 Recent events surrounding Ferguson, Missouri, and the choking death of Eric Garner in New York have brought police misconduct to the forefront. But since neither left nor right appear to have a serious answer to these police malfeasance, we ask the inimitable Bob Murphy to join us and make sense of how private defense agencies might work in an anarcho-capitalist society. Libertarians rightfully point out that police, unlike private actors, are largely immune from criminal prosecution, civil liability, or even losing their jobs. And because police forces obviously are not subject to market discipline, the incentives are all wrong. The worse crime gets, the more their budgets grow. But the mainstream media fail to understand that police are merely the visible business end of the state. It's the state itself that's out of control, and abusive police are about one symptom of this larger problem. Join us as Bob Murphy talks about what Rothbard and Hoppe have to say about all this. How would an insurance model compare to the state's growth model? And how do we overcome common objections by those who insist that government must have a monopoly over the use of force? Stay tuned. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome once again to Mises Weekends. I'm your host, Jeff Deist, and we're very pleased to be joined once again by our good friend and one of our closely associated scholars here at the Mises Institute, Bob Murphy. Bob, how are you this weekend? I'm doing great. Thanks. Well, happy holidays and Merry Christmas. It's that time of year. But unfortunately, the topic at hand today is not so merry. We've been seeing a ton of media coverage of police misconduct of late, both with what's happening in Ferguson and what happened with this chokehold death of Eric Garner. So I thought it would be an excellent time for us to talk about the libertarian alternative, which is, as Murray Rothbard puts it, private competing defense agencies. You know, Bob, it's a fascinating topic, but it's also a thorny one. I think you'll agree. And there's a lot of conservative folks, libertarians, monarchists who make some serious and thoughtful arguments, intellectual, philosophical, practical arguments against the privatization of security. And while I don't personally happen to agree or share those arguments, I respect them. I'd just like to get your initial thoughts on Murray's seminal idea of privatizing police and defense agencies. Well, sure. And I think you're right that the recent news hooks as depressing as they are do serve to underscore that this isn't some pie in the sky academic fantasy that Murray Rothbard and other thinkers engage in. Because I think the default is that people so-called normal people who aren't steeped in libertarian theory, they have this idea that, hey, our present system works pretty well, and you guys are proposing some radical thing. But now we've learned another news hook, of course, is the Senate report on all the systematic torture that the CIA engaged in, or enhanced interrogation, depending on how you feel about it. And so it's clear that this present system is not working. And so it really does make us wonder, well, gee, is there a reason for that, or is this just random? And so what people like Murray Rothbard pointed out is, look, we can understand like something like food or education. Most people would agree it would be absurd and dangerous to allow the state to monopolize the production and provision of food or education. They can see that not only would that be inefficient, but it would also be extremely dangerous in terms of your liberty to give them such power over you. So then why in the world would we entrust them with the job of telling us who the criminals are, and then telling us what is appropriate use of force in order to grab those people and put them in cages, or in some cases to execute them? Like how can you trust the government with that if you wouldn't trust them to monopolize like the school books or giving food to people? So that's the premise. And then Rothbard just as an economist walks through and explains how that type of market could work. As I mentioned, there's a lot of very well-meaning objections to this. And I think the objectivists, the Randians have been in the forefront of this. Harry Benzwanger, who's a famous objectivist, recently wrote an article in Forbes where he really laid out the case for police and why even a limited government person ought to believe in state police. And I will give him credit, you know, as an objectivist, he does go out of his way to define his terms and he properly understands the state as force. So let me just as devil's advocate, Bob, throw out a paragraph here where he says, ask yourself what it means to have a competition in governmental services. It's a competition in wielding force, a competition in subjugating others, a competition in making people obey commands. That's not competition, it's violent conflict. On a large scale, it's war. So I'd like your response. Well, sure, and you're right, Jeff, that his article, even though I think it's utterly foundationless, that's not a criticism of his. Just the idea, the position he's being forced to defend, I think, is without foundation. So he actually does a good job of mustering a defense for it. But when you think about it, and if you just allow yourself to go down that path of questioning, should there be a state monopoly on defense services and judicial rulings, it goes out the window. So for example, I could just make an analogy and say, look it, when it comes to fighting off deadly microbes and viruses and bacteria, things like that, that's not something that you can do, that you can get in voluntary trade with. We can't bargain with the bacteria. We have to wipe them out and destroy them. So clearly, health care cannot be something entrusted to the market because that's not an exchange of values. That's just one side has to vanquish the other. The bacteria are trying to kill us and we're trying to kill them. And so that's why we have to have the state monopolize that whole operation. So if I say that, you'd realize, well, no, that's obviously crazy, Bob. What we mean when we say that health care should be run by the market is that the voluntary humans who are not engaged in aggression, when they deal with each other and we try to get some people to go into medical research, we try to get other people to become nurses and doctors and some people to build hospitals and see patients and other people to have insurance companies and collect premiums, all of that, that web of commerce and transactions should be handled by voluntary market activities. That's what we mean when we say a free market in health care. So by the same token, when we talk about having a free market in defense, we don't mean that if some outside force is sending tanks towards us, that we go out and try to pay them enough money to turn around. That's what we mean is when we organize our defense among lawabiding people internally, if we're talking about a foreign state sending bombers and tanks, what we mean is, are we allowed to use violence and aggression against our fellow men to compel them to contribute to the defense strategy that we think is optimal? And that's the issue. So there's no doubt that, yes, ultimately, when it comes to police, for example, that sometimes you have to use violence against a criminal. Like that's the standard libertarian default view. But the point is, when you want to say this agency is the one that gets to be the police force, can they use violence to rule out competitors? So the way you compete as a police agency or as a judicial firm or as a group trying to say, hey, we can protect you from foreign bombers. We're going to have service to air missiles and so on. That has to be voluntary competition. You have to voluntarily get your customers money. You can't say to your customers, hey, the deal is we'll protect you from foreign invaders and you have to give us $1,000 a month for that service. And if you don't like it, we're going to throw you in a cage. That is what is not acceptable in the Rothbardian framework. Right. And it's interesting that Ben Swanger's article actually goes farther than rejecting private defense. He actually opines that capitalism requires government. And what's interesting here is, of course, governments are necessarily parasitical. So production precedes the state necessarily so. So it seems like he's got that backward. In other words, what comes first production of the state? Well, right. I mean, there is that as well. I mean, his intellectual mistake is that he assumes that a legal order requires a monopoly agency to provide that. And then that's what he means by the government. And so there's a couple problems with that. So one problem is we don't see that when it comes to things like mathematics or physics or even standards like HTML and stuff like that, where the arguments by which people say there has to be one supreme agency. Otherwise, there would be chaos and incompatible rules that you don't see that play out in these other areas that are clearly voluntary. It would it would be awful to have one group with the monopoly on what is proper the laws of physics are or what our understanding is. You obviously you have competition and and people try to offer different theories of how nature works and so on. And that's the way we come to an understanding and scientists have a general agreement on right now our best understanding of what the laws of physics are and so on. There is there's no analog of the state in that realm. And yet clearly that's something that's objective out there. That that's clearly something you know, a Randian should love is the study of the laws of how nature operates or mathematics even more so. The other problem is, you know, he has another part in his article where he says something like there has to be what agency they have the supreme law of the land because you can't have different groups disagreeing about what the law is. But OK, then ultimately that means if you're an objectivist and oblique with that, you should believe in one world government. And maybe they do. I don't know. But most people don't usually push it that far and say the only way we're ever really going to have peace on earth is if one state is controlling all earthlings and we're all citizens of this one giant government that rules over the whole world. Most people correctly are horrified by that proposition. And yet that's the ultimate logical conclusion. If you're going to say this idea of competing jurisdictions in a Rothbard type framework would not allow the rule of law. Bob, you wrote a great article all the way back in 2005. I didn't realize it was that old. It's called but wouldn't warlords take over? And in this article, you addressed some of the common objections that we're addressing today. And what I like is, well, first of all, you sort of predicted the old if you're an anarchist, why don't you move to Somalia? Ha, ha, ha argument that's become such a cliche today. But you also go into social contract theory, which is obviously something as libertarians we reject. But you turn it around and you use it to make an argument that if we really do sort of agree on so many fundamental things, then that helps us make the case for privatizing defense. Yeah, sure. So that particular branch of the article, what I was trying to say there is the reasonable person who objects to a Rothbardian framework. They're going to say, look, under the problem with your guys' view that you think that just competition among defense agencies or judicial firms and so on. You guys think you'd have this nice, peaceful orderly outcome. But what you fail to acknowledge is in the real world, people have different views of what justice is. There would be different customers who would patronize, affirm the beliefs in capital punishment, for example, or people who are really Orthodox Jews might subscribe to some other judge or whatever, who they think that kind of law should rule over disputes and so on. And and thus there would be chaos. You can't just have market competition to solve all that. These things are incommensurable. There can be no solution except which side has more guns. And so that's why they think that Rothbardian anarchy would break down. And they say, in contrast, our view is we have a democratic, Republican system of government where we all agree that periodically we're going to submit to whoever wins the elections for that period. But we have a basic guarantee of human rights and so on, a constitution, things like that. So that the temporary majority can't just lord it over the minority. We have this basic framework. But then the particular policy parameters we may disagree with each other, but whoever the majority is and they elect their representatives, so it's peaceful. We don't resort to violence. It's not which side has the most guns. It's which side has the most votes. But then we have that basic guarantee of human rights that there are constitution. So my point is, if that would work, that system they just spelled out, well, then why wouldn't that work with Rothbardian anarchy as well? Right? If we're all peaceful enough and we can recognize, yes, despite our differences, we were not going to just take it to violence that if you guys get abortion to go through and we think it's murder, we're not going to go around killing doctors. We're going to wait till the next election. We're going to write letters to the other. We're going to use peaceful means to try to reform from within. If you're that kind of person, that society would work. Well, then how come you couldn't buy the same token? Say, yep, those people over there patronize a certain defense agency. We think they're wrong, but we recognize that civil war helps nobody. And so if we ever have a dispute with somebody represented by that firm, then we're going to submit to a third party and we're going to have a different rule book that applies and we're going to try to persuade them over time and hopefully our company gets more and more customers, but we're not going to resort to civil war and settle our disputes. Right? So that's all I'm saying is that they're inconsistent. The type of population that would allow the standard story of peaceful democratic government to work would also allow Rothbardian competing defense agencies to work and in fact, more so. And it's not as if regions around the world that are ruled by states never see civil wars, that happens all the time. OK, so it's not that the state system of governance prevents civil war and mass strike, we see it all over the place. And even in the United States with recent events, like we talked about in the beginning of this interview, it's breaking down right here that many people would say, yeah, warlords have taken over and they're the NYPD and so forth. What's interesting when you reference Rothbard is that he was writing and talking about this concept a long time ago. Now, man economy and state and power and market were bifurcated, unfortunately, at one point, but even when power and market comes out, his opening chapter is called Defense Services on the Free Market. That's pretty radical stuff for, let's say, 1970 when the book is published. Right. I mean, it's hard for me to remember what I used to think before discovering Rothbard. I mean, I have to be even reading Four New Liberty, which is, you know, not not he just kind of sketches out things. He doesn't get into much because it's such a wise sweeping book. But I remember just sort of laughing and thinking, wow, this guy's pretty out there. Like he really put, you know, I was at the time in favor of tax cuts and a flat tax, that kind of stuff. That's where I was coming from. And jeez, this guy doesn't think there should be any taxes. Ha, ha, ha, split. So it just takes a while to to realize and let it sink in. And it's really just a prejudice that you just, if you just assume there has to be a state performing these services. Most people, like my progression was, I realized, oh, yeah, you don't need a state to deliver the mail. You don't need them to build the roads. You don't need to run schools. You don't need them to send welfare checks to people. OK. And then it's a very hard leap to then go for, oh, jeez, you don't even need them to provide a monopoly police service. I mean, just to get people to see it, if the kind of stuff happened where, like, let's say there's a shopping mall that employed a private security firm and then some kids shoplifting and then the officers grab the kid or the employees where we want to call them. And then the kid dies while they're taking him into custody. Whether or not those people are legally responsible. Clearly, the shopping mall is going to fire that firm and hire some other firm where the employees, when they're protecting the property, you know, the merchandise on the premises, they don't kill teenagers when they bring them into custody for shoplifting, right? Because that's just bad business. The public doesn't like that. And they realize there's a way you can bring in nonviolent, non-threatening people into custody without killing them often. And so that's part of the issue why everyone's so, you know, outraged about what happened, especially with the Eric Garner cases, that guy clearly was not a threat to anyone in the immediate area. And yet he ended up dead and nothing really happened to the police officers involved. And so that's really what the outrage is. So I'm saying if you did have competing forces, there wouldn't be this issue of you wouldn't be forced to choose between people dying often in the hands of the police versus complete lawlessness, which is what the average American thinks the choice is. So once you introduce competition, you would realize, no, the choice is getting rid of this agency that for whatever reason doesn't bother properly training its employees about how to bring people into custody without killing them. Well, Bob, when you bring up the idea of competition, you know, both Rothbard and Hans Hoppe talk about using an insurance model. And what's interesting here is that an insurance company has a vested interest in keeping its costs as low as possible. So an insurer has an interest in preventing crime, in making sure or hopefully increasing the odds that your home is not broken into. Whereas police agencies and police forces that are run by states, state and local governments tend to have a growth model. In other words, the worst crime gets the larger their budget grows. So when you take away market forces and you take away market discipline, I don't think we should be surprised that police services cost too much and that they're not very effective. Yeah, that's a great point. And people hear that and they say, oh, that's such a cynical view. But it's again, the people who often are the opponents of Rothbard, they'll say things like, oh, you trust people too much. You don't understand the depravity of man. And that's why we need a strong state in order to knock some sense into these people or, you know, take these people off the streets. And so it's ironic that all of a sudden, you know, these people who have such a low view of their fellow man, yet their solution is to give a monopoly on guns and so-called legitimacy and sovereignty to this other group over here who, at best, why are they in charge? Well, because they want a popularity contest. All right. And so that mean the whole framework is insane. And you're exactly right that with as with any other government agency. I mean, it's like when there's a plane crash, what happens? The FAA can go to Congress and say, well, we're clearly under funded and understand we need more money. All right. So that's just a perverse situation where these government agencies that are given the responsibility of keeping the public safe or preventing crime or punishing criminals, what have you, that when bad things happen, that gets them more money. And so we shouldn't be surprised that crime is a rampant problem in certain areas when, as you say, if they actually solve the crime problem, then the legislators would say, well, clearly the police don't need the budget increase. There was nothing happened last year. Why don't we cut their budget? Well, Bob, I couldn't agree with you more. It's time to wrap this up today. But ladies and gentlemen, if you're interested in learning more about the subject, go to Mises.org and find Bob's article entitled But Wouldn't Warlords Take Over or find the PDF of Power and Market and just read the first chapter by Rothbard. And I think you'll be illuminated. Bob, thanks so much for a fascinating interview. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.