Every time a foreigner lectures me on how India needs a more enthusiastic and less apathetic police, I simply say that the last thing I want is a police that actually does its job.
Because there are some VERY sincere police in some eastern regions here, and those regions are currently seeing anti-police uprisings by peasants. The law deemed many of them squatters on their own land, for appropriation for ambitious state projects. The police was enthusiastic to remove them by force. Now, the anti-police uprisings in Jharkhand or Madhya Pradesh keeps resulting in nastier things being done by both sides.
THIS is an argument for efficient police?
If they were more like the police in my region, they would have been a little more lazy and relaxed, and figured it would have been unreasonable to evict people from land on which they already lived. And hey, no peasant uprising in my region, while police and normal people get along fine.
Efficiency and good conduct are not everything, and sometimes a little subpar conduct of duty goes a long way in stable society.
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
In this paper , Hoppe, Hülsmann, and Block (HHB) make their ethical case against fractional reserve banking (FRB) based on the fact that "two individual owners cannot be the exclusive owner of one and the same thing at the same time." They then posit that since fractional reserve bank notes creates multiple titles or claims to the "same" gold, they are inherently fraudulent. In analyzing this claim, the first thing we will have to do is to turn it into a remotely sensible claim. No one who deposits money at a bank thinks they are entitled to the same money back. What they want, when they go to get their money out, is the same amount of money back. What a gold-backed fractional reserve note comprises is a claim to a certain amount of gold, not certain particular pieces of gold. I hope that change to their argument is uncontroversial! So their complaint comes down to this: if a bank issues pieces of paper that allow the bearer to claim a certain amount of gold...
Every time a foreigner lectures me on how India needs a more enthusiastic and less apathetic police, I simply say that the last thing I want is a police that actually does its job.
ReplyDeleteBecause there are some VERY sincere police in some eastern regions here, and those regions are currently seeing anti-police uprisings by peasants. The law deemed many of them squatters on their own land, for appropriation for ambitious state projects. The police was enthusiastic to remove them by force. Now, the anti-police uprisings in Jharkhand or Madhya Pradesh keeps resulting in nastier things being done by both sides.
THIS is an argument for efficient police?
If they were more like the police in my region, they would have been a little more lazy and relaxed, and figured it would have been unreasonable to evict people from land on which they already lived. And hey, no peasant uprising in my region, while police and normal people get along fine.
Efficiency and good conduct are not everything, and sometimes a little subpar conduct of duty goes a long way in stable society.