For The Private Production Of Security

As we vote, and are encouraged to do so by many who imagine they are doing “something good,” it might be pertinent to ask ourselves the fundamental question of political science:

Why do “wee, the sheeple” set up The State?

The Great Socialist State that exists today does too many things – The State runs oil and gas companies, banks, fertilizer factories and steel plants, hotels and airlines, railways, electricity companies, roads monopolies, water supply monopolies – and all this apart from running courts and police.

Recent events have highlighted the fact that, just as we need to re-examine the IAS, so we must also take a close look at the IPS, the cutting edge of Coercive State Power.

And this cutting edge of State Power is much too mingled up in the “politics” of The State – they guard all the candidates.

But how do they serve the people?

What about the traffic police?

One lakh people die every year on Indian roads: about 350 a day. This is two and a half times more than the USA. The USA has 830 cars per 1000 population. India has 15 cars per 1000 population. But still, 100,000 die every year.

The automobile revolution is on us.

How will we be safe on the roads?

How will we be safe at all?

There are terrorists, Naxals, militants of all kinds.

So how will we be safe?

There is the police from The State.

And the other way is the “private production of security,” a line of thinking that dates back to Gustave de Molinari, who was a close associate of Bastiat and the editor-in-chief of their Journal des Economistes. Molinari’s essay is available here.

There is much that has since been written on the “private production of security,” and I especially recommend Bruce Benson’s The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without The State. Buy it here.

But do try and look at it commonsensically: with locks, guards and watchmen, we are already protecting ourselves via the free market, outside The State. Amit Verma’s post on watchmen misses the point – which is the “private production of security.”

I am on that side.

I uphold the Right to Bear Arms.

So where have we now arrived in our examination of the primary question:

Why do wee the sheeple set up The State?

Allow me to quote the opening paragraphs of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, a brief pamphlet that was of great influence during the American Revolution of 1776. Its full title is:

COMMON SENSE OF THE ORIGIN AND DESIGN OF GOVERNMENT IN GENERAL. WITH CONCISE REMARKS ON THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION


Paine begins:

SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil, in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities are heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer! Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.

(Read the entire text here.)

Common sense says wee the sheeple set up The State for our security, and that alone.

And yet, even here, wee the sheeple of India would be better off relying on private agencies. They guard the malls and multiplexes, the factories and the offices, banks, apartment houses, homes and even entire localities. They make us “feel” secure, in so many ways that The State Police cannot ever match.

Someone told me that private security agencies are the number one growth industry in India right now.

If so, they represent an important economic phenomenon for those who believe in the “private production of security,” followers of Gustave de Molinari, friend and associate of Frederic Bastiat.

So where have we arrived? Our question was:

Why do wee the sheeple set up The State?

Common sense says security, and common experience says that this vital security is now increasingly being provided by competing private firms.

We need to encourage this industry.

And think of security in those terms.