The Real Enemy of Liberty; R. J. Bidinotto

Packing up and moving to a new home is emotionally wrenching and physically gru eling. It's especially difficultif you love your old residence, as we did. It was a big house on a tree-lined street. It had lots of dark oak throughout, a charming dining room, and a finished attic that held my library and office. In addition, we had many fine neighbors who organized annual parties and cleanup days for our block. And our mortgage was outrageously low. So why did we move? The decidingfactor was the mounting threat of crime in the neighborhood. Breakins, thefts, and vandalism, once rare, were on the rise. A wonderful Victo rian place at the end of our block, vacant for some time, had in recent months been sys tematically stripped of its chandeliers, bev eled glass windows, and fireplace mantel pieces. Today it's a boarded-up eyesore. Last summer, a block away, a youth ar rested repeatedly for arson set his own apartment house on fire. Afew nights before we moved, the young couple across the street scared off a prowler trying to force entry in their home.

All this was eroding neighborhood mo rale. Attendance at our latest annual block party was poor. Some neighbors had given Mr. Bidinotto is a Staff Writer for Reader's Digest and a longtime contributor to The Free man. Criminal Justice? The Legal System Versus Individual Responsibility, edited by Mr. Bidi notto and published by FEE, is available at $29.95 in cloth and $19.95 in paperback. P~ease see this month's Notes from FEE for detazls. by Robert James Bidinotto up and were neglectingtheir own houses a~d lawns. Families with children-the bedrock of any community-were either relocating or talking about it. The trend was unmistakable.So with great regret we bailedout, evicted from a home we loved by the threat of predatory crime. Viewed statistically, crime is horrific enough. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statis tics reports that there are some 34 million personal and household victimizations an nually-a figure that doesn't even include commercial and business crime. Moreover, our streets and communities are far less safe than they used to be. In 1960, only 161 violent crimes were recorded for every 100,000 people. By 1991, there were 758 violent crimes per 100,000people. In other words, in just 30 years the violent crime rate, per capita, has nearly quintupled.

But statistics can't capture many of the other costs criminals impose on society. Consider, for example, the waste, disrup tion, and pain this single move has inflicted upon my family. Start with the loss of a home we loved and neighbors we treasured. Then there were the costs of locating, pur chasing, mortgaging, and renovating a sub stantially more expensive home in a neigh borhood with much higher property taxes costs that will amount to many tens of thousands of dollars over the years. Add to this the physical demands and economic impact of the move itself; the time lost from work and other pursuits; the hefty price tag of reinstalling utilities at the new home; the outlays for everything from new furnishings to new business cards and stationery and a new kennel for our dogs (kept largely for security-another hidden cost of crime). If you add such expenses, and many n?t mentioned, to similar costs borne by ml1 lions of other citizens, you'll get a tiny hint of the enormous impact crime is having upon all aspects of American life.

According to the polls, crime is the num ber one concern of the public. Yet curiously, 696 the problem has gotten scant attention from most proponents of the free market system. To read libertarian journals, you'd get the impression that the only crime problems are those artificially created by intrusive gov ernment regulations and the illegality of drugs. In the absence of such interventions, some argue, crime would largely disappear. This naive perspective is utterly demol ished by the outstanding essays which I have compiled for the newly released FEE volume, Criminal Justice? The Legal Sys tem Versus Individual Responsibility. Peo ple don't commit crimes because stupid laws "forced" them to, any more than because any other aspect of their environ ment "forced" them to. Criminality is a matter of freely-chosen values; and today's crime wave is the result of decades ofassault on our most basic cultural and moral values.

Why have so few inside the free market and libertarian camps come to grips with the crime problem? I think because many of them tacitly maintain a double standard about violations of individual rights. Free marketeers typically posit govern ment per se as the "enemy" of individual rights and liberty. Of course, an unlimited state certainly can be the worst enemy of individual rights, as the bloody history of this century grimly attests. However, in their eagerness to denounce governmental violations of rights, these same individuals ignore the very evils that governments were established to eradicate: individual viola tions of rights. Some years ago I wrote about the plight of Simon Geller, an elderly radio station owner then threatened with cancellation of his FCC broadcast license on the grounds of programming content. This was an uncon scionable instance of attempted plunder, and violation of the man's First Amendment rights, by federal officials.

But I have also written extensively about the far more common plunders and preda tions imposed upon innocent victims by ordinary criminals. Consider that during 1992 alone, there were an estimated 12,211,000personal thefts and an additional 14,817,000household thefts. 697 Were these actual violations of property rights by criminals any less real or devas tating to their victims, than the threatened violation of rights that Simon Geller faced from FCC bureaucrats? Then why treat gov ernmental violations of rights as somehow far worse than private violations of rights? As our Founders knew, government does have a legitimate role: to respond forcibly against any initiation of force or coercion. But many proponents of laissez faire, habit uated to viewing government as "the ene my," can't bring themselves to admit that there is, indeed, a place for vigorous gov ernment intervention: intervention against private violations of individual rights.

To acknowledge the full scope of preda tory activity in modern American society, free marketeers would have to concede the need for a tough, ambitious governmental response. Yet to acknowledge any justifi able role for government flies in the face of many libertarians' utopian fantasies about "market alternatives to the state." For too long, the free market argument has ignored the very real value concerns of the public. Americans typically feel irritated and exasperated by politicians; but by con trast, they feel profoundly frightened and threatened by criminals. What are they to think of those who magnify government evils but minimize private ones-who try to convince them that their rights and liberties are far more jeopardized by the local post man than by the neighborhood pedophile? The public rightly finds this dispropor tionate and silly. The free market case loses all credibility when its advocates dismiss Americans' very real and immediate fears, while magnifying those that remain more distant and even hypothetical.

Typing these words with battered fingers, surrounded by unopened boxes from an exhausting move, helps put things back in proportion. It was not the government, after all, but crime, that caused me this unwel come disruption. All violations of rights are equally evil. And the real enemy of liberty is anyone public or private-who would violate indi vidual rights. D THEFREEMAN IDEASON LIBERtY Health-Care Reform: Deja Vu All Over Again by Steven Horwitz and Ronald M. Horwitz I magine that a major sector of the econ omy is widely thought to be in crisis: it consistently fails to provide the expected level of service; it leaves people without access to its product; and everyone agrees that it needs to be dramatically reformed. Imagine further that study commissions are formed and retreats are held using the tal ents of industry, academia, and government to diagnose the problem and provide solu tions. Imagine also that virtually allinvolved are convinced that more government inter vention is the answer but they want to avoid centralized, public sector solutions.