In the last week or so, events have indeed been moving very quickly. For a few days, we were looking at a resurgence of the coronavirus, and “conservatives” expressed concern that Black Lives Matter protestors were violating quarantine to march, even though a few weeks ago they thought that white people marching together with guns and no masks against coronavirus restrictions were just defending their civil rights. (I wonder what changed?)
But the big news right now is a social movement/hashtag to #DefundThePolice. Since I’m more of a bleeding-heart-libertarian, some might ask what my opinion is on the idea to pull money and power away from a part of government most people actually like.
My reaction is, “Great! Can we do the Pentagon next?”
Given that libertarians have been saying for QUITE some time that police have far more paramilitary firepower than most districts need, and that much of the history of our increasingly federalized and militarized law enforcement is an attempt to clamp down on black people in particular, the question is why this idea, which is not really that new, is only now suddenly becoming popular. Maybe because the party that always thinks government is the best solution is finally starting to realize that it isn’t. Meanwhile the right-wingers who claim that government can’t do anything right suddenly change their tune when it comes to beating people up.
Well, on the bright side, in the increasingly likely event that the November elections wipe the Republican Party like the fecal matter it has become, “conservatives” might suddenly remember that libertarianism is about maintaining a healthy skepticism towards government in general, and not just giving intellectual support to the ulterior motives of Koch Industries.
But on another level, “Defund the Police” is just another example of the Left failing to pitch its ideas beyond their own audience because they assume that everyone is on the same page. Like how we had to start saying “climate change” because the Right were able to joke about freak snowstorms in May as an example of “global warming.” Or how they use “white privilege” to describe the normal state of affairs – not getting harassed by police, not being disadvantaged in applying for a loan, going out to vote, et cetera, as though this was a “privilege” that is unearned and needs to be ended instead of a set of rights that ought to be extended to all. Just as white people see “privilege” as normalcy, most of us see the police as functional and constructive (at least until very recently), and using the shorthand phrase without defining what we mean by “police” and what we mean by “defund” is what allows the Party of Trump to sell us-vs.-them rhetoric that would otherwise not be feasible. Some people hear “Defund the Police” and think “Who’s gonna protect me from armed robbery?”
I may seem flippant, but this is a serious moment. Just as Viceroy Trump in trashing the “norms” that the duopoly held to as a substitute for Constitutional government has thrown out the idea that the standards in Washington are fixed and unchangeable, events in Minneapolis are moving towards historic change. There is now a very strong likelihood that at least one major city will in fact end its police force as they had previously known it. This is not a hypothetical. If you’re going to end a major part of local government, what does that mean, and what follows it?
Some of what I’m getting at was well-addressed in a column from Jim Wright, no Ayn Rand fan he:
Most of this extremely extended piece is basically Jim posting and referring to the various idiots he has debated this issue with on Twitter, but I direct you to skip towards the later part, where he says: “The current government of America is a pretty good example of what happens when you don’t demand the details up front.”
I have gone over this more than once, and I’m gonna have to do it again: During the Obama Administration, Republicans spent at least six years hopping mad about “socialist” Obamacare, they spent six years voting for repeal after repeal that they knew would get vetoed, and they had six years to come up with a plan that would be better (since even liberals, or especially liberals, knew the ACA has much to be desired). They had a successful candidate for President who asked that the Republican-run Congress give him an Obamacare repeal and replacement that he could sign on Day One. And of course, they didn’t do that. And as I’ve also said, that lack of policy is not simply unhelpful, it is actually harmful to the political movement. Rather than “repeal and replace,” Republicans clearly want to get rid of the current healthcare system without having a serious alternative in mind other than going back to the status quo ante, and if people liked that, we never would have had the Affordable Care Act. And once it became obvious that Republicans planned to kill one of the few parts of government that everybody (including their senior citizen constituents) actually liked, this position became a liability to Republicans in the midterms, and one reason they lost the House in 2018. Similarly, if the other faction of duopoly gets taken over by its scalphunter contingent, and they push an agenda that they have not defined and don’t really know how to pass, they will be in the same fix as the Republicans – either let the institution (in this case, local police) hobble along in a crippled state, which becomes a liability to them as the party in power, or try to outright eliminate one of the few institutions that (however imperfect) most people still want to have. The third alternative, which Republicans never had the imagination to work on, would be to have an actual repeal-and-replace program.
And there are ideas for that. The Movement for Black Lives site says that “communities most harmed by destructive policing (should) have the power to hire and fire officers, determine disciplinary action, control budgets and policies, and subpoena relevant agency information.” It also mentions (under ‘End The War On Black People’) “an end to zero-tolerance school policies and arrests of students, the removal of police from schools, and the reallocation of funds from police and punitive school discipline practices to restorative services” as well as “An end to money bail, mandatory fines, fees, court surcharges and ‘defendant funded’ court proceedings”, “the end to the use of technologies that criminalize and target our communities (including IMSI catchers, drones, body cameras, and predictive policing software) ” and “An immediate end to the privatization of police, prisons, jails, probation, parole, food, phone and all other criminal justice related services.”
Yeah, but… we get into details. In particular, body cameras and software are ostensibly intended as a means of making police more accountable to the public, and, as with having police in schools, would require rethinking some of the security procedures that were already instituted by public demand, and admitting that maybe they aren’t working.
Moreover, as with rethinking an “education” system whose funding is largely dependent on local property values, we need to recognize how much of this bullshit law enforcement system is based on a need to fund government, or make it self-funding as in the case of privatizing services. It is certainly not news that institutions seek to perpetuate themselves, and as with ticket quotas and adding fines and fees for things that previously didn’t used to require such, we create more, not less, incentive for government to be intrusive and oppressive. You could certainly add more income and property taxes into the system so that the funding isn’t so regressive, but that simply shifts the issue and raises the question of how many of these government “services” we actually need.
It’s almost as if, in seeking to remove only one support pillar of a system that seems especially problematic, we find out how many other parts of the system need to be questioned!
In summary, leftists: Be careful what you wish for, smash the state, and thank you for boosting libertarianism!