Russ Roberts talks with Glenn Loury, who says,
the descendants of American slaves, again, taken as a whole, are the richest and most powerful and influential population of African descent on the planet.
So, the idea that we want to scrap the [capitalist] system and start from scratch–as I say, I think it’s a very mischievous idea.
Later, Loury says,
if you brought some of the empathy for the public servants, who were teachers, over to a sense of empathy for the extremely difficult job of being a police officer in an American city, and you brought some of the sense of judgment and insistence upon accountability that is reflexively invoked when we talk about police officers over to talking about how we want to think about our public servants who are providing educational services, I think we’d all be better off.
And of course there is more.
Solve for the equilibrium;
Let’s say that it makes sense – from the progressive movement currently, from law enforcement, and from the Democratic Party – to vote to eliminate all Federal ownership of lands. DC statehood, Puerto Rico, Guam – this is a huge Democratic goal – and now getting rid of courthouses. But many western states are more than 50% federally owned, not just parks, and ranches, but also including huge oil reserves (Strategic reserve). Then we add in the recent Supreme Court ruling about the better part of a state actually having been ceded years ago to a native American tribe.
So what would this devolution do?
And then there is this one detail: most of the military bases are in Red states. Most of the recruits, too. Except perhaps the Navy… so what does this do to the outcome? What about those retired military leaders who spoke up for the Progressives and the social experiment that has been conducted in the military for decades?
What are the implications?
“… to vote to eliminate all Federal ownership of lands.”
Huh? Progressives are consistently against ending federal ownership or control of public lands, and often against even allowing natural resource extraction to occur on that land. See, e.g., the recent resistance to Pendley at BLM.
On police:
In my city, the police are employees of the citizens, and employees of the Mayor and City Council.
What decent employer would tolerate abuse of his/her employees? If I ran a McDonalds, and someone was attacking the employees, I would try to defend the employees, like any decent employer.
I am appalled that it is somehow tolerable (in Seattle, Portland, Chicago) that people throw missiles or worse at police officers–would this be tolerated if rocks were thrown at teachers, firefighters, streetlight repairmen and so on?
We need a mayor somewhere to say, “The police are my employees and of the city, and we will not tolerate anyone abusing our employees.”
We need a mayor somewhere to say, “The police are my employees and of the city, and we will not tolerate anyone abusing our employees.”
…even if they abuse you or your family?
Ben, my namesake: in fact I was mildly abused by County Sheriffs as a youth, when I lived in Altadena, California.
Does that justify later violence against police officers anywhere?
Yes people are just not deferential enough to cops. Yeah thats it.
Glenn Loury is criminally underrated. Thanks for the pointer.
@Benjamin Cole: If you ran a McDonalds, and an employee was utilizing excessive, occasionally lethal, force against the people they are serving, would you do anything to prevent that?
Frustration and anger with our current system started with police abuse of power (and victimless crimes that make police the enemy of many people), not with police being attacked by citizens.
If I ran a McDonald’s where customers frequently shot at my employees, I’d probably take that into account when evaluating their use of force.
An unrelated Mac Donald: “In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population.”
https://www.city-journal.org/html/hard-data-hollow-protests-15458.html
“the descendants of American slaves, again, taken as a whole, are the richest and most powerful and influential population of African descent on the planet.
So, the idea that we want to scrap the [capitalist] system and start from scratch–as I say, I think it’s a very mischievous idea.”
Let’s remind people that M. L. King rejected communism:
“King began preaching on “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity” in 1952, repeating sermons on the same theme throughout his career and including one as a chapter in his 1963 volume of sermons, Strength to Love. Communism’s presence demanded “sober discussion,” he preached, because “Communism is the only serious rival to Christianity” (Strength, 93). King critiqued communism’s ethical relativism, which allowed evil and destructive means to justify an idealistic end. Communism, wrote King, “robs man of that quality which makes him man,” that is, being a “child of God” (Strength, 95).”
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/communism
The inconsistency is more stark. For education, the literature points to the null hypothesis, while for policing, the literature says that the impact on crime with respect to policing is highly elastic.
It makes sense–sometimes public policy makes a big difference–other times not.
James Q. Wilson asserted that in most male age cohorts, 6% of the population commits 60% of the crime. This is in one of his old articles that is not paywalled at the _Commentary_ archives. Really it’s not paywalled if you work at it–you can read everything he wrote there for free.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/james-wilson/what-to-do-about-crime/
Thus, we can argue plausibly, if you can make it harder for that 6% of the population to commit crimes, and you incarcerate those who commit crimes, crime goes down. For a while NYC had mobile vans to arrest farebeats who were found to be carrying weapons and / or with outstanding arrest warrants.
New York City’s homicide rate went down more than 80% from peak to trough. Thus, the response of crime to policing is empirically demonstrated to be highly elastic.
We just don’t get that same impact in education. We are discussing different variables–also one is a good thing (education) and another is preventing a bad thing (crime).
Part of the issue is that the one person can commit a lot of crimes. In contrast, each student can only get one diploma. We can’t produce an elastic response in education by getting the super diligent students to earn a diploma for himself / herself and then for 9 other people.
In contrast, sometimes we can arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate someone who has killed one person and may go one to kill more people if not brought to justice.
Teacher union v cops union, battling for limited taxpayer funds.
The socialism is so precious it must be reserved for our first responders!!!
It’s telling that by sounding sane and rational in comparison to the mainstream chuckleheads, Loury and Roberts seem insightful. And they do have many useful, intelligent things to say that listeners might be able to apply to their local communities.
Unfortunately though they just take for granted that something is wrong with the police and that cedes way to much ground to the powers of inanity.
They start with the ritual invocation of St. George:
“In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and other deaths of blacks at the hands of police…”. As if the police injected him with the fentanyl that killed him.
The toxicology reports show George had blood concentrations of fentanyl at multiple times a lethal dose and the films show that at no time was an officer’s knee placed on the front of George’s throat which is the only place that breathing could have been obstructed.
In a just world every idiot pundit claiming that police killed George would be sued into bankruptcy. But in the corrupt USA court system, when the mob wants a lynching, the mob is going to get a lynching.
Policing is a local matter, just like schooling. Reforms will only work when adopted at the local level with the support of local citizens. If you, me, Loury, Roberts or anyone else wants to change how something is done in their community, then go participate in the local process. Else, you are just blowing smoke and giving cover to the crazed lunatics in the streets.