 Thank you, everyone, for coming. Good afternoon. Also, thank the Mises Institute for inviting me. So what I want to talk about today is the political economy of policing. So what is that? So the political economy part is what I mean by it, actually, is the economic analysis of the institutions through which policing is provided. So what is policing? So that can refer to what most people have in mind when they hear police, like government agents enforcing laws, hopefully protecting property rights and keeping people safe, but not limited to just that, but also the non-state provision of the enforcement of property rights protection, not just both commercial, but as well as people doing non-compensated labor, volunteering their time in neighborhood watch or buying their security systems and cameras, so trying to be inclusive here. So not just your elite government police, but also your elite private security. So what I'm doing here is kind of a comparative institutional analysis, both of your government provision and your non-government provision. And the key, the light by which I see everything else, is through economic calculation. So Dr. Solano talked about the problem of calculating under a system of socialism, but the economic calculation problem, it's not just limited to socialism. It can also occur in an otherwise market-oriented, I don't know if that's a good one, a market economy when you have government agencies operating within it. So I have a picture here of Mises's bureaucracy, which I think after this talk, everyone should go buy a copy. I'm probably gonna lobby for that to be one of the books included in the box. It's not only 100 pages, it's a great read, but how Mises defines bureaucracy is that it's an entity that can't engage in economic calculation, as opposed to an organization manage for profit or it can depend on profit and loss calculation. So when we think of a typical government police department, it's run bureaucratically. They can't engage in profit and loss calculation. I mean, they can calculate their costs, which are meaningful because they go out into the market and acquire labor, some capital goods, some police cars, some guns, some tasers, these things that have market prices, using resources that other people bid for, but they can't calculate profit because their revenue is disconnected from the voluntary market exchange. That is, I mean, they mainly get it through taxes or taking your stuff. Otherwise, through a non-taxation means, I'll talk a little bit about civil asset forfeiture later. But there's this disconnect. It's not people expressing their desire for government-provided policing. They're not exchanging their money, demonstrating they prefer the government-provided service more than they prefer the alternative use of that money. So that's a bureaucratic police department. By contrast, private security bought voluntarily on the market, at least in an ex-ante sense, people buying it are demonstrating they prefer those services over the alternative uses of the money that they're spending on them. And this has a lot of epistemological implications. So as I mentioned, police departments are bureaucracies that can't engage in profit and loss calculation. So they have to find some other way, excuse me, of measuring performance. Most of them, it's not like they go out and collect surveys of how much people like the services they provide. They don't say they don't leave us a Yelp review. They don't do these things. So they mostly rely on data they just collect incidentally. Things like reported crime, arrests, clearance rates. So clearance rates being, when there is a reported crime, if they arrest somebody for it, they consider that a clearance. Not necessarily convicted for it, but we arrested someone. And with these figures, like, okay, reported crime went up. Maybe we need more money. Reported crime went down. Thank you, you're welcome. So these things, you see, they're very limited from what we can tell from these things. It's very different than profit and loss calculation, which a for-profit firm can tell whether they've allocated resources to more highly valued uses. And I wanted to mention Eleanor Ostrom and her colleagues. I think they engaged in what I consider probably the best social scientific research. I mean, it's not economics, but they're the crown jewel of the social sciences, but the best they could do under the circumstances. So starting in the 70s, so at the time in a research question of interest or maybe probably something just taken as gospel was that municipal services should be consolidated. That's wasteful to have, like, if you think of Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, there's all kinds of little police departments. It's like, why don't we just have one big one? We'd get rid of duplicative services. I'd be more efficient, you'd have better training. And so she goes out to test this question or to the extent that it can be tested. So she was in Indiana, one of the cities, research was Indianapolis, where she'd find, I guess ideally, you'd find comparable communities. So those near Indianapolis receiving policing services from the Indianapolis police, comparable neighborhoods that have their own independent police department. And she'd go ask people, are you satisfied with the police? Well, not just satisfied, but all kinds of things. How easy is it to get in contact with the police chief? How many police officers can you name? Like all these kinds of things. And then also, well, what's the cost per person? And she found some of them, well, what she generally found was those with their small independent police departments were generally more satisfied. Sometimes they cost more, sometimes they cost less. But from this, we can't determine, like, are consumer preferences being satisfied? As if people like it more, but it also costs more. Well, maybe people are willing to pay that. Maybe they'd prefer to pay less, but have less preferable service. But we don't know. So I guess I bring all this up, just to show under a system of bureaucracy, it's extremely hard to tell whether people are actually satisfied that they'd be willing to pay for these things, even with the best research that can be done. So by contra, now moving away from bureaucracy, talking about policing services being provided through voluntary means, economic calculation is possible. Even in a psychic sense, or be careful here, not calculation, but people know, or can know whether they've made a psychic profit. You go buy security cameras for your house. You feel more protected, whatever. You were willing to give up that money. It's like, oh, resources have been allocated to more highly valued uses. Commercial enterprises can engage in actual arithmetic calculation when they spend money on either hiring contracted police or having their own employees provide security in-house. And they can do this, might be in a variety of ways. In terms of additional revenue, if we make, say our business establishment, people feel safer, maybe they, we increase revenue. It's not necessarily the case that they can tell, this was the marginal contribution of greater security. Maybe they can see, okay, here's before, you know, maybe we had some vagrants around and people were unsafe and felt that, and oh, we get the security, they made people feel safer. We see revenues go up, maybe we can infer that that was the cause of this security. Or similarly, with losses prevented, say we're dealing with retail theft, we hire some loss prevention specialists. We can see what were our losses beforehand, what were our losses afterwards, and we have a monetary value that we can compare to what we have to pay this loss prevention guy. And if we pay him less than the, I guess it's a counterfactual, we don't know how much loss we're actually preventing in the counterfactual, but we can estimate it. So there are these means of telling whether, in money terms, security resources are being allocated to more highly valued uses. So in thinking about a bureaucratic police department, since, again, going back to Mises's bureaucracy says, here's for-profit management, here's bureaucratic management. Bureaucratic management can't be done according to profit and loss, so how do they make decisions? Well, if we observe them, like, go look out the window, you can see a lot of the Auburn police driving around. Their production process seems to be mostly, they'll respond to calls for service, and when they're not doing that, they wait for calls for service, or maybe engage in vehicular patrol, or just park and have some donuts. But they mostly wait for, it's very reactive, and even when a crime does occur, they'll go investigate, detectives go investigate crimes, so it's very reactive. They do make some proactive decisions. They do respond to incentives. I think a good example of this is after the 1984 Crime Control Act, this opened some loopholes for civil acid forfeiture, which you might be familiar with, so civil acid forfeiture is when police can seize goods that they believe have been used in, or are the proceeds of a crime, so they spot you have a lot of cash in your car, that, oh, is that drug money? And they only need a probable cause standard to actually seize this, and the reason they're interested in this is that they can supplement their own budgets with this. A lot of states require that, if police do do this, I mean, they don't have to get a conviction. Civil acid forfeiture, not criminal acid forfeiture. In the state of North Carolina, for example, it's supposed to go into an education fund. But this federal law made it so that police departments could bypass that. They could get in a partnership with the DEA and they'd split it 20 to the feds and 80 to the local police department. And so they decided to reallocate resources based on this. Bruce Benson, a Florida state economist, he found that near Tallahassee after this that police, well, property crime went up. Police officers dedicated fewer resources to preventing or investigating property crime and more towards drug crime, because that's where the money was. So they do respond to incentives like this. Yeah, I mean, an additional example, Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was killed. There was a DOJ investigation. They found that a lot of police departments were engaged in writing a lot of tickets for, you know, ticky tax stuff. You got these cracks in the sidewalk leading up to your house. You don't have matching blinds. That this was a way of making money. So they do respond to incentives and some of these have monetary rewards. But as you see, it's not connected necessarily to what consumers want and are willing to pay for. A couple additional institutional differences between government police and non-government police that I think are important is that government policing takes primarily, takes place primarily in the public domain or a so-called public property, I don't necessarily like that term, but maybe it's more accurate than public domain because that might have the implication that it can be homesteaded. But like what I mean there, like public streets, et cetera, like these don't have a capital value. And so if you try to, I mean, you could engage in a street beautification project, I guess, but you wouldn't have a capital value for it because it's not traded on the market. So you can't tell whether those investments were worth doing. So this has implications for the allocation of resources and whether we can tell whether certain investments are value added. A second, or an additional institutional difference is how both government police are constrained and how non-government police are constrained. So government police are constrained, at least say in the American case for example, by constitutional guidelines about searches and seizures, what they can do that without these restrictions maybe they'd be even more abusive. Whereas non-government police don't have these, they're not bound by the constitution the same way. And so I'll talk about how, well that affects how they engage in policing, how differently they are constrained. So now that we've talked about some of these institutional differences, I wanna talk about the implications these have for trade-offs within policing. That is, there are these inherent trade-offs that in a bureaucratic framework, we're just unable to tell whether we've found the optimum of this trade-off according to what consumers want. So I'll talk about each one of these. The first, I've decided to label convenience slash dignity and security. So you're probably familiar with that Ben Franklin quote about the trade-off being between liberty and security. And if you trade liberty for security, that you lose both and deserve neither. And it's my argument here is that trade-off isn't necessarily the case. That is, if you have the liberty to choose the security you want, well then, while you have your liberty, you can choose more or less security so that the real trade-off might be something like convenience. Some mundane example is like computer passwords. Like there's a trade-off between convenience and security. Like if you're using the same password for all your accounts, that's more convenient but you're probably less secure. Whereas if you wanna be more secure then you might have to give up some convenience. So that's what I mean. I don't think if there's not a monopoly provider of security, you don't necessarily have to give up your liberty. The second one, this issue of constraints and security. That was just meant about constitutional constraints. And then this question of whether to use force or how much force to use. I'd say this itself can be subject to economic calculation in the right institutional setting. And then these last two points related to some research I've done on police unions where police unions will negotiate in their contracts for increased job protections that make it harder to punish them when they're being bad. So those are the last couple of things we'll round out. So let's dive in. So, a pleasant picture here. So thinking about this trade-off between dignity and security. So, when you think about the mission of the Transportation Security Administration, I mean, it's to keep people safe while traveling. But there's this trade-off. I assume for now that they're not engaging in security theater. That's what they're doing actually increases security. But there's a cost to dignity. Even if, I mean, let's also assume they're publicly spirited. They want to find this optimal trade-off. Like they don't just, and probably a lot of them don't enjoy this, but somebody made the rules that they have to do it. Maybe some of them do enjoy it, but say what they really want to maximize, regardless of whether they enjoy it or not, is that they want to find this optimal trade-off. That they don't want to engage in undignified acts unless the benefit in terms of security is worth it. But we have these incommensurate things. How do we measure dignity versus security? Well, the thing is, when this is bureaucratically provided by the TSA, we can't, it sounds grammatically funny, but we can't know. We can't know whether they're actually doing that. I mean, if we imagine instead in a different institutional framework, say the airlines themselves were the providers of security, security screenings. I think that would seem incentive aligned, at least, that, I mean, they don't want to just be insecure. I mean, they have billions of dollars of capital goods at stake, but they don't want to engage in security theater, especially if, well, maybe if they could fool people, but they don't want to engage in undignified acts if that's not actually increasing security. So if that were a matter of choice among consumers, like you choose this airline and they offer, okay, maybe you just go through the metal detector and what, that's through this competitive process, they could figure out the optimal trade-off between what consumers want and also protecting our capital goods, but they wouldn't want to unnecessarily inconvenience travelers, because they want travelers to come with us, but we also want to make sure our capital goods are protected. So I would argue that it's only through this institutional framework of private property and free exchange, rather than a monopoly provider of security, a bureaucratic provider of security, where this optimal trade-off can be determined. And we can look at different examples of this. So I mean, one more within the private sector. So this here is a picture at a Kroger in Fulton County. So it depicts, so within a Kroger grocery store, there's additional barriers with one entrance and exit. Looks like it's protecting things like laundry detergent or other items. I guess these were the things that they found were more often stolen. And you see the headline says, some customers upset over changes at a Kroger. So here, they're facing a similar trade-off, right? Some customers may feel alienated by these additional security measures. So you have this decrease in dignity or convenience. And Kroger's only going to want to do that if that sufficiently, say, prevents loss, if the dollar value of that loss prevented is greater than however many customers they might lose. I mean, yeah, people will complain. They'll probably still shop at Kroger, right? I don't know. But they don't want to do this unnecessarily, right? They only want to do this if, and they can see in their bottom line, is this, I mean, we have the, I mean, the physical costs of erecting this structure, but also, I mean, potentially lose out on customers, but also prevent theft. But only in this institutional framework of private property and free exchange can they determine this. A similar example of this. This is a convenience store in Baltimore. See this lady behind a lot of glass to protect herself. And people complain about this too. It's undignified, but this entrepreneur behind the glass is trying to determine and can do it because of profit and loss, whether it's worth even while operating a convenience store like this where, well, faces an increased risk of theft. And even though this might alienate certain customers, like, oh, I feel like I'm a zoo animal here being behind this glass. Then, turning to the second point, which, let me go, constitutional constraints and security. So, Mises in bureaucracy talks about these constraints, bureaucracies are supposed to be subject to rules. I mean, that's what bureaucracy is. Well, you can't calculate, so follow these rules. So he says, if one assigns to the authorities the power to imprison or even to kill people, one must restrict and clearly circumscribe this power. The law determines under what conditions the judge should have the right and the duty to sentence, and the policeman to fire his gun. So, this should be subject to rules. Constrained, it can't just depend on officer's discretion. It has to be bounded within certain rules. But this leads to certain problems. So in line with this, according to the law professor Randy Barnett, which he agrees with Mises, you gotta constrain government here. But this leads to a dilemma of vulnerability. So he says that a society that includes extensive public property holdings is faced with what might be called a dilemma of vulnerability. Since governments enjoy privileges denied their citizens and are subject to few of the economic constraints of private institutions, so that's the poor thing. They're subject to few of the economic constraints. Their citizens are forever vulnerable to governmental tyranny. But he goes on to say, so if they're gonna be, you wanna decrease their being subject to governmental tyranny, so you put these constitutional constraints on them that they can only search you under certain conditions or certain conditions as we met if they arrest you. But this dilemma of vulnerability is, this leaves you vulnerable to others, non-governmental actors. So if we think about order maintenance in the public domain or extensive public property holdings as Barnett terms it. So government police are constituting to strain their ability to maintain order in the public domain. So for example, laws against certain disorderly activities such as vagrancy or loitering or panhandling or soliciting for prostitution or public intoxication. The Supreme Court has voided these for vagueness. They say these laws are too vague. Like if this, we don't know if this lady, is she handling a cab or is she advertising her services? We don't know, this leaves police officers, I mean they can, oh, if they're not on the up and up they might harass certain people. So the Supreme Court says these are too vague, we can't have these laws because as they are enforced they might be arbitrarily enforced. But if, so this is to solve the dilemma problem with government police officers, but then it does leave you vulnerable to, the vagrants, the loiterers, the panhandlers. So it's like choose who you wanna be vulnerable to. So this is the dilemma of vulnerability. And so the problem is, well, maybe think about Rothbard wanting to unleash the police. You're on the wrong side of the trade-off. Because they can't, without calculation, they can't determine what the optimal trade-off is here between this dilemma of vulnerability. So by contrast, if we think about private security, so these have a picture here of the Beatles of Burlington arcade. They got cool outfits, but they're considered one of the oldest private police forces in the world. So the Burlington arcade, it's not video games, it's an upscale shopping area in London. And they have certain rules that if American police tried to enforce these in a public domain, it would be considered unconstitutional. So for example, they prohibit whistling, because whistling used to be this code among pickpockets in the area. So no whistling. You can't make clucking noises because this was a signal among ladies of the night that their services were available. So you can't, you know, this ruins the decorum of this upscale shopping area. But so the constraint here is they're not constrained in the same way as, like, they don't have a First Amendment constraining them against, you know, if you consider clucking or whistling speech. But they're constrained in other ways. They don't want to make rules that make this property undesirable by consumers. They only want rules that will increase the value. Or if they do decrease the value to some people, the value is increased commensurably to others. But we can compare those because they can gauge in profit and loss calculation. Sorry if that sounds too much like a broken record, but like I said, it's like the light by which I see everything else. These things that you can know because of the institutions of private property allowing you to calculate profit and loss. Then moving on to this question of whether to use force or how much force to use. So this is a picture of, so a few years ago, there were these two men, they're being arrested here. They were in a Philadelphia Starbucks. And they were sitting in there. They didn't buy anything. One of them requested to use the bathroom and they were told by the manager, you gotta buy something or you gotta go. I mean, it's a busy place, you're taking up a table. And they chose to do neither. So the police were called. And the police reiterated to them like you either gotta buy something or leave. And again, they didn't do either. So they were arrested for trespassing. And here the police basically did their jobs right. I mean, it's like, here's trespassing. Starbucks is fully within their rights to eject these two men. But this ended up being an entrepreneurial error. Like if you've heard about this case, it was a big PR disaster for Starbucks. Ended up closing 8,000 locations for a day for some kind of training. I think the CEO met with these two men. I think it might start a scholarship in their honor for young entrepreneurs. They said they were there to make a real estate deal, but they're wearing sweatpants. So what I wanna say, maybe from a legal perspective that Starbucks was fully within their rights, but from a profit making perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, it was probably better for them had they tolerated this nuisance rather than use force to deal with it. And they can only know that because, well, Starbucks is subject to profit and loss calculation. Whereas, I mean, the police department, like I said, the police department itself, they were acting as the agents of Starbucks, but I mean, like I said, they didn't break any rules. They did their jobs as they were trained to do. But because this took place in a context where there's economic calculation, they're able to determine whether it was worth it to use force here. And might I add, so you might know, this saga continues with Starbucks and enforcement. So more recently, a few Starbucks locations have closed because they went too far the other way. They became too tolerant. So in Seattle, for example, Starbucks employees were, they just felt unsafe, too many people shooting up in the bathroom. So economic calculation allows them to see that they've gone too far the other way. So they're trying to find this optimal trade-off. I mean, we don't wanna use force too much, but we also don't wanna become too tolerant of certain behaviors that people don't wanna come in here and people don't wanna work for us. Some of those locations ended up closing. But again, this is only because Starbucks can engage in profit and loss calculation. So last couple things I wanna talk about. So with police union protections. So police unions negotiate for job protections that make punishing police officers more difficult. This, we can effectively think that as a, or think of that effectively as a pay increase. So it's like professor, granting professors tenure to the extent that that actually gives them some job protection. If you think, okay, I got these two job offers like this one pays this amount, this one pays the same amount, but there's also this chance of obtaining tenure. It's like, oh, well, all else held constant. I know what I'm picking. So the one offering tenure could offer less in wages to the extent that people think job security versus higher wages as a substitute. The one not offering tenure is gonna have to offer more money. And it's the same thing for police officers. All else held constant. More job security will decrease the level of wages that have to be offered. And there's pretty clear examples of this. I find interesting. So in Chicago, for example, there were years where the city is like, oh, we don't have a lot of cash. We can't really raise your pay as much as you want. And the police union says, well, we'll take more protections in lieu of higher wages. And the city's like, okay. And so you see how the city might like this. They're like, oh, well, this is budget neutral. You know, any costs that come in the, any costs that occur monetarily will come in the longer term once we, well, which is what they found. They, certain officers with these protections, they were extremely hard to fire and creating these civil liability costs for the city. But nobody remembers that when the decisions were made. And then later, so the Chicago police, or the city of Chicago had this police accountability task force. I think Lori Lightfoot was on it. And they recommended getting rid of certain, some of these protections. They said this, because they're the police accountability task force, we want police to be more accountable. Well, these protections, so an example of protection might be officers get fired, they can appeal to binding an independent arbitrator. And about half the time, these arbitrators give them their jobs back. And ostensibly, this is to prevent arbitrary firing, because this is a very big issue. I won't get too much into, but with private sector employment, private sector employers are relatively unconstrained as well. They're not trying to obtain profits. They can, they have, they're less constrained in wanting, in being able to hire people they like, who aren't necessarily more productive. And so in that sense, public employees might be more vulnerable to firing, but then you have all these civil service laws or union protections that make it harder for them to be fired. So anyway, I just want to, sort of that what I'm talking about in terms of these protections, but to finish that story, about the police accountability task force. So they recommended getting rid of these protections and the fraternal order of police president came back to them and said, yes, we would be willing to forego these protections. Just bring your checkbook. So if you pay us more, we'll get rid of these protections. So they clearly see these as substitutes. So this leads to, I think, an interesting question. So a trade-off between, say, lower taxes and greater police accountability. So as mentioned, at least some police unions are willing to negotiate away protections in exchange for higher wages. But how much are taxpayers willing to pay? That's what I find interesting. You see certain surveys of people saying like, yeah, the police need to be reformed, but the same surveys never asked like, okay, how much are you willing to pay for that? I wonder, well, maybe people are willing to pay. I don't know, but people seem to think that, oh, we should just get rid of these protections. Well, they don't think of the secondary effects like, you've lowered police pay. You're going to have a different pool of applicants likely. So this is a trade-off here, and we can't know what the optimal trade-off is without markets, and it wouldn't be taxes, but it would be individual buyers of security. How much are they willing to pay for greater accountability? And then, I think this is an interesting political economy issue, and this, I think is related to the fact that we can't calculate the optimal scale of police provision in a bureaucratic framework. So most police departments are at some kind of municipal city level, and there's a lot of heterogeneity. There's different people who, people who are paying the bulk of the taxes, the ones who would probably be like, yeah, give more protections, lower my taxes. They're generally not the ones suffering police misconduct. So just an additional issue whether you have bureaucratically provided policing that you're not able to determine these optimal trade-offs because consumers aren't actually able to express their preferences in a market setting. I mean, you have voting, but that's just really very crude at best. Just not a substitute for determining opportunity costs. And then lastly, a related issue, this trade-off between misconduct and what I'm calling de-policing. So the de-policing label is, or some called it the Ferguson effect, that police officers, they're worried about getting in trouble. It's like, I don't want to be on the evening news if I try doing my job. And even in certain cases, as we found, like I would argue, in my opinion, sometimes like, yeah, they do things well, but then LeBron James is tweeting about them. Like thinking of the Makaya Bryant case where it involved a woman about to stab another woman and a police officer shooting, and it seems like in my estimation justified. And it's like, well, this led to a lot of negative publicity. But the point is to the extent that police are able to, I'm just gonna stay in my car. I'm not gonna be proactive because I don't want to put myself in more situations. That's what I mean by de-policing. Okay, so primary justification for these protections by those who are more protections, such as qualified immunity. So qualified immunity protects police officers from civil liability if they violate someone's civil rights and are sued. If they, I think the legal conditions are, if they do so in a, I guess, good will, to the best of their abilities, they didn't try to violate civil rights. And there's not a historically established, through precedent that doing this thing violates civil rights, then they're not gonna be held personally liable for it. And the justification for that is, well, we don't want police officers to be afraid to use force in situations like this. Like you're in a high pressure situation where people are using lethal weapons. You don't want police, well, the argument goes that you don't want police officers to be hesitant to use force. But if you don't have these protections, then they'll pull back, engage in de-policing. So this is a trade-off. You'd rather have more misconduct or de-policing if police are unprotected. Of course, say, this is only a problem when you have monopoly provision of a government bureaucracy providing policing, where they do have the less constrained, they can shirk. That's what I'm essentially talking about. They're shirking when they engage in de-policing. Again, if I wanna go sit in my car and eat donuts, that's shirking. I can only do that because there's not market competition. So an entrepreneur trying to satisfy consumers wants to find this optimal trade-off. I mean, they wanna minimize their liability. Certainly don't want guys going out with guns blazing. Maybe economic calculation will determine that to be the most efficient response. But no, they wanna minimize their liability while also protecting clients. If they're shirking, if they're minimizing their liability too much, then a competing entrepreneur will provide services that are better on that spectrum. Only minimizing liability to the extent that they're not unjustifiably leaving their clients unprotected. So to conclude, the provision of policing faces many entrepreneurial issues, as I've pointed out, but bureaucracy is about strictly following rules. It's not a, I mean, it can't incorporate entrepreneurship. It's like, you just do these things. You know, they're like Joe Friday from Dragnet. Like, just the facts, man. It's like, everything's by the book. And then, you know, in those buddy cop films, you have like the buy the book guy. That's the bureaucrat guy. And then you have, you know, Mel Gibson, the lethal weapons. Practically speaking, policing, it's not a standard situation. It's not like the DMV, where if you meet these conditions, I will issue you a license. It's not easily subject to bureaucratization in that way. And well, not to imply that the DMV is easily subject to bureaucratization either. I mean, there are trade-offs there too. I mean, Walter Block will tell you all about that. All the, you know, tens of thousands of people dying on the road. Like, is this worth it? We can't know without economic calculation. We have road socialism. So I don't want, I just don't want to apply that to DMV. Like, oh yeah, this is a great case of bureaucratization. Like no, there are, I mean, maybe in worse costs there too, of tens of thousands of people dying. So by moving policing outside of the realm of economic calculation, but making it bureaucratic contributes to a lot of these problems we see in policing. And I think one of the important implications in thinking about police reform is that, I mean, that might push you towards one side of the other of these trade-offs, but as long as you, like, reform, but keep it bureaucratic is not reforming in such a way that it's subject to private property free exchange, these things that create market prices through which economic calculation is possible, you can't resolve them. You can't find that optimal trade-off. So it's unresolvable in that sense. So that's all I have to say for now. Thank you for your attention. Okay, I think we have about four minutes for some questions. So I think Manuel said it best. Keep it concise. Keep it about what was asked. Be brief, no introductions, no anecdotes, no attention seeking. Have you done any research into specific areas? I know Detroit at least was looking at utilizing private police forces in order to help kind of rebuild their image by having better security. Do you know how successful that was if it's being successful, et cetera? Oh, well, regarding Detroit, I mean, a pretty well-known private policing service in Detroit is the Threat Management Center. You can, so the purveyor of that, Dale Brown, he's got some great interviews with Tom Woods in which he talks about the things he does. I don't know of the city of Detroit, the government trying to utilize this. A big problem for them is that they promise so much to their public employees. And so a lot of, much of what their current taxpayers are paying for policing is for services rendered in the past. It's to pay for retired police officers. I mean, created a great entrepreneurial opportunity for Dale Brown to enter. So I don't know of the city being involved, but he himself, I mean, he has quite a profitable business, a lot of mostly commercial clients, but also a lot of residential clients. So, yeah, I don't know if this, you think the city would be interested, I mean, it might just be a death spiral, I think, as if things gets worse, tax revenues go down. But yeah, so if you're interested in Detroit in particular, and I'd say just private policing, I think Dale Brown and Threat Management Center, are very interesting. Go check out those Tom Woods interviews. So in a system with private policing, how would qualified immunity work? And if we were not to have qualified immunity at all, what would be the best way you believe? And I know you said there are, there's never a best solution, it's always about trade-offs. But what do you think the best way to keep them accountable would be? Yeah, so, qualified immunity, I don't think any non-state actors, I think there was some legal bells over whether workers in contract, I don't like the term private prisons, they're all, the government's their only customer, I call them contract prisons, there was some debate over whether they're subject to qualified immunity. But essentially in the privacy, you don't have this. There's, so there's vicarious liability, the whatever the individual employee is gonna be doing, their employer is going to be liable. So there's not anything comparable to qualified immunity, if that makes sense. They're like, either them as an individual or their firm is going to be civilly liable if they do things that a court determines they committed a tort. So it just, this fits in well in the discussion about these firms, they want to minimize that liability. I find it interesting, there's a Canadian private security service called Intelligard and they're really early adopting out of body cameras, like they'd have guys carrying cameras around, there's actually footage of a guy getting like roundhouse kicked and he drops back up, but they did this to protect themselves, right? A lot of police unions have fought against body worn cameras, saying this changes their working standards, so it's subject to union negotiation, where for privately, they want to minimize their liability, like essentially, yeah, if you're doing things right, then you want that footage to protect yourself. So, say in these ways, yeah, they want to find that optimal trade off, we want to minimize our liability, but not so much that we're not protecting our clients. So it's a, yeah, you wouldn't have a substitute for, you wouldn't have anything like qualified immunity, just be that firm subject to civil liability, and so they have to find that optimal trade off and compete with other entrepreneurs also trying to find that. We're out of time, so thank you, Dr. Fegley. Thank you.