 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. Joining us is Bruce L. Benson, Devoie L. Moore Professor and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University and courtesy Professor of Law at Florida State University College of Law. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Bruce. Thank you. The enterprise of law strikes many, I would say, is probably quite radical. You question whether or not government is even needed to provide so-called law and order. And you use the quote in the beginning of the book. You say, you use economic theory to compare institutions and incentives that influence public and private performance in the provision of law and its enforcement. How does economics help us think about law and its enforcement? Well, of course, first of all, law and enforcement involves the use of scarce resources, which means they have to be allocated. In economics's studies, the allocation of scarce resources, the allocation process isn't through markets, of course, unless we talk about bribery and things like that, then we get a market kind of process working. But nonetheless, we can look at the institutional environment and think about the incentives that individuals have who are in a position to make these allocation decisions. So really, it's in a sense the economic model of behavior as in public choice theory, for instance, being taken to the public sector in general and to the legal system itself in particular. So all of us are fairly used to state provision of law and law enforcement. The system we live within and, well, we know that we deal with private security guards occasionally and may have heard about arbitration between parties as opposed to taking disputes to court. For the most part, we just kind of think of state-provided law and law enforcement as the way things work. But in the introduction to your book, you make a point of saying that typically we think a market, one of the things a market does is provides what the customers want. And you contrast this with state-provided law in saying that in many ways it fails to provide what people would want, what we might expect in a market. So what are some of the ways that state law or authoritarian law, as you refer to it, doesn't live up to what the customers desire? Well, I guess we can look at what's going on today in places like Baltimore and Cleveland and places, Ferguson, Missouri, I guess, where we've seen significant abuses of power by the police. As one example of the public sector not doing what we want it to do, we can see instances, in fact, significant instances where prosecutors decide to drop charges against some individual or decide to plea bargain down to some lower kind of charge. And so the victim of the crime really doesn't even get the satisfaction of having the criminal effectively punished if that's what the function of the process is. In terms of legislation, we see all sorts of laws created that actually are not about protecting us from bad things, but are, in fact, about protecting certain privileged groups from competition or protecting their privileges and so on. So I just read in the paper this morning about the two young girls trying to set up their lemonade stand and the police came and shut them down because they didn't have a proper license. Is that the kind of thing we want our legal system to be doing? I don't think most of us do. I'm struck when reading your examples of how the legal system fails to provide what we want because reading it from a libertarian perspective and also being very aware of what's going on in Ferguson and in Baltimore and the story of the girls' lemonade stand being shut down and then these stories of there was the one just earlier this week about the 11-year-old who was playing alone in his yard for an hour and the parents were arrested and charged with neglect, I believe, and he was sent to Child Protective Services. And I guess I had two reactions. I wanted to see if I'm maybe misreading where, for one, I would say that, I mean, we know if you poll parents, you poll people about should children be allowed to play outside. A shockingly large percent, if not the majority, I believe think no. Kids of an age who used to play outside all the time should not and it may be driven by kind of the panic attacks people have now about how dangerous they imagine the world has become. At the same time, a lot of the rules that you or a lot of the things where you say the law doesn't give what people want tend to be you say people want harsher sentences than the law currently provides or that is enforced that the plea bargaining leads to us basically going easier on criminals than we otherwise might or the market demands. But to me, from a libertarian perspective, those seem like features not bugs that if... Going easy on drug criminals seems like a good thing. Right. If the state is going easier than kind of the vindictiveness of Americans want, I guess I would be kind of hesitant to institute a market that would be as vindictive as the voter wants. Well, you're missing the point, I guess. My point is that we don't like many of these things that are coming out of the system. A different system is going to produce different outcomes. You're not going to have plea bargaining between a public prosecutor and a criminal or the criminal's lawyer in a privatized system. It'll be bargaining, perhaps, but between the victim and the offender. So you have some perhaps bargaining, perhaps arbitration, perhaps mediation. And the acceptance of the bargain is then not up to some public prosecutor, but it's up to the victim himself. What will satisfy the victim. And prior to the rise of criminal law, the kinds of things we think of as crimes today were illegal, but they were illegal in a system of civil liability. Now, someone here thinking when you're saying state provided law or publicly provided law, someone's first thought is going to be, well, that's the only choice. Anything else is not meaningfully law. And the idea that there's private provided law just seems kind of silly to many people. But in your book, you've explained how this is a erroneous concept of law. And we haven't always had state provided law in this way in that story. So how did that used to be the case that we didn't always have publicly provided law? When people say the state has to provide law, they're defining law as rules provided by the state. So it's a tautology. If we want to think of rules as the behavior that other people expect us to adopt in various kinds of interaction, then those rules come from lots of places. And in fact, most of the rules we follow in our day to day life are not rules generated by the state. The state may have at some point written them down, but they were developed through communities, individuals interacting, contracting, developing various sorts of mutual insurance arrangements, mutual assistance arrangements, all sorts of other sources of law. If you don't like the term law, you can call them norms. I call them customary law because I think that gets at the idea. The argument I make is one that is not at all shocking to say an anthropologist. That law comes from different places. Law can be imposed from the top down, which anthropologists are referred to as authoritarian law, or it can come from the bottom up through various forms of voluntary interaction, and they call it customary law. The customs that individuals adopt within their communities are very powerful in many situations. And if we go back in history, you go to, say, a number of tribal societies, you find systems where there is no legislation, there is no central authority to enforce rules. Nonetheless, these people get along, they interact, they trade, they enter into joint production, and all sorts of things because they know how each other is, or they at least have expectations about how each other is going to behave in these situations. So there are rules. A lot of these rules that you're describing, these customary rules, are things that we have experience with today. Everything from, you know, we know that you're supposed to, at least in the United States, you get in line for something. You queue up and that's the proper way to handle it. And if you cut in line, people get upset with you or look at you. You don't double dip chips either. We have these kind of rules and we know just behaviors that are appropriate or not. And so thinking about those or thinking about stuff on the margin about, you know, a higher security guard to protect your factory as opposed to a cop, we get all that. But I think what you're describing and where the absence of state-provided law and enforcement seems particularly weird and where I guess I'm asking if you could expand on how it worked before, how things worked before the rise of the state is in those, the things that like the really hard laws, right? The ones like against murder, against, you know, outright theft. The things where we don't, it doesn't feel right that the way you handle those is to give the person the stink eye or refuse to associate with them. We want some sort of like real enforcement there. Or blood feud or something along those lines. But blood feud sound pretty bad. Yes. And so how do you, how did those kinds of issues get settled without a centralized authority? Well, let's just, since we're a common law country, let's go back to England prior to the development of what we might call royal law, law of the kings. And think about how those kinds of situations were dealt with. There was a custom, a view that every individual, free individual had what was referred to as a peace. Essentially, the individual had property rights. They had property rights to their homes, perhaps to farmland, to the cattle and horses and sheep that they had and so on. And the expectation was that everyone would respect each other's peace. Well, some people don't respect the law. They certainly don't today and they didn't then. So how did they deal with them? Well, the typical community of freemen would form sort of mutual insurance arrangements, reciprocity kinds of things. They called them the tithing and the hundred, or that's at least what historians have named them. And the idea was that they would cooperate in various activities. If cattle strayed off the, the individual could call on his neighbors, the tithing to go help him find them. If he was robbed, he could call on his neighbors to go pursue the robber. If they had obligations to maintain the road network or network of paths within the community, so a path cross of somebody's property, they were supposed to keep it clean so other people could use them. This was all built on frequent interaction and reciprocity among these individuals. Now, if there was a dispute as to whether they caught the right bad man, the right robber, there was also a court system that worked at the hundred level. There was a court, but it was not a court backed by the king or something like that. It was representatives of each tithing would act essentially as a judge and jury, and they would decide on guilt or innocence. And if there was a finding of guilt, then the expectation was that the offender would pay restitution to the plaintiff. So if you've got someone who was robbed, the court would come up with an appropriate restitution. In fact, it was a pretty common understanding about what the payments would be for various kinds of offenses depending on the situations and so on. So how do they enforce that though? How do they make sure that you paid? First of all, of course, if the individual couldn't pay, they had alternatives. For instance, these were mutual insurance arrangements, so one community, if a member of that community owed restitution to somebody, they might pay the restitution for the individual and then the individual would owe his own neighbors and friends. If the individual refused to accept the court's judgment, the individual would be declared an outlaw, essentially word would spread that this individual is outside the law, no longer protected by his own community, and essentially he's free game. His property could be taken and so on. That might sound harsh, but of course the police are seizing assets today from people who haven't done anything, but maybe violated traffic law. So the outlawry, well it might sound trivial today, was a significant thing back then because you had to have protection from within your community in order to survive in that environment. If you were an outsider, you did not go into another community without being voluntarily accepted by that other community. Now the point that you make in the book, the point about restitution is incredibly powerful and something a lot of people haven't thought about and I've pointed out to people that isn't it strange that if I get into a fender bender with someone, me or my insurance company pays them, but if I punch someone in a bar or someone punches me, they pay the state and that's supposedly a crime of which the victim receives nothing. And that is kind of a head scratcher. It's so common. Oh, crime is the people versus the king versus it's so common that we don't even think about that it's really strange. How did it come to be that you're paying the state when you committed crimes against people? Well, let me say first of all it came about slowly, gradually, and not without substantial resistance. The system of hundreds and tithing in the restitution system, referred to often as the man price system, was essentially universal in these communities and then the system included everyone, the wealthy, the powerful, the poorest farmer and so on. And so the king, of course, the kings came arose in England not to establish and enforce law, but to fight wars. They were typically war chiefs who ultimately were able to claim some sort of divine right or some sort of authority that would allow them to lead armies and that sort of thing. But then, of course, they needed funding to maintain or be active in their wars. And so they start looking for ways to fund their operations. The king's primary source of income, the early kings, was essentially the produce from their various estates. They had lots of different estates around the country and they travel from one to another and consume what was produced there. They didn't have much in the way of money coming in that was liquid that could be used to buy other things. So they're looking for ways to get money. Well, one avenue was the king's peace. Everyone had a peace. The king had a peace, too. But the king has power in that he has military forces and so on and the support of other powerful individuals. And so he started expanding the king's peace, for instance. Was the king's peace geographically assigned or was it temporarily assigned? For instance, he would declare that a foreign traveler in the kingdom would not have the protection of a local tithing or hundred. And so if that individual was attacked, the king would step in and pursue justice. But it was a pursuit of justice in the sense that the king got the compensation, not the traveler. And so you lose that link between punishment and restitution and it becomes punishment with no restitution to the victim. Of course, most traveling groups and especially the merchants and the churches and so on traveled with protection anyway. So this isn't a big deal. It sounds like a good thing. It sounds like, wow, the king is stepping in to protect people who are traveling and that's a good thing. So some minor sorts of changes like that start occurring. The king declares that his peace extends to the major holiday period. So any offense committed during a certain holiday period is an offense against the king and the money goes to the king. The restitution payment or compensation payment goes to the king. After the Normans invaded, much more powerful kings, within a century or so you start seeing a distinction between crime and criminal law and civil law that hadn't existed before. And the distinction essentially was with criminal law, the king gets the money. With civil law, the victim gets the money. And the king is constantly expanding his jurisdiction, his peace to sweep in more and more opportunities to collect money. Law enforcement was a revenue generator for the king initially and that made it very attractive. It still is. That was what was striking about reading this is that it was one of those kind of, aha, that makes so much sense now, sorts of moments. One of the things that came out in the aftermath of the Ferguson situation was the enormous percentage of the city's budget that came from these fines that they were levying on their citizens. That they kept just jacking up the fines and jacking up the number of things you could be fined for. It was like 60% of the municipal budget. And so they had every incentive was for them to just harass and find their citizens and see them not as people that they ought to protect but as a source of revenue. Yeah, and people just don't realize how important this has become. In the area of drug enforcement, for instance, the since the early 1980s, we've seen lots of changes in asset seizure laws that allow civil seizures. All they have to do is suspect that someone has committed a crime or that they purchased some asset with proceeds from a crime and the police can seize that property. There are lots of police agencies around the country that whose budget is a substantial part of their budget comes from seizing assets from people who haven't even been arrested or charged. And so you've got these fines, asset seizures, all sorts of activities that are generating revenues for the government or for the policing agency or something like that. So someone's probably thinking right now that pushing back, okay, so criminal law is developed as a moneymaking scheme for kings in the state. But at the same time, if we don't assume that kings are entirely nefarious people, which may be a bad assumption, but if we don't think they're entirely nefarious, maybe they said, well, the crime is not being prevented well enough by this system of restitution and private provision of security. And so one thing I need to do for my subjects as a good and decent king like King Richard and Robin Hood or something like that is to give them protection and step in to help out the people who don't have enough money to pay for their security firm or are not being assisted by the community. And yeah, I'll take some money from the people to help me do that better because that costs resources. But overall, it's a better system wherein to prevent and to protect people via this criminal law rather than the restitution system before. So it's actually a positive evolution forward of the state taking over something that it should be taking over in the first place. Well, that's a good story. Unfortunately, it's false. The kings did not take over the policing function or the protection function. They just took over the collection function, I guess you might say. The kings relied on the local voluntary policing arrangements to collect their own fines. In fact, they as the king took more and more of the money shifted out of restitution into essentially fines. The local communities resisted. They didn't want to take people to court to try to collect restitution because they weren't going to get restitution anymore. They were going to get money for the king. So they would try to avoid that through direct bargaining, for instance, with the offender and various things like that. It also creates incentives to use violence against the offender rather than actually trying to get a peaceful settlement. And so you get a period as the kings are trying to expand their jurisdiction but still have the local communities do the policing where you get a lot of resistance. And so there's a sort of give and take through over a century when the kings would demand more and more of the money and the local communities would just quit doing their policing stuff. And so the king would have to back off some and let them collect some restitution. And so they'd start doing their policing stuff again. Ultimately, the system of tithing in 100 broke down. The policing function just there was no policing. And so then the king, this was after the Norman invasion, created what was called the Frank pledge system, which essentially ordered these communities to do policing in order to collect the revenues for the king. Without compensation. And so you get an effort to use force to force people to pursue criminals when previously they'd done so voluntarily because of reciprocities and the recognition that they were helping neighbors who would later help them and that sort of thing. Now you mentioned that in the book you mentioned that they even made it illegal to go outside of the system to solve the crime by your restitution situation by yourself in order to put. I think at one point you mentioned that to put ads in the paper just asking for the return of stolen property. No questions asked. They made those illegal because they wanted to collect fines. Yeah, fascinating. Yeah, and so you have a long series of laws trying to force the local communities to do the policing functions. The, as we move through time, the king starts creating local officials, justices of the peace, for instance, who would be ordered to organize the policing and see that offenders get taken to court and that sort of thing. They were ordered to do so without compensation as well. The king didn't want to spend money on law enforcement. They just wanted to collect revenues from law enforcement. So harsh punishment in that actually I read, I can't remember where, what historian wrote about this system where essentially every community in England at one time or another was fined for failing to do its policing duties. And some of these places and some of these individuals would rather pay the fine and do the policing stuff. But then you also start seeing organizations, private organizations that joined together to take on some of these functions that the king was trying to do in a relatively efficient way. So, for instance, there were organizations where, oh, I forgot to mention, the victim wasn't expected to prosecute. So the victim was ordered to bring witnesses to trial and pursue charges against the offender, even though the victim was not going to be compensated. So the victim was not only no longer getting restitution, but he was expected to have bear more costs in order to collect the money for the king. And this, of course, led to people demanding some sort of restitution or retribution if they couldn't get restitution. And so you start seeing increasing levels of really nasty sorts of punishment, capital punishment being an obvious one, but all these stories about people being put on the rack and things like that start coming into play after the king takes over the process, because the people themselves are not being satisfied with the system. But anyway, the arrangements would oftentimes, depending on if it was a business group, for instance, they might hire a private security type individuals who would then pursue criminals and bring them to justice. The king never really stepped in until into the... There's a period where punishments are getting so harsh for trivial kinds of crimes that the people in the country in general didn't want to impose those punishments. But the only alternative to punishment, physical punishment, was to convict the individual for a relatively minor, really minor crime, and then they were branded as criminals. The juries then were nullifying royal law by refusing to hang people for minor cases of theft and things like that and simply branding them as thieves and letting them loose. Those were the choices, essentially. So there was demand to do something about this and demand to come up with ways of dealing with these criminals that was somewhere in between capital punishment and branding. And the king started transporting criminals then to the colonies in Americas and in Africa and places like that. Even then, of course, the king wasn't spending any money. He franchised a particular firm to do the transporting, and the firm got its money by selling indentured servants to contracts to the colonials when they transported these criminals over to them. So anyway, you start seeing a new development, transportation as a replacement for capital punishment. And then transportation gets cut off with the American Revolution. And so they put these so-called hulks in the Thames River. These big dead ships, essentially, would sit there and they put more and more of these criminals onto these ships, waiting for transportation to start up again. And it didn't, of course. And at that point, the king ultimately has to start paying something to get rid of these criminals. It was very expensive, but they transported a lot of them to Australia. Finally, you start getting prisons built to house these individuals. And you see a shift from the criminal process being a money generator for the king and the central government to a system where it's increasingly costly. And that's what we see today, of course, is a system that's extremely costly to the government. It's still, as you say, a revenue-generating system, but the revenues are being generated for local communities and local police departments and things like that, whereas taxpayers are paying huge amounts for prisons and so on. I wanted to talk a bit about the really fascinating analysis you give in the book of the incentives that exist within the legal system that we have today and how those cause problems specifically in the legislative process and then among judges and then among the police. But I did have a quick question before we move on to that. The story you've told so far has been about England and then America. Can we tell a similar story about other parts of the world? Because after all, other parts of the world have the same sort of authoritarian, state-driven law that we have in the West. Well, certainly we got our law from England. So did Australia and Canada and South Africa and so on. So the background for the development of the law was the same for all of those countries. Other European countries had similar processes as kings became more and more powerful. I have not taken a deep look at, say, Asian societies and that sort of thing, so I can't be strongly affirm that. But on the other hand, something like the tithing and the hundred has existed, has developed essentially everywhere. It really was an institutional arrangement that evolved out of tribal arrangements. And so those tribal arrangements, you find the same sorts of things in New Guinea and the Philippines where you're still finding these tribes. And so you certainly can find lots of hints that the same process has occurred and pretty strong hints in places. I honestly can't say whether the same story tracks in China, for instance, although I suspect it does. Yeah, then let's turn to that analysis of, basically it's a public choice analysis of our modern legal system. Let's start with the lawmaking process. One of the things that you point out is that when the state is the one making laws, when you have the centralized authority, you end up with different interest groups operating who each may have their own goals that work across purposes. And one of the, I think, really interesting things was that we end up as a result often with far more laws than we ought to have because incentives exist to create more and more and more laws and that also those laws have a focus that often doesn't make a lot of sense from the perspective of what we really ought to have or really want to have. Can you tell us a bit about why that happens, how that happens? Think about the example I just discussed about the king's creation of criminal law over time. When they tried to force the local communities to do the policing, the local communities resisted. So they're creating, they're passing laws that say local community do this policing activity and the local community is refusing. And so they pass more laws trying to force them to do these duties and threaten them with fines if they don't and so on. And so you see a growing set of rules attempting to force a community to do something that doesn't want to do. The same sort of thing happens all the time when we think of customary law evolving from the bottom up. It essentially means the community as a whole is agreeing voluntarily to accept these rules. They're not going to voluntarily accept rules that discriminate against them. So they tend to be fair on bias kinds of rules that come out of these systems. There's some bizarre rules that come out of them too. Oftentimes in primitive societies because they don't understand various things and so on and they create some rule to do something they think will help. But those rules don't have any effect. On the other hand, when the state creates a rule that says, you know, you got to do something, the individuals who are targeted by that rule don't want to do what the state says. And so they find ways to avoid it. And the legislature can never anticipate all the kinds of adjustments people are going to make. People are pretty entrepreneurial in finding ways around the law. And so you get a method of bypassing or circumventing the law created by the state. And so they have to create another law to block that. And then they have to have more police and so on. I always tell my students about the 55 mile an hour speed limit that was passed back in the 70s. The police, of course, had the, well, individuals, first of all, truckers all had CB radios. And so they'd call each other and warn them about police stings and, you know, traffic stops and things like that. And so they would avoid these speed limits. They'd drive over the speed limit and avoid being ticketed. And so they had to have tried to create some rules about what you could do with the CB radios. They then developed the radar guns to detect speeders some distance down the road. But then, of course, the private sector comes up with a radar detector which could be installed in cars. And so the state had to make those illegal in order to use their enforcement methods. And so you just get this spiraling process of more and more laws trying to force people to do things they don't want to do. I think a good analogy to the kind of laws that come from customary norms versus the ones that are imposed on the top down is an informal pickup baseball game that kids play in a backyard versus the formal little league system. Because when you have the informal pickup baseball game, everyone kind of has to respect everyone else because you're trying to make everyone happy and you don't want people to go home because the rules are not working for them. And so you adjust the rules on the fly and you have this kind of emergent system trying to make everyone happy and everyone having a good time. And then little league, it's not that way you sort of debate the rules, applying everyone from the top down and try and have a different goal in that kind of authoritarian order. And a lot of times the kids don't enjoy it as much as just the pickup baseball game in the backyard. Yeah. Good analogy. I believe that's from Steve Horowitz. Yeah, Steve Horowitz taught that up. And Peter Gray is a guy who wrote an essay on that which we can link in the show notes which I think is a good analogy. I think the story is really fascinating and there's so much in the book more than we've even touched on. But someone's thinking, what is the relevance? We talked about Ferguson and we talked about various problems. But the story of a primitive past using a primitive, quote, legal system and then evolving forward and now this doesn't apply. We don't live in small towns or small tribes where we have reputation is a huge thing and reciprocity. We have much bigger areas. So, you know, are we saying this was better and we should go back to not having state law now? Does this even apply anymore? What are the lessons that we can learn from the development of authoritarian law and how can we apply them now? Well, I know personally I wouldn't want to live in Papua New Guinea in one of those tribal societies that still have predominantly private law. Or blood feuds. I mean, isn't authoritarian law better than blood feuds? Well, see, Francisco Parisi, I think his name is, wrote a very interesting paper about blood feud. And essentially explained that restitution arrangements evolved out of the blood feud to mitigate the violence associated with the blood feud. And I've written, I've studied the Pashtun tribes in Afghanistan where you see the same sort of thing. They have a blood feud kind of legal system, but there's all sorts of ways to avoid the blood feud. And Parisi's story is simply that with no legal system, essentially people would take revenge on people that harm them. But people lived in communities and these kinds of violent conflicts and feuds could spread and generate significant negative impacts on the rest of the community. So there's pressures starting to build to alleviate this problem of violence. And so the result is that a customary norm develops that says you cannot take more in retribution than you initially suffered. It's the eye for an eye kind of idea. And of course, that means then that you start, you have an objective thing that both parties anticipate is going to occur. I put out somebody's eye. The expectation is that that guy or one of his friends or family is going to try to put my eye out. Well, I don't want to lose my eye. Maybe I can offer him some money not to do it. And so as a replacement for revenge, you get negotiation and payment. And ultimately then the order of events shifts. Initially it was revenge. But you can negotiate. And ultimately it becomes negotiate, go through a fair trial, something like that. And then if it doesn't work, you can take revenge. So what are the lessons for today from this idea that there can be private law and private provisional law? What are the lessons for today? Can we scrap what we've got and go back to a fully private system? Is that would that be inadvisable? Well, what I would like to see is just opening up legalizing lots of private alternatives. And then if the state can compete, fine. But if they can't compete, they go out of business. A modern example in Japan, if an individual commits a crime against another individual and that individual gets caught. He typically a representative of that individual, someone in his family perhaps or something like that will go to the victim and say, boy, this guy's really sorry for what he did. Is there something he could do to alleviate your suffering? And so you get a negotiation oftentimes with the help of a mediator where ultimately the offender pays a compensation to the victim. And if the victim is satisfied, he writes a letter to the judge who's going to try this guy and says he was remorseful. He's compensated me. You shouldn't punish him too severely. That works pretty well. You don't hear nearly as much about crime and prison riots and things like that in Japan as you do here. That doesn't eliminate crime. There's always crime or offenses. Another example, in lots of communities now, there are what are called victim offender mediation programs where an organization, maybe a church, some private organization develops a program to prosecutors actually like it oftentimes because it relieves court crowding where they divert the offender into a mediation setting where they sit down typically at a table with the victim, a mediator, any other affected parties, perhaps members of families and so on. They talk about it, the offender, I mean the victim is able to actually tell the offender how much harm was done. The offender sees the victim as a real person instead of just someone they didn't know that they took something from. They negotiate a contract for compensation. It doesn't have to be money. The offender might agree to mow somebody's lawn for a year or do some other sort of task for a period of time. Or they agree to pay or something like that. The last thing I read suggested that about 95% of these victim offender mediation efforts lead to a contract and something like 92% of the contracts are fulfilled. Well, that sure is a lot less costly way to deal with these offenders than putting them in prison where we spend $20,000, $30,000 a year to house them and feed them. The offender is perhaps doing productive work and the victim is being compensated for the loss. These kinds of programs are spreading. Really, there's lots of them in New Zealand. There are growing numbers in Canada and the United States. We see them cropping up in Europe now. So it's in a sense it's a move back to restitution. Perhaps just one of the worst things that the authoritarian system does is it keeps us from thinking about new ways of solving problems that arise and keeps us thinking in this one state-centered type of way. Well, it keeps us thinking that way because it doesn't – I mean, it bans the alternatives. That's the thing is when you talk to people, you even raise the topic of we could have law enforcement, we could have law creation without the state. It seems as silly as the notion of democracy. When you were describing democracy to the people of Europe a millennia ago, it sounds just as crazy. It's in large part because the state does everything it can to stamp out those alternatives before they get a chance to get off the ground. Yeah. You know, why don't we have – someone might say why don't we have private police? The answer is we do where it's allowed, where the state doesn't prevent it. And we do in many cases where the state does try to prevent it. The railroad system in the United States and Canada has its private police force. Lots of corporations have their own security system with large numbers of security personnel. So if the state allows these individuals or these firms to engage in policing-like activities, the private sector will produce it. Right now the dominant function of the private sector in terms of what we think of as policing activities is in protection because that is allowed essentially everywhere. You can hire private security to protect your home or your business and so on. And there are estimates of perhaps three times as many private security personnel in the U.S. as there are public police. And these people range everywhere from the typical sort of stereotypical night watchman or mall cop to highly trained, sophisticated private firms and personnel guarding all of our nuclear facilities in the United States, guarding all of our chemical facilities in the United States. Used to guard – used to deal with airports. Now we have TESA. I would invite a careful comparison of the two with airports. I think we made a huge mistake moving to public provision of airport security. So there are all of the everything that we think of as a function of the state in terms of law and law enforcement is in fact being done or has been done by the private sector. And there's always this give and take tug of war as people try to move things into the private arena and state tries to pull them back into the public arena and that sort of thing. But it's something that people don't really notice. Thank you for listening. If you have any questions, you can find us on Twitter at freethoughtspod. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.