrying box cutters.

At the time when airport security was nationalized, John McCain said: “This, I think, with the president’s signature, will give Americans confidence that their government and their Congress and their president are doing everything possible to improve airport security as rapidly as possible.”

But doing everything that the government finds possible isn’t the same thing as doing what is necessary according to the assessment of the owners of the airlines and the customers who use them. The TSA has no connection at all to owners and customers. As a result, it is now common for people who fly to return with amazing stories of humiliating and unwarranted intrusions, harassment, and bureaucratic delays. As to whether security has actually been enhanced, it’s anyone’s guess.

Most pilots are still unarmed. Those that are had to face a thicket of red tape, including an intimidating psychological evaluation, in the course of a government training program undertaken on their own time. Once they are given the right to protect plane and passengers, pilots must still carry their firearm in a lockbox. Meanwhile, federal flight marshals are still rare.

Average passengers, who have borne the brunt of the costs of security guidelines, must obey a codified list of items that can and cannot be carried on planes. Box cutters are outlawed for politically understandable reasons—given government’s propensity to protect us all from past threats. Why are people allowed to carry cigar cutters but not razor blades, knitting needles but not ice picks, and nail files but not tiny scissors is anyone’s guess.

What makes the people who drew up the list, as versus the airlines themselves, any greater experts on the likelihood that these objects will or will not be used in terrorism? A person who intends to do harm in the sky isn’t likely to be deterred by having his cuticle scissors confiscated. Remember too that any object that can be used for terrorism can also be used to protect against terrorism; stripping passengers of anything that could be used as an offensive weapon also takes away items that could be used for defensive purposes.

As for bureaucrats now running airport security, they are obeying orders from above, not responding to market needs. They face no competition, have no access to a feedback mechanism of profit and loss, and they lack every incentive to actually make good managerial judgments that would lead to enhanced security. They are not owners but rather outsiders to the market process, blind to the needs of consumers, inattentive to the interests of the airlines, and disregarding of the various tradeoffs associated with choosing one method over another.

All of these results could be known in advance, and critics of the program warned that this would be the result. But it is still something remarkable to observe in real life, as I did on a recent flight. Upon entering the airport, confusion was everywhere. No effort was made to make the system transparent to regular people. There were huge scanning contraptions with bags sitting on the conveyor belt (who owns the contract for those and how did they get it?) but it wasn’t clear whether one’s own bags were supposed to be placed on them or what would happen to them after. What was clear, given the employee badges and demeanor, is that passengers would be in lots of trouble if they did the wrong thing.

The bags took an age to go through, and anything suspicious would prompt the federal employees to open up the bag and wipe a tiny cloth on the contents inside, in four different places. I suppose this is to check for explosives. They then examined the cloth to observe any discoloring. The whole process had the appearance of silly ritual, not an actual security check. What was especially striking was the speed of the operation. The entire airport had passengers and airline employees bustling about here and there. But the federal employees seemed to work outside of time itself, completely oblivious to the tempo around them. They lacked any sign of vigor or initiative.

These federal employees seemed to be vaguely in charge of all things between the time the passengers entered the airport and when they did the final pass beyond the last X-ray machine. They seemed disparaging of the needs of passengers, stationing five employees in a spot where it should take one, and assigning one employee to do a job that should take five. They were probably all nice people but they acted like caricatures of government bureaucrats: at once belligerent and ignorant, threatening and uninterested, detached and intrusive. Their main job seemed to be to muck up the system, and revel in the fact that they were in charge. This was Martin van Creveld’s “impersonal state” at work.

Security is a service like any another. When the market is in charge, it is something provided when, how, and to what extent it is needed. Risk assessment is crucial. There is no sense in wasting resources on nonexistent threats. Those contracted to provide security must be in a position to respond to the needs of the moment, change their tactics, and outwit the threat. Those who do the job best are rewarded and those who fail are weeded out of the market. Competitive pressures lead to constant improvements in methods and continually falling costs.

The bureau in charge of federal security today bears none of these traits. This isn’t because of culpable negligence or incompetence, though surely these factors play a role. It is because they stand outside the market system and are not thus responding to the needs of producers and consumers. Though it is a new bureaucracy, its employees already fit the classic description as given by Ludwig von Mises: “they shun innovations and improvements. They look on every project for reform as a disturbance of their quiet.” The absence of market mechanisms “creates insoluble problems. It kills ambition, destroys initiative and the incentive to do more than the minimum required. It makes the bureaucrat look at instructions, not at material and real success.” (Bureaucracy, 1944, pp. 60–61).

Sullen and incompetent employees are a feature of the private sector too, of course. The crucial difference is that in the market economy, forces are at work to systematically punish the bureaucratic impulse and replace it with something more spectacular: vigor, innovation, and genuine public service to others. In the private sector, failure is punished with losses. After 9-11, we saw what happens when government-provided security fails: government grows.

The success or failure of the Transportation Security Administration will come up for review in a couple of years. We already know what will happen. Plenty of failures will be spotted, as well as many imagined successes.

Regardless of the record, the bureaucracy won’t be abolished. It will be “reformed,” especially given that a huge new lobbying force now has every reason to push Congress to retain the system. The one reform that the system most needs—namely, to be subjected to the competitive pressures of the market—is not possible in the current framework. The only real solution is the one that Congress rejected back when it had the chance for real reform: total privatization.

36

Stop Signs and Liberty

July 14, 2009

And then one day the stop sign was gone. It was the very stop sign one block from my house that was oddly stationed at a low-traffic, three-way intersection, tempting every driver to slow down but not come to a complete stop.

How the city cleaned up on that one! I have personally coughed up in excess of $1,000 for tickets there, one time receiving two tickets in as many days. This sign was even the reason that I spent a day in jail for failing to fork over when the judge said I should.

I’m not alone: 93% of the drivers failed to come to a complete stop. Even so, I’m routinely lectured that my job as a citizen is to do precisely as I’m told. I’ve learned to habitually stop completely, even when the place looks like a ghost town, with no cars anywhere in view.

Then one day the stop sign vanished.

What happened here? Did the cops finally get all the citizens trained to stop and thereby dissipate their opportunity for rents? Was there just no more money to be made from the disobedient?

Do I get a refund? How about compensation for the day I spent in jail? What about everyone else?

The local government must have extracted tens of thousands of dollars before good sense overcame our overlords and they decided to relent to reality. But no, there will not be compensation. The law changed its mind, and we are supposed to just deal with it. Now I must rehabituate myself to breaking—I mean keeping—the law.

One day, I’m jailed for failing to stop. Presumably, I could now get a ticket for stopping, since surely there is a law against suddenly stopping on a public road for no reason other than some vague memory than one had to in the past.

What is evil one day is mandatory the next.

Now, I know what some readers are thinking: here we go with the libertarian wacko complaining about the “coercion” of stop signs. For decades, conservatives have been poking fun, caricaturing libertarians as people who rail against stop signs and thereby reveal their personal problem with authority—even such obviously justified authority as government stop signs.

Don’t we understand that these keep us safe, and so surely we should be willing to give up just a bit of license to speed around with abandon in the interest of the common good?

Even now, a quick google of “libertarians” and “stop signs” reveals many people on the Left and the Right who think it is just stupidly hilarious that libertarians talk about these issues.

As a matter of fact, the management of the roads is a hugely important issue, given that tens of thousands of people die on government roads every year. Private ownership would in fact lead to greater liability for the road owner—and also more rational rules of the road. The private road would be devoted to serving the customers, not looting them at the point of a gun. And not only are private roads viable; there is a long history and a present practice to draw on.

Walter Block’s new book on road privatization makes the case that this is not an issue to ignore but one to solve through free enterprise.

In some ways, then, it is true that the stop sign—as with every regulation by the state—embodies all that is wrong with the public sector. The rules are made to benefit the state. You are on the hot seat if any policeman says that you have done wrong. The pretense of a fair trial is a complete farce, as you have to tangle with judges who hate you, waste several days of work, and throw yourself on the mercy of the court. Once you are entangled in the web, you can’t really get out.

And who makes the rules? The central planners make the rules, and the public be damned. The rules are there to serve the state, not us, and the stop sign that is oddly placed in order to extract revenue makes the point very well.

When you are stopped, you become aware that the imbalance between the citizens and the state couldn’t be more obvious. Deliver an insult and you are arrested. Try to run and you are gunned down. Fail to pay and you end up in the slammer. And maybe the cop will find something else about your life to be suspicious of. Whatever they want to know, you must tell them.

Government is not reason; it is force. What was the actual social rationale for that stop sign in the first place? You dare not ask, for then you are questioning the elites who are in charge of your life. And why was it removed? It’s not for you to question why; it is for you to do or die. It was there and now it is gone. All “law-abiding citizens” must change with the arbitrary dictate of the traffic masters.

Now, I’m not saying that we don’t need rules in society. But the question of who makes the rules and on what basis becomes supremely important. Will the rule-making flow from the matrix of voluntary exchange based on the ethic of serving others through private enterprise? Or will the rules be made and enforced by people wearing guns and bulletproof vests with a license to shock or kill based on minor annoyances?

Something as seemingly innocuous as a stop sign can become the occasion for the use of terrible violence and terrible oppression. And think about it: we are talking about local government which is especially sensitive to public opinion. If we see corruption here, what about at the national level, where the citizens are nothing but an abstraction?

So, no, I have no problem with making the stop sign a symbol of the fight. It shows that even the least objectionable aspects of the state can mask despotism and that we should think hard—very hard—before ever ceding control of even the smallest parts of life to the state.

Ultimately, the state is in control or we are.

There is nothing in between.