Consider the phrase “De-fund the police” from a three-axes perspective.
From the oppressor-oppressed perspective, it sounds like a call to take resources away from oppressors and give them to the oppressed.
From a civilization-barbarism perspective, it sounds like a call to undermine civilization and pave the way for barbarism.
From a liberty-coercion perspective, it sounds like a misdirected effort. Excess coercion comes from unnecessary laws and unaccountable enforcement. For libertarians, reform would start with having fewer laws. Those who enforce the laws should be accountable for acting within the law themselves.
As is often the case these days, the libertarian view sounds the most sensible to me, followed by the conservative view. As to the progressive view, I understand the emotion but not the logic.
Hi Arnold, as so often is the case, it seems to me the three axes model tends to conceal the essential unity between conservatives and libertarians. Here, the “civilization” that conservatives seek to defend is precisely mutual respect in liberty under law. The reforms you say that libertarians would seek – fewer laws, applying the laws to government officials equally with the citizenry – are favored by conservatives as well. Whether the name given is “civilization” or “liberty”, they are the same.
If there is a conservative-libertarian difference, it seems to be not so much in the policies and institutional outcomes favored, but in the moral-cultural-spiritual grounding which is thought to underlie and motivate those policies and institutions. Conservatives would tend to place that grounding in Judaism or Christianity, in love of neighbor and respect for God, while libertarians tend to seek a religion-free foundation for them along the lines of Enlightenment thinkers.
Which of those two is “most sensible” then is a matter of faith. But I think it may not be coincidental that as long as there was an abiding religious faith in America, there was deep popular conviction supporting conservative-libertarian institutions, whereas now that religious faith has largely been lost, even those who believe in libertarian values lack the conviction and motivation to defend them.
There was deep and pervasive religious faith during our 3/5ths stage of development. I suppose “love of neighbor” has certain biblical limits.
The 3/5ths rule was meant to *reduce* the power of slave states which gave slaves 0/5ths votes but wanted them to count 5/5ths for the sake of apportionment of representatives. A 2/5 or 1/5 rule – while it would still be misinterpreted and used rhetorically with even more wrong valence by those ignorant of the history – would have been even better: not just more just, but probably by the greater empowering of abolitionist states, ending slavery earlier and possibly avoiding the civil war.
As it happens, there is currently a legal debate on how to count non- voters and those illegally present on the territory for the sake of apportionment. The trend is toward 5/5ths, but, for example in the case of prisoners, creates all kinds of perverse incentives.
As to the progressive view, I understand the emotion but not the logic.
I’ve long said that ethics and critical thinking needs to be taught in American schools starting in Kindergarten. If they’re old enough to understand the basics of math I don’t see why they wouldn’t be old enough to understand the basics of critical thinking and ethical reasoning. Train a generation of kids to think and the cult of progressivism will die out.
Note, “Cult of Progressivism” (CoP for short) does not mean “Liberal”. I truly think that progressives don’t fit on the TLP model. From the very beginning, in an article titled (something like) Three Axis of Exaggeration, Prof. Kling made it clear that this model only applied to reasonable, rational, people. There is no thinking or reasoning in the CoP. “Yer either wit’ us or agin’ us” is the limit of their views of the world. This is not a philosophy, it’s people reciting lines handed to them from someone else.
If you believe Arnold, this would be expected to have no effect due to the null hypothesis.
“For libertarians, reform would start with having fewer laws”
Which ones?
The first thing libertarians bring up is drug laws. But most people in jail aren’t in jail because of drugs. They are there for violent crimes. And when they are there for “drugs” it’s usually because drug charges where the plea deal accepted for what is usually a violent offender.
Moreover, people support drug laws. That’s why they are on the books.
Nor do drug laws cause crime. If so, Singapore should be a hotbed of crime.
I’m fairly convinced from looking into this that much of the problem is that there is a portion of the underclass that just really want a score and if it wasn’t drugs it would be prostitution or dice or that some dude looked at them the wrong way. When my wife had to sit on a jury for a underclass assault with a knife “getting dissed” is basically what it boiled down to.
“Those who enforce the laws should be accountable for acting within the law themselves.”
Are they not *reasonably* accountable? Acts of unjustified police violence are very low relative to our crime problem, and those that engage in those acts usually get punished.
We have things like police unions and qualified immunity because cops are legitimately afraid of the politicians selling them out whenever something goes wrong in their frequent interactions with an often violent and non-compliant underclass. It’s not like these sprung out of nowhere.
In places where increased BLM “scrutiny” of the cops has come its usually resulted in an increase in the murder rate far beyond whatever was hoped for in reduced police violence. There is nothing libertarian about being a victim of violence so long as the perpetrator is a civilian.
Murray’s suggestions were that criminals should be quickly caught, found guilty, and receive a harsh punishment. But libertarians don’t like a “police state” so it’s harder to catch people. They want all sorts of defendant “rights”, which makes it harder to convict even when everyone knows they are guilty. And they hate mass incarceration but I really doubt they would agree to any other reasonable detergents (corporal punishment).
Besides diminishing the significance of 20% of the incarcerated population, conflating disobedience with crime, and ignoring the problem of sentence duration, you miss the broader libertarian argument about proliferation of bad or unnecessary legislation.
Yes, since persistent disobedience to state authority effectively carries a death sentence (regardless of any preceding offence), state prohibitions of peaceful activities, as well as state demands for positive action, will always be ethically problematic.
But, the proliferation of legislation also creates conditions (e.g., by increasing the cost of employment or wedlock or savings or consumption or emergency provision or insurance or education or housing), that tend to produce the adverse social conditions that you want to blame.
African Americans aren’t suffering from systemic racism, they’re suffering from systemic paternalism. Many of the problems that black and other Americans face today are systemic, but were caused by progressive institutions and policies, such as:
– Teachers unions
– Police unions
– Minimum wage laws
– Occupational licensing
– Rent control
– Welfare restrictions that favor single-parent families
– High marginal tax rates on earnings by welfare recipients
– Zoning restrictions
Unfortunately, there appear to be no conservative politicians who know enough about economics to make this argument.
Come on, you can’t be serious. Conservatives have been flogging this dead horse for decades, except perhaps for zoning restrictions. Lately they haven’t been able to make these arguments forcefully or loudly because that would be – guess what? – racist.
One great irony is that via Conquest’s First Law, it is the unions that are the source of conservative sanity on these topics.
Conservatives have been against the unions for so long because of sending all those dues to Democrat campaigns, for making accountability for poor performance impossible, for raising their pay and benefits and cost of public services to the moon. But the members of those unions are thrown into the crucible of ugly reality every day, and they know they are one incident away from being unjustly thrown under the bus by some politician.
Perhaps there will be some kind of Nixonian Southern strategy and realignment and rapprochement as conservatives court the public unions by emphasizing the alignment of perspectives. But Nixon was a genius and there are no geniuses left in the GOP.
Which of the issues I listed do you consider “dead horses” and why? Do you deny that unions protect their members from individual accountability, that minimum wages and occupational licensing increase unemployment, or that rent control reduces available housing? The fact that people have been pointing these things out for years doesn’t make them any less true.
Sorry, I’ve used the idiom incorrectly. I meant that conservatives have been making these points over and over again for decades.
If they’re true, then shouldn’t people keep saying them until things change? If you believe that any aren’t true, please identify those with which you disagree and explain why. Thanks.
Oh, quite true (again perhaps except for zoning, see below). My point, and the reason why I used the dead horse idiom, is that lots of people – usually conservatives – have kept saying these things for many decades without much noticeable effect. Clinton-era welfare reform just scratched the surface. Otherwise, policy and situation have been moving in the direction reverse to all these things all that time. This should at least produce reasonable doubt as to the wisdom of keeping saying these things and expecting something to change.
Re zoning. I don’t want to mince words. The primary purpose of zoning in today’s America is to exclude poor and dangerous people, who are predominantly POC, without threat of lawsuits for discrimination. It’s almost the only tool left to enforce (partial) segregation. There are reasons this tool exists, and until these reasons disappear, either it or something equivalent will keep existing, or the country will follow the path of South Africa. If these reasons did not exist, as for example in Japan (which does not have American-style zoning), then sure, no problem, let’s repeal zoning yesterday.
@Richard W Fulmer:
It’s not that these issues are ‘dead horses’ and I would go two points further with you and agree that (1) they are real problems, and (2) that conservatives and libertarians should still do what they can to advocate for and implement reforms to improve those matters.
However, there’s still a huge problem when you do a very common thing in those circles which is to make the following, erroneous connection, ” Many of the problems that black and other Americans face today are systemic, but were caused by progressive institutions and policies.”
The list you provide is typical, but is based in socially-desirable mythology when one in being sincere, and what I called “opportunistic crisis milking” when one is being cynical. It highlights the difference between Wishful Thinking Conservatism and Null Hypothesis Conservatism.
Now it turns out that the list you provide are all two-sided coins, as in reality most things are morally complicated. For example, job security is bad when it shields bad actors from accountability from good people, but good when it shields good people from partisan persecution from bad people / pressure from the mob. Unions are bad when they give all their money to progressive candidates, but good when they stand in the way of those progressive politicians enacting the most crazy parts of their agenda.
But the error that goes from NHC to WTC is so deep that it attacks the items on that list not only when they having nothing to do with the controversy at issue, but precisely when they are on the good side of the coin!
Let’s go briefly through your list to illustrate this:
1. Teachers unions: In WTC, good schools improve outcomes and test scores for their students by the mechanism of good teachers performing well. Likewise, kids with plenty of potential nevertheless get bad scores when they attend bad schools, which are bad because they employ bad teachers performing poorly. And those schools can’t get better teachers, or motivate their teachers to do better, because the unions protect the bad teachers. Somehow this degeneration doesn’t happen in the good schools, even though they have unions too, which is a mystery which demands and gets a whole variety of hand-waving rationalizations, none of which ever make any sense. The WTC perspective also leads to perverse absurdities like No Child Left Behind policies which insist that all schools are Lake Wobegon and can be above average.
NHC, on the other hand, would say that teacher quality, motivation, performance makes very little difference to kid outcomes and test scores on average / on the margin. See Weissberg, “Bad Students, Not Bad Schools”.
On the other hand, even schools with low average test scores could still be functional, pleasant, respectful, and orderly places instead of violent, unruly “Lean on Me” hell-holes that reliably and rapidly burn out the majority of do-gooder, resume-building ivy-leaguers we tried to throw at them and end up in a bunch of cheating / cooking-the-books scandals, if the school authorities were (1) able and willing to impose discipline freely and remove bad apples from the bunch, and (2) teach kids at the levels and with the techniques appropriate to their needs and dispositions, without worrying about hitting unrealistic, arbitrary benchmarks.
Here’s the important point: The progressive political craziness imposed on schools in the form of making effective discipline impossible and mandatory uniform standards is precisely where teacher’s unions serve a good purpose – as it happens one consistent with traditional social conservative insights – by resisting and slowing down and moderating these efforts as much as possible, on behalf of the teachers on the front lines who have to deal with the fallout every day, per Conquest’s First Law.
Good teachers are already getting thrown under the bus and purged for claimed violations of PC just as ridiculous and evil as all the rest, and again, it is here where union protection of job security is precisely what it needed to thwart the unjust terminations done at the behest of the mindless mob-driven inquisition. Also, unions are occasionally effective in preventing the worst abuses of racial preferences and making sure good, smart teachers don’t get thrown under the hiring and career progression bus just for being white.
When we are talking about the bad impact of bad schools on black kids, it happens to be precisely in those areas in which union interests and conservative perspectives are aligned and thus where representatives of both institutions should be cooperating with each other. When teachers unions are performing conservative functions to try and stop progressive ideological insanity from hurting black kids in schools even more, it is precisely the wrong issue and wrong moment for conservatives to start harping on how teachers unions are the root of the problem for black kids!
Going after unions then is a kind of socially acceptable evasion of the real political and ideological problem.
2. Police Unions: Again, it is progressive ideological craziness that makes traditional effective and efficient policing techniques and maintenance of public order practically impossible without resort to huge amounts of money and technology. Police unions will protect some bad cops doing bad things, but they will also protect good, innocent cops doing what they were trained to do in tough situations, when it becomes politically convenient to throw them under the bus. Without those protections, the police will do the absolute minimum necessary to not get fired or blamed, and tend to sit in donut shops while criminals literally get away with murder. We are now at the point where if we want talented, highly qualified people to be willing to become policemen for ordinary levels of compensation and benefits, not only should we not eliminate qualified immunity, but we would have to give cops the same absolute immunity prosecutors enjoy.
All the rest of your examples are some combination of factors that either don’t have any appreciate impact on the major disparities in outcomes of marginal productivity, educational attainment, and involvement with the justice system (hence, wishful thinking) or were some of the coping mechanisms which allowed people to evade and circumvent some of the fallout from progressive political craziness and thus have some semblance of a normal bourgeois lifestyle (hence conservative).
Going after them gives us the worst of all worlds. It’s both (1) not effective, and (2) undermining of resistance to progressive lunacy.
If one can’t talk honestly about facts, then one has to fall back on delusions, which are not just wrong but counterproductive.
I oppose unions for government workers. They are powerful political blocs that warp public policy. For example, the union for California prison guards has been a strong force pushing increased penalties for crimes. When unions negotiate with elected leaders for more pay and better benefits, they’re often negotiating with people whom they helped elect and whom they help keep in office.
Teachers unions protect bad teachers:
https://www.americanexperiment.org/2018/05/teachers-agree-teachers-union-makes-harder-fire-bad-teachers/
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/04/27/teachers-unions-protect-ineffective-teachers.html
Unions protect bad teachers and bad police officers:
https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/15/democrats-accidentally-make-the-case-against-teachers-unions/
Teachers unions fight school choice:
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/teachers-unions-block-school-choice
Teachers unions fight merit pay:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2010/10/why_do_unions_o.html
Police unions protect bad cops:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/george-floyd-death-focus-on-police-unions-protecting-bad-cops/
Prison guard unions support tough-on-crime policies:
https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-price-of-prison-guard-unions-2/
I oppose public employee unions in general because they are often negotiating with elected whom they helped place in office. Teachers unions are by far the biggest contributors to American elections. In addition, unions often warp public policy. The California prison guard union, for example, was an important force behind tougher criminal penalties. Teacher and police unions are also notorious for protecting incompetent and sometimes dangerous members. Finally, unions block needed reforms. Teachers unions actively fight school choice and merit pay.
As for the other examples that you hand wave away, let’s look at some facts:
• Between 1940 and 1960 – when Jim Crow was in full force – the black poverty rate dropped from 87% to 47%.
• Between 1972 and 2011 – with the Civil Rights Acts, the Great Society programs, and Affirmative Action in place – the rate dropped from 32% to 28%.
• In 1948 when the minimum wage was largely irrelevant, the unemployment rate for blacks aged 16-17 years was 9.4% and for blacks aged 18-19 it was 10.5 percent. The rates for whites of the same ages were 10.2% and 9.4%.
• Today, the unemployment rate for young blacks is 35% – three times higher than it was in 1948.
• In 1960, 22% of black children were being raised without a father.
• In 1995, 85% of black children were being raised without a father.
I hope that you are comfortable with your delusions.
” In 1995, 85% of black children were being raised without a father.”
I agree with you that’s bad, though note that progressives would not agree with us about that.
Nevertheless, that particular number has increased dramatically over that period for all races and ethnic groups (perhaps except for Northeast Asians and South Asians)
To what do you attribute that change? Mostly to single mom-friendly welfare and the resulting high effective marginal tax rates?
There are probably a lot of causes. High incarceration rates for young black men, making them bad marriage options. Hip hop culture that portrays women as “hos” rather than as wives. Girls who were raised in a family headed by single mothers and who grew up to recreate that same “normal” family structure. A worldwide culture that glorifies single parenthood and sex outside of marriage on stage, in movies, on TV, and in music. Poor schools that left them with few options outside of welfare. What are your thoughts?
I’ve read lots and lots of libertarian intellectual commentary arising out of these and similar “stoked outrage” events over the last decade and going ever further back, and I’ve got to say that my impression of the modal gist of all these is opportunistic political “crisis milking”.
Libertarians tend to want to avoid signalling any disagreement with progressives that would get them in hot water, but they also want to not sound like complete idiots and try to make sense and say things which are intellectually serious and logically coherent. The eye of that needle is so narrow that threading it is practically impossible.
It *is* impossible if one tries to get into the particular details of any latest agitprop frenzy. “Oh, the problem here is that there are too many laws.” – “Wait, should there not be laws against counterfeiting? In all the classic libertarian texts prohibition of counterfeiting is usually justified as a kind of fraud and harm to another’s property, and …” – “Well, um, hey, let’s talk about drugs!” “Uh, ok, what about arson or vandalism or burglary? Are those excess laws too? What about resisting arrest? If there are going to be police with the power to arrest, and occasionally someone doesn’t want to be arrested and resists, sometimes threateningly, then … ” – “Did you not hear me? DRUGS!”
Libertarian commentators seem to have their own version of a wedding registry or “Amazon wish list”, of luxury agenda items they would pursue if only they got a windfall of political capital.
When the progressives try to whip up outrage over some particular event, most libertarian commentators try to flee to a higher level of generality and abstraction and pull out a standard script of explanations and policy recommendations which often bear no relation at all to the particulars of the event. “Well, see, it’s the militarization of the police and giving them ‘tanks’.” – “Did you see the video? Was there a tank? You know, with treads and a main canon? What about what happened had anything to do with military equipment?” – “Well, let’s not get into particulars. But also, did you not hear me? Big, Scary, TANKS!”
Libertarians are supposed to be the intellectual adults in the room: intelligent, serious, respectable, somewhat detached, and with whom one is supposed to be able to have a sensible and reasonable conversation about these matters in good faith, based in a coherent set of ideas and principles, and without either side getting completely bent out of shape, trying to get their opponents cancelled, and accusing them of being vampire nazis in league with the devil.
But in these instances they do not exactly cover themselves in glory and valor. Indeed, “I understand the emotion but not the logic,” applies quite well. I understand that people who want much less law and policing have an emotional commitment to advocating for those goals in general, but there is rarely any logical connection between what they say and the specifics of the incident in question.
Look I get it and I sympathize! I don’t want to get cancelled, and I pay lip service and participate in preference falsification when pressured to do so.
But whatever the libertarian view happens to be, I cannot agree that it sounds ‘sensible’ at all.
The progressive view on the other hand – as radical and crazy as it may be – makes perfect logical sense once one translates the code and penetrates the real meaning of vague slogans and mantras:
“No unarmed black person is to die while in custody or in any altercation with a non-black person. Such deaths can never be justified or excused as accidents or merely negligent manslaughter, but are some species of intentional murder with hateful intent, with strict liabiltiy. If in a situation arises such that there is a risk of such an incident, an officer is to disengage and let him go, without regard to personal or public safety, and with no defense for exigency.”
Dictates, threats, and ultimatums are always logical. “Do this racialized amnesty and y0u keep your city. Don’t do it, we burn down your city.” If A, then C. If not-A, then not-C. Therefore A==C.
Look, the bottom line is that urban areas won’t revert to anarchic free-for-alls forever, and these things tend to go like a swinging pendulum and eventually, whatever we call the entities responsible for enforcing criminal laws and protecting public safety, will evolve and adapt to once again impose order. Technological substitutes will have to be developed to replace human violence.
What was a gradual and perhaps moderatable trend will be accelerated and hardened to extremes by legal and cultural necessity, and all the libertarian focus on human police and use of force will just accelerate the ushering in of Big Brother digital panopticon and a social credit system which would make members of the CCP blush.
And that system will be in the hands of lunatic progressives who will use it to scrutinize, punish, stifle, and chill any dissent. Talk about a Pyrrhic victory.
Best explanation, ever, of “why I am not a Libertarian (any more)”.
The social credit police might be coming, but I’m strongly advocating a Federal Job Guarantee, like a voluntary National Service, to reduce poverty among any and all who are willing to work.
The Deserving Poor.
Those “unwilling” to work must be more clearly identified as the Undeserving Poor.
We need two different social safety nets – one for the Deserving; and another for the Undeserving. Current welfare, perhaps, for the undeserving, unwilling to work. And Jobs for the deserving.
That’s just the problem.
Jobs and poverty have nothing to do with it.
The war on drugs and the “””tanks””” and unions and qualified immunity and community policing and restorative justice and more social workers and services and midnight basketball and all the rest have nothing to do with it.
These are all desperate and/or opportunistic attempts to skirt around the main issue and point at everything except the obvious so that one doesn’t have to deal with the Lovecraftian horror of looking ugly truths in the face and dealing with unpleasant, inconvenient, socially undesirable facts. You know, like adults.
But that’s the problem. We can no longer be adults. We can’t talk about what does have something to do it, so we talk about things that have nothing to do with it.
“why I am not a Libertarian (any more)” is not quite true. I still agree with libertarians a lot, as there is naturally a lot of overlap between the implications of libertarianism and the preferences of those who have a high regard for the traditional (if practically extinct) American attitudes of individual freedom and classical English notions of rights, personal liberty, and tolerance of eccentric voices.
The trouble is not just trouble with libertarians, but the Big Trouble we all face. It is that the progressives kept narrowing the range of possible intellectual discussion, which made it harder and harder to find alternative ways to justify sanity. The big libertarian error was to focus too exclusively on the coercive power of the state and to ignore the coercive power of the mob.
It’s still nearly impossible to convince libertarians that the cancel culture is sufficiently coercive and intimidating that it warrants the same countermeasures as those directed towards state action. This despite the willingness of many to admit that – like myself – they are terrified of the “reign of cancel” and keep their mouths shut with regards to their honest sentiments.
And now we’ve passed the intellectual event horizon where the permissible range of disagreement or counterargument with progressive orthodoxy without incurring severe personal penalties has shrunk so far that it is no longer possible to skate around issues and make any kind of honest, coherent cases against what they are doing. Which was, of course, the point all along. Disagreement is violence. Disagreement makes one feel unsafe.
In retrospect, it was a huge strategic error not to crush PC culture at the start and to bolster protections for free speaking in the public and private domains. This would not be in strict accordance with libertarian orthodoxy and would require an exception and compromise, but “speech is different” is a reasonable distinction to draw.
Unless libertarians and conservatives are willing to make the one big compromise on affording people the whole suite of anti-discrimination protections for opinion and speech, to form a kind of NATO of woke-containment, then they are going to be compelled to go as nuts as the progressives on literally everything else.
This has the ring of truth 😐
That being said, I don’t see how it’s fait accompli. It’s also possible that, if sensible folks take strong but non-radical action, they take the wind out of radical sails.
I agree that the underlying issue is most frequently escalation of an arrest situation. But there are a whole lot of ways to improve those outcomes.
1. More training for police in subduing people without using excessive force
2. Higher standards of accountability for those who employ excessive force
If you eliminate 90% of these situations, and make public examples of the <1% where excessive force is used, there will still be radicals, calling for craziness, but most people won't pay them any heed.
That they're being listened to now is in large part because "we" (mostly meaning urban police forces) have been unwilling to make many changes up to this point.
Once again, we see how terribly afraid you are.
We have a President of the United States whose primary appeal and only real interest is in mocking progressivism. Dozens of highly popular media figures specialize in the same thing. A full third of the country loves every word of it, and yet somehow you’ve talked yourself into thinking you will be ruined if you are caught telling us what you really believe.
Come on… blurt it out. You can do it. The main issue is… what?
Oh please, you can’t be serious with than nonsense, right? Let me get this straight: you think cancel culture and purging people for being insufficiently woke – for instance by allowing a US senator to author an op-ed or merely referring to a study demonstrating the counterproductivity of violent protest – is some kind of baseless paranoid fantasy? That’s nuts.
Have a bunch of people not been ruined for saying what they really believed (or not just saying what they are supposed to believe, or even saying what they are supposed to believe but in wording deemed imperfect by the twitter mob) in the last two weeks? Does this not demonstrate that who the president is is irrelevant next to the angry mob your boss is worried about upsetting? Seriously, who has the president helped get their job back?
Even though this is a thread on the police, in the midst of unprecedented waves of national protests about police violence, you are primary takeaway is how uncomfortable this has made it for you to speak your mind, because you read a couple of stories that have been repeated 10,000 times. You ain’t the Editorial Editor of the New York Times.
We all pick and choose what concerns us. I personally worry about how mean Justin
Wolfers is about as much as I worry about “murder hornets”.
Unless the agency enforcing the non-discrimination laws you’re proposing is specifically geared toward protecting non-left speech (which would be politically and legally impossible) it will ultimately fall into the hands of your enemies, per Conquest’s 2nd law, who will enforce the rules asymmetrically. We have laws – and countless institutions have internal rules – against gender discrimination, but somehow end up allowing female-only organizations, female-only scholarships, etc., even though the rules officially protect males from exclusion just as they protect females. That’s because the law ultimately gets enforced according to what those who enforce believe the purpose of the law ought to be.
I think what you’re proposing amounts to “cutting a great road through the law to get after the devil.”
Wow, so many stawmen employed in that post we’ll see a substantial decline in jobless numbers next week for sure.
Thank you for your virtue signaling and preening take. Your smugness is on par with most Progressive types
+1
Hope to see your promised take-down of Yuval Levin’s last book some time. Although, in the current situation, maybe you think such an effort would be superfluous.
Scott Alexander has a book review contest in August, so I’ll send it to him first.
“Defund the police” seems to be a bit richer than just that. On the oppressor-oppressed axis, “defund the police “ is invariably intertwined with some magical thinking about new social programs which will make violent crime go away.
On the civilization-barbarism front, we hear a lot more substantive black lives matters analysis looking at crime victimization statistics of blacks before and after campaigns to demonize police. Glen Loury, for example, has argued:
“The main threat to the quality of life of people living in black areas is the criminal behavior of their fellow citizens, most of whom happen to be black. Black people in American cities are victims of rape, robbery, and murder to a very significant degree, and the perpetrators are almost always black. The protection of life and property is the most important task of the state, and many African-Americans cannot feel safe in their homes. The police are part of the solution to this problem.”
The liberty-coercion axis is associated with state-capacity libertarians’ calls to strip police of union protection and to create ongoing academic intermediation in the management of police operations and takes racism in white police officers as a given. I’d quibble with the relevance in the reduction in laws advocacy too. Looking at the most recent case in Atlanta, do libertarians want to decriminalize drunk driving and resisting arrest? In the Minneapolis case, do libertarians want to legalize counterfeit currency and resisting arrest? The closest case that seems relevant was the New York “loosies” case and it may be that libertarians really do want to eliminate taxation of cigarettes? But it seems libertarians are mostly in support of the riots and that most of the riots are set in motion when a black suspect resists arrest. The primary libertarian goal then can be said to be to create a constitutional right for black suspects to resist arrest and strict liability for whit police officers whenever a suspect resisting arrest suffers any harm.
On a democracy-authoritarian axis, populists might generally oppose the non-legislative creation of rights and liabilities by an unaccountable court system and believes that white officers should be tried under the same extant laws and regulations that would also apply to non-white officers. In addition, populists may support the truck drivers who are refusing to deliver to areas that lack any police protection. They may also support legislative reforms to force votes on court-imposed doctrines like qualified immunity.
“As to the progressive view, I understand the emotion but not the logic.”
I can only speak to my particular progressive view, of course, which is that “defund” is less about reducing headline expense than reducing specific expenses — militarized hardware in particular.
I have no idea if this is an accepted progressive thought, but my preference would be to experiment with decreasing the number of police significantly and the funds less significantly, transferring the resulting funds to various social services. In NYC, you often see three or four police officers standing around where it seems clear one would do.
The intended result would be to increase the quality of police officers, and to hopefully decrease their aggressiveness. The libertarian side (break the union power) is also important here of course.
Do we have any evidence that social workers would do a better job than police?
Especially in the instances that supposedly causing this outrage?
What exactly does a social worker do when someone resists arrest?
Won’t this idea end the first time a social worker gets hurt?
Are we convinced police union power is a problem here? There are some problems with union, but I think they are mostly price based (too many employee benefits) rather than some driver of police misconduct. Libertarians have been big on touting Camden, NJ, but it mostly used breaking the local (majority black) police union so it could cut benefits and use the money to hire extra (white) cops. Not reduce the number of cops.
Certainly the biggest gap to be proven is whether social workers, or rather some kind of non-gun-armed response force trained in de-escalation etc., could work.
I suppose we are all aware that most British police don’t carry guns and they call in special forces when a firearms response is necessary. The US is different since there are many more guns around, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be adaptable. Certainly if the cause of the call is a counterfeit $20 or being drunk at a Wendy’s, as in the instances causing the current outrage, these do not seem to require a firearm response.
I think “won’t this end as soon as someone gets hurt” as an objection one could raise against most possible reforms. Why should it end as long as the public is still happy with it and people will take the job? At some point, of course, they would get called in by mistake in a situation where firearms are necessary. That would be bad of course, but my bet (and I suppose, the underlying bet of progressives generally) is that it would turn out to be rare enough to be a net improvement to the situation.
As for unions, who knows? My friends with a history of working in government think the unions make it far too hard to fire employees for misconduct, but this is not specific to cops. Probably it’s highly locality-dependent. I defer to the libertarians.
The number of people killed by the police last year was around 1,200. Compared to 15,000 or so murders and 1.2 million instances of recored violent crime.
Of the 1,000 or so deaths related to police shootings in three-quarters police were under attack or defending someone who was. The officers were often lauded as heroes… 28 percent of those who died were shooting at officers or someone else. Sixteen percent were attacking with other weapons or physical force, and 31 percent were pointing a gun.
There simply is no problem with police violence. At all. It isn’t even close. It’s pure agitprop.
“being drunk at a Wendy’s”
He was so drunk he fell asleep behind the wheel in the middle of a drive thru as people honked at him. That means he was driving drunk. He later failed a Breathalyzer test. He had been driving drunk, violation of a serious law, and endangering the lives of people on the road.
The police attempted to arrest him for his serious crime and prevent him from driving drunk and hurting/killing innocent bystanders. The suspects intent was to pick his young daughter up and drive with her in the car while intoxicated.
The suspect then attacked the police and grabbed a weapon (their taser) from them. The cops tried to warn him about the use of force (trying to start with non-lethal force) only to eventually have the man turn at them and point the taser at them. Then he got shot.
How exactly would a social worker handle that situation?
The statistics you cite can be true, and it can still be true that there’s a significant problem with the way police go about their business.
By your own statistics, about 200 people were killed by police by some other means than shooting. That should be close to 0.
Of the 1000 or so that were killed by police shooting, you concede that about 250 were in situations where the police were neither under attack nor defending someone who was.
That number should also be close to zero, and we are up to about 450 lives that could be saved annually.
And by doing this, we get the added benefit of drastically reducing a cause of social conflict and unrest.
It’s very unlikely we’d get to 0, but there’s a lot of reason to reduce the number significantly.
As far as the guy in Atlanta, I’d argue the police shouldn’t be charged with murder (as they apparently are), but they could probably have avoided a lethal confrontation by boxing the guy in and exercising patience.
“By your own statistics, about 200 people were killed by police by some other means than shooting. That should be close to 0.”
On what basis? Have you reviewed all of these cases?
Even if all 200 were totally unjustified, that is a very reasonable numerator for the massive denominator that is the criminal justice system.
“you concede that about 250 were in situations where the police were neither under attack nor defending someone who was.”
The source specifically cited three categories of encounter. It didn’t classify what went on in the other 25%. You’re assuming what that means that that 0% of those cases should have ended the way they did.
Even if all 250 were totally unjustified, that is a very reasonable numerator for the massive denominator that is the criminal justice system.
“And by doing this, we get the added benefit of drastically reducing a cause of social conflict and unrest.”
We have unrest because we have agitprop telling people we have a problems we don’t and then we allow people to get away with unrest without serious consequences. That’s a problem, not policing.
You are a part of the problem by participating in it. A lot of people will die because of your views.
“It’s very unlikely we’d get to 0, but there’s a lot of reason to reduce the number significantly.”
No there isn’t. It’s a very reasonable numerator given the denominator. Previous attempts to get closer to zero resulted in large increases in the murder and crime rates of affected cities (see the Ferguson effect). We already did this BLM song and dance five years ago. It takes a lot of people getting murdered to reduce a single instance of police killing someone. It’s an indefensible tradeoff.
“but they could probably have avoided a lethal confrontation by boxing the guy in and exercising patience.”
Glad to know you’re an expert of how to handle violent drunks that attack you, steal your weapon, and threaten you.
We know how this ends. Clueless Monday morning QBs like yourself give bad advice about what cops should have done in a situation you would never put yourself in. Cops realize they can’t win and give up. Dudes like this pick up their daughter drunk and get into a pileup on the highway.
Even if all 250 were totally unjustified, that is a very reasonable numerator for the massive denominator that is the criminal justice system
This, sir, is a losing argument.
No there isn’t. It’s a very reasonable numerator given the denominator. Previous attempts to get closer to zero resulted in large increases in the murder and crime rates of affected cities (see the Ferguson effect). We already did this BLM song and dance five years ago. It takes a lot of people getting murdered to reduce a single instance of police killing someone. It’s an indefensible tradeoff.
As I wrote above, this seeming inability to conceive of a non-extreme solution seems to be the problem. We should neither feverishly deny there’s a problem and say silly things like there’s an acceptable amount of unjustified police brutality nor should we abandon the people of inner cities to anarchy.
Simply framing this as an either/or question is failure.
I don’t know what is and isn’t a winning argument sometimes, I only know what the truth is.
In your head there is some better trade off where you can have your cake and eat it to.
In reality there is no empirical evidence that this is the case. Attempts to decrease incidents of police killings have generally lead to higher murder and crime rates. The rate of increased murders outpacing the decrease in police killings by an order of magnitude. That’s not even close to a good trade off.
The rate of police killings is very low relative to crime rates. This is far too small of an issue to deserve the unrest we have seen. I also see no reason to believe our current equilibrium is inefficient compared to likely proposed alternatives.
On net I expect your views to lead to additional death and suffering based on the evidence.
Sounds like you don’t agree with the typical point from first principles which is common to all three of Arnold’s axes that the state should maintain the legitimate monopoly on force.
Any case of unjustified police killing is therefore much worse than a “normal” murder, because it undermines that social compact — for progressives and libertarian perspectives in an obvious way, but also for conservatives (or it ought to be) since it blurs the line.
Therefore the numbers, which I’ll take your word for, ought to be much rarer than the 450 (from Mike’s comment below). I assume neither of us has gone through all the cases and would just be presuming that they are legitimate or not based on our priors and on the sample of cases that has floated up to the mainstream media. From memory they include a case where a child was shot playing with a BB gun, a man shopping in the outdoor section of a Walmart was shot when he picked up a gun that was for sale, a man who was shot when he informed a police officer that he was legally carrying a gun in his car, a man who was unarmed and running away from the police when he was shot in the back, et cetera.
I would argue that if such cases can occur, the other cases we don’t hear about are likely (statistically) to be somewhat less egregious but still bad, and still demonstrative of abuse of power.
“Any case of unjustified police killing is therefore much worse than a “normal” murder, because it undermines that social compact”
That’s debatable, but the current exchange rate on murder to “unjustified police killing” is 50:1 or higher. It seems a stretch to claim we should exchange more murders for fewer police killings at that rate.
What undermines the social compact is being subject to crime without the authority providing a reasonable level of protection and justice.
If you are right about it being 50 to 1, then I agree. But I have no idea where you’re getting this number. I would hope the the marginal additional number of murders from reducing unjustified killings in the way I described is much closer to 1 to 1. Who knows, maybe it can even be a win win. But experiments should be made.
It’s easy to come up with a lower estimate for that ratio. In 2015-2018, there were around 9,300 extra murders, concentrated in a few metropolitan areas, due to reduced policing (Ferguson effect). This gives the numerator. There is no way to know the exact denominator – how many police killings of unarmed suspects in those metropolitan areas were prevented due to reduced policing – but it is quite implausible that this number exceeds the total number of police killings of unarmed suspects in USA over the period. WaPo database says it’s been 273. So by this most conservative estimate, the “exchange rate” cannot be less than 34:1.
*lower-limit estimate
As often happens, I think you underestimate the degree to which progressives are motivated here by civilization/barbarism reasoning. Lots of videos are circulating showing police roughing up peaceful protesters. To progressives, and perhaps progressive-sympathetic libertarians as well, the police in those videos are the barbarians and the protesters their civilized victims. The fact that police are disproportionately likely, even in liberal urban areas, to be “Red Tribers”– whose culture the “Blue Tribers” increasingly view as savage and thuggish by nature– exacerbates this. You may think this reasoning is unfair, and that the videos are unrepresentative, but it’s there and it fits a civilization/barbarism narrative at least as well as an oppressor/oppressed one.
Progressives apply the “oppression” label so expansively, and at the same time so selectively, as to justify the conclusion that they use it as a bludgeon to support the groups they like and to harm the groups they don’t like. We all know which groups are which.
A federal investigation of Ferguson, Missouri concluded that the city was using its police force to raise revenue via fines, fees, and civil asset forfeitures. This type of predation is especially hard on poor people who often cannot afford to pay the fines, which causes further legal problems, and who cannot afford to hire lawyers to defend their freedom or to regain their confiscated property.
Such abuses are common in other cities including Washington, Detroit, New Orleans, and Chicago. In 2014, the value of civil asset forfeitures in the country exceeded the value of all goods stolen in burglaries. All Americans have good reason to fear the police.
BTW, while there is a cottage industry of “what defund the police REALLY means”, there is the stubborn fact that Defund the Police actually means Defund the Police, to the people chanting it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html
I suppose it means as much to them as “Lock her up” means to the people who choose to chant that — that is, not a concrete policy proposal or a realistic expectation.
Right.
The officious apologeticists and volunteer “translators from radicalese to normalese” are always quick to tell us that these are mere slogans with all kind of subtle nuance that moderates the real message and that the radicals don’t really mean what they say, even when the radicals object and explicitly confirm they really mean it.
It raises the question of which is the more charitable interpretation. The one that offers the radicals the respect of sincerity and to treat them seriously and interpret their statements literally, or the one that – probably inaccurately – mellows out the terrifying harshness of their plans for the purpose of avoiding spooking the squares?
At any rate, taking ‘defund’ seriously makes sense. What are the alternative positions?
“Reform ICE!” or “Abolish ICE!” Anything short of abolition is just reform.
If you call for reform, well, there are a million possible reforms, and someone will ask you what reforms you want and why, when obviously most people have no idea and will just get angry if you ask them to explain themselves. Reform also sounds lame and weak: just mild tweaking that will never last and not some kind of fundamental transformation of something that is rotten to the core.
The only alternative to “reform” is ‘eliminate’, ‘abolish’, ‘defund’.
You can maybe get a bunch of people to agree on the need for some kind of vague ‘reform’ as a kind of abstract art or Rorschach test where people can see what they want to see, but you can’t get them to coordinate and rally around any particular proposals for reform, because there is some kind of “social-dynamic ideological-entropy” problem and there are too many possibilities.
But “abolish” is one, clear, strong thing. Don’t tweak slavery, don’t phase it out gradually, or incentivize manumission, etc. ABOLISH it. Completely. Now. We call ourselves ‘abolitionists’. There are slavery abolitionists, ICE abolitionists, and police abolitionists.
When you call to abolish something, you are also protecting yourself against criticism. “But what about this, or what about that?” “Hey, let the chips fall where they may. Let justice be done though the heavens fall. There might be bad consequences and things to figure out later, but the need to eliminate an ongoing egregious evil right now trumps all of that, so none of us need detailed answers to these petty questions, and it’s rude and suspect to demand them.”
Point is, when they say “abolish”, or “defund”, you should take them seriously and at their word.
[as officiously as possible:]
As you say, “defund” or “abolish” leaves open the question of what to replace it with, if anything. The options seem to be (1) nothing, (2) some completely different form of public safety structure, (3) essentially the same thing but with different people and a different culture.
The closest thing I’ve seen to (1) was this op-ed published in the NYTimes. But the (sketchy) suggestions it contains are actually a mixture of (2) and (3).
What you’re conveying to me is “because they have no clear ideas, the effective answer is they’ll rip it down and replace it with nothing.” Whatever the merits of that argument is, I think we can at least be sure that it is not the more charitable interpretation.
I also feel fairly confident that calling people who take a stab at outlining the actual idea “officious apologists” or “volunteer translators” is not the more charitable interpretation of that activity.
A few years old but relevant to Arnold’s #3: Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter tells future legislators that before they approve of new legislation, they consider whether they are willing to accept deaths as a result of enforcement. Fewer laws and regulations would help.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2014-12-04/law-puts-us-all-in-same-danger-as-eric-garner
If I don’t pay my taxes they will start to seize my assets. If I refuse to hand them over, people will come to arrest me. If I resist arrest they will try to subdue me. If I put up a good enough fight they may kill me.
There are people like that, tax protestors, that occasionally do actually get killed by the state.
Nobody thinks their protest is legitimate. Nobody says “well its tax laws fault, not theirs, we should abolish taxes.”
Even Jesus said “render onto Ceaser that which is Ceaser’s”, and newsflash the Roman taxes were so bad people had to sell their kids into slavery. That’s why his accepting tax collectors was such a scandal, they were basically child slave masters.
“Some politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of cigarettes, so they’ve driven cigarettes underground by making them so expensive.”
Every single item in most countries is subject to a VAT. Nobody thinks it’s okay to evade the VAT.
I’ll pay $20 for a drink at a bar in Singapore because it taxed. Yet, somehow, Singapore doesn’t have some black market drug problem.
If we think cigarettes have big negative externalities (which they obviously do) then it makes perfect sense to tax them.
I can buy there are some dumb laws, but libertarians think they have scored some slam dunk because blacks just don’t want to follow the rules we arrived at through our legislative process.
Sure. Also police forces shouldn’t go in with guns blazing like at Ruby Ridge or Waco.
There is more than a binary trade off between using excessive force and refusing to enforce laws.
Less money spent on police and more spent on friends of Black Lives Matter.
Teachers and social workers get increased at the expense of police.
There is strong opposition to this idea, in the Black community. A large segment of them like the cops.
At the bottom is simply that local governments are broke.
When you’re having 10 million arrests and something like 15 million police encounters a year, you know, ten of these incidents could very easily happen, maybe — 20, twice a month. Maybe you could have two of them a month. If we treat these the way we treat them now, without context, this country is not going to survive.
“this country is not going to survive”
What country has not been a putrid swamp of malice and absurdity? One could call it the human condition. It isn’t that fact that determines survival or not, but the frequency and influence of those rare sparks of decency and intelligence that do occur. This swamp still has an uncommon abundance of the latter.
“As to the progressive view, I understand the emotion but not the logic.”
That’s the problem with oppressor-oppressed rhetoric, at least the way progressives wield it. One could just as easily argue the opposite position from an oppressor-oppressed perspective: minorities deserve police protection just as much as white suburbanites. Thus, we should increase spending on police in urban areas and other places with large minority populations. Chronic underfunding of police is just one more example of inadequate funding of government services for marginalized peoples.
If one can argue for both a position and its opposite using the same rhetorical axis, then one is bound to commit logical fallacies.
That implies that for any “woke” argument, there exists an equal and opposite “woke” argument.
The driver at base is that blacks are losers.
We spent a lot of money trying to fix black people. On police, schools, medical care, social workers, etc. At least 20k/black/year transferred from whites to black by my count. That’s half or more of their income.
No matter how much we spend, they are still going to be losers. They are going to have many of the same problems and the same relative status and outcomes issues relative to whites (or Asians or Hispanics).
So spending more on police (or in the case I’m about to use, cutting excessive black police officer salaries to hire more white police) might make a place like Camden NJ the 95th percentile for crime instead of the 99th. That is an improvement. But the people of Camden, NJ are still losers either way.
Anyone dealing in reality can only promise blacks a few marginal quality of life improvements that more or less leave them on the same rung on the ladder as today. Maybe LKY can say that in a campaign speech to a bunch of Chinese and get buy in, but that isn’t going to fly with blacks.
Black Lives Matter can give them a narrative. A narrative where they aren’t losers (from birth due to genetics). They are oppressed. And if they can overcome that oppression by doing what BLM people tell them to do then they won’t be losers anymore. They will charge up the status ladder and get “what they deserve” that ignores reality.
BLM isn’t about policing or police violence. It’s about the narrative. It’s about how all that money we spent trying to fix black people through various programs didn’t get any results. And so the question becomes…why did we spend that money? Should we keep spending that money? Should the people who wasted that money still be in charge?
I’d go even further and say that like many other things in life the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity complex needs exponential growth. It’s built in. People need to get promoted as they age, young activists need jobs. The budgets have to increase to make all that work. So not only are we not to question the powers and funding we have provided this sector in the past…we can’t question its eternal expansion.
That’s why they need the violence and intimidation and firings. The DIE complex can’t be defended on the merits. The best defense is a good offense, and it must expand or die.
I grew up in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico where, as a “gringo,” I was in the minority. There was a fair amount of bigotry on both sides, but over the years I observed that the most bigoted people tended to be the least educated and the least intelligent.