Private security firms...
Turn on the "protected." Who could have imagined?
In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
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...
The Mexican drug cartels are a really interesting phenomenon since they have the power to rival Mexico's security forces. When I look at these things, though, I try to avoid using the labels "public" or "private", since those only make sense in a larger context. So, I'd probably call them for-profit security organizations or something like that.
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine used to live in El Salvador. People in his neighborhood kept getting robbed, so they pooled their resources to hire a couple of security guys to patrol the area... only to have the security guys rob them all at knife point.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lesson here somewhere.
One of my friends bought food from a privately owned restaurant, and he got sick.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lesson here somewhere.
There sure is Bob: both states and private enterprises are populated by flawed human beings, and both screw up.
DeleteI'm beginning to suspect that labeling might have a distorting effect. For example, it seems perfectly fine to call the Pinkertons a "private security firm", but to apply that label to a clan in Somalia or a drug cartel seems off. The "private" in the phrase "private security firm" only makes sense if there is a "public" with which to contrast it against. Is this something along the lines of what you mean by rationalism?
ReplyDelete