Security in A Statist Society: Protection In The Current Environment

The state is the monopoly of final arbitration and thus must have a monopoly on security to enforce its decrees. This is why competing security companies cannot come into being and why the state police are our only option for enforcing private property whilst the state still exists. Any private security company necessarily has many restrictions and regulations placed on it to keep it from competing with the state police.

As we know from classical monopoly theory, monopolies will increase prices on ever-decreasing qualities of products. This is seen in the provision of security by chronic under-production of security. Part of right-wing populism as advocated by Rothbard and then Hoppe is that we should unleash the cops onto the street criminals and gangs as well as clear the streets of bums. How we can bring about such libertarian or right-wing populism, as Rothbard used both terms, is a matter for a different article. In the current world, we do not have politicians interested in libertarian populism to remove the state from various areas of life and thus need to look for non-political solutions.

In cases of emergency, the state has suspended security provisions. We can see this in the case of riots in the past week. They do this because the riots give them a reason to further militarize the police and increase their police powers. This reason is then tolerated by the public as they remember the riots and how the police were “powerless" to protect them. They don’t do this for any altruistic reason of actually providing the security they chronically underproduce, but to further and more easily expropriate the citizenry through such things as drugs, surveillance, and gun laws. None of these actually increases safety, but it does make the state’s job easier once more funding can be allocated to this.

Since the production of security is necessarily underproduced, efforts need to be made to rectify this. Many companies that are capital intensive already supplement state security with their own. This adding of a company's services to the state’s does a fine job at bridging that gap. It is probably the best way to increase security.

The question rests on how should we supplement security in our own communities. Many will find their neighbors unwilling to pay for a security company in the misguided view that the police provide security or they shouldn’t have to pay more for it than they already do.

Thus security needs to be provided in a cheaper way. There are three ways of going about this provisioning when a security company is not a path forward: community watch, carrying a gun, and a militia.

A community watch does the job of having quick calls to the police when people are committing crimes. This allows the police to actually provide what security they actually do to your community.

The second example is buying and carrying guns. Guns are the great equalizer of strength. A 250 pounds man and a 120 pounds woman have the same combat strength when both have a 9mm pistol in their hands. At that point, it will depend on who is the better shot and not just who has more muscles. Guns also allow you to match and exceed the strength of many people who do not have guns. Owning and carrying guns allows you to protect yourself and your property with much great efficacy.

The final example is to form a pact with your neighbors that you will protect each other’s belongings and persons in the event of criminality. This is in effect a militia that stands guard over your community properties. By guaranteeing that the community will protect each other, everyone has a sense of duty to actually provide security to others not only from a sense of honor to keep their word but because others protect them and theirs, and will back them up in the case of conflict.

The militia is legal because of citizens’ arrest laws. If you see someone breaking laws against persons or property and you have permission from the owner to make such arrests, you can go and arrest that person until the cops arrive. You have to tell the person you are making an arrest of them. You can even use force to restrain that person from fleeing. Force must be tailored to the event in question, but force is legal to use.

Such militia are great tools to increase the amount of security that you and your community have. There even exists insurance for self-defense cases that will pay for lawyers for any criminal or legal suits. USCCA is one example of gun uses, but many insurance companies will also provide this for you.

When these three methods are combined, you can greatly increase the amount of security that is provided as well as have a plan in place when the cops decide to not answer their phones.