15A022 Krime in the Coming ZGS by Jim Davies, 3/26/2015   

One of the great fictions behind the alleged need for government is that without it, crime would run rampant and society would dissolve in an orgy of violence.

Not exactly.

"Crime" is any action that breaks a government law. So when government has evaporated, there can be no laws; hence, absent laws to break, crime will vanish with them.

However there is more to say (otherwise this would be a very short Blog) because there is no correlation between breaking a government law and doing something wrong or immoral. To check this, we need a handle on morality or ethics, and the starting point on that is the axiom of self-ownership. Whatever intrudes on that fundamental right is evil, whatever sustains or enhances it is good.

That is in a nutshell the rational basis for ethics; it's possible also to have an irrational or religious basis such as the Ten Commandments, but happily the two methods produce very similar end-results: hurting people is wrong.

Now compare that with "law-breaking"; taking a person's property clearly hurts him, yet seven trillion dollars a year is taken from Americans currently by a gang of thieves calling itself "government" without a single law being broken. Humongous, massive theft; grossly immoral and vastly greater than all "private" acts of theft put together, but perfectly non-criminal. Conversely the voluntary exchange of money for cocaine hurts nobody, yet is entirely criminal. Crime and wrongdoing are two different concepts, which only sometimes coincide.

Therefore, when trying to predict how crime rates will change when government evaporates, we're in need of a new word; "crime", as such, will simply not do. "Unprovoked aggression" or "initiated force" do the job, but each of those has two words, with seven and six syllables respectively. Too much of a mouthful. Suggestions welcome; but in the meantime I'll propose "Krime", with a K. Krime consists of hurting people; of violating their right of self-ownership, of initiating force against them. Krime includes the obscenity of taxation for example, but excludes the crimes of drug dealing, speeding on an empty road, and all other victimless crimes. When the ZGS begins, krime will drop like a rock.

First, everything government does is a krime, so that will vanish. Is that portion 90% of all krime? 95%? - hard to tell. But it will drop to zero. No more tax, no more forest of rules and regulations to deny choice, no more interference with freedom of trade, no more indoctrination in government schools, no more prohibition on the employment of the low-skilled, no more intrusion on how we keep and spend and invest our own money... thousands upon thousands of activities that are today crimes but not krimes, we'll be free to do.

Second, the rate of one-on-one krime, such as it is, will fall steeply also - for several reasons:

(a) Since the zero government society will not begin until everyone has understood and embraced the principles of self-ownership and responsibility, respect for others will greatly increase. Therefore, the motivation to damage other people will reduce. Everyone else will be seen as valuable to oneself, and therefore worthy of that respect. Hurting them will be to hurt oneself. Aggression will be much more widely seen as counter-productive. This isn't a change in human nature; on the contrary, it's the rational harnessing of human nature, centered as it rightly is on self-interest.

(b) The free-market, competitive justice industry that will arise in the ZGS will be vastly more efficient than the current government monopoly, meaning that krime will seldom go undetected and adjudicated. Kriminals plan their business partly on the basis of how probable is apprehension; if they can get away with robbery, they proceed. In the coming ZGS, getting away with krime will be as unlikely as only an efficient market can make it.

(c) There will be no artificial limits to honest success, so the current relative attractiveness of krime will be severely reduced. Today, krime may pay. Tomorrow, it seldom will.

(d) The ability to defend oneself against violence will not be artificially limited. Anyone who wants one will buy and carry a handgun; hence kriminals will never know how well their targets are equipped so will presume they are armed. All kinds of violent krime will be deterred far more effectively than today.

(e) I'm uncertain how much change there will be in the rates of krimes of passion, for in their nature they often happen suddenly, without rational planning. "Date rape" will vanish, of course, since it is and always was an artificial construct built to satisfy social engineers; and traditional rape, with the clear use of force, will reduce because ladies will be better armed to resist, as in (d) above. But, spousal homicides? Difficult to anticipate what changes we'll see.

It would be nice to predict that all krime will vanish with government, but this is an attempt to make rational forecasts, not to express hopes and unrealistic dreams. I hope to have shown enough to satisfy the reader that well over 95% of it will disappear, and then we'll have to work on the rest. It will be rewarding.