24A004 "Defund Police, Abolish Prisons" by Jim Davies, 1/23/2024

In an otherwise excellent interview of Prof Peter Boghossian by Prager U's CEO Melissa Streit, he dismissed those two suggestions as fundamentally, profoundly idiotic - and did not pause to elaborate or give reasons.

Although Conservatives like him and the Prager U staff get things right about half the time and present matters very well, this casual dismissal is a good example of how they sometimes get things badly wrong. Here's why: they don't pause to consider the context.

Now, it's quite true that the screeches to defund cops come mainly from the far Left BLM, and they reached a crescendo after George Floyd died in Minneapolis in 2020 after a cop prevented him breathing by placing his knee on his neck. Horrid though that was, the demand was visceral rather than intellectual. Here, I'll try to show why both of the reforms in the title are highly desirable.

Context is vital. In the present context of "lawn order", where laws are written to control conduct, some form of enforcement is clearly needed; otherwise they'd be suggestions rather than laws.

Similarly if someone is judged to have broken one of those laws, punishment is not inappropriate, hence imprisonment. For as long as that context is kept, yes Prof Boghossian isn't far wrong; it would be silly to scrap them. That system could not survive their abolition.

But if the contextual system were changed - as is certainly proposed here on the ZGBlog - it's not silly at all. In fact it would be highly desirable and necessary.

Police, first, are authoritarians; they bully. Armed with badges, costumes and firearms, they have (or suppose they have) authority to issue commands and make arrests, even though their victim has done them no harm, and even if he has done no harm to a third party; but just if suspected of breaking a law. There were no tax-funded police in America prior to 1838, so any "idiocy" about their de-funding belongs to the good professor. And yes, to the BLM.

Now, in the coming zero government society (ZGS) anyone who sees an aggressor harm someone might arrest the perp (or shoot him!) so as to prevent the damage going further; but the action taken will be the minumum needed for that purpose. Anything more, and the "perp" would be able to sue the one interfering.

So while I think it possible that companies will arise and offer their services of patrolling streets to keep predators at bay (as in Colonial America) they will have no powers whatever beyond those anyone else has. Police, as such, will not exist and the question of "funding" them by the extortion known as "tax" will not arise. Police will have been fully de-funded.

Prisons, likewise, are barbaric istitutions and will have no place in the ZGS. Their supporters (including, naturally, those who staff them) often call them "correctional" instututions, another fine example of government hypocrisy given the high rates of recidivism. They serve no useful purpose at all; the inmates are dehumanized and ruined, any victims of their crimes are ignored, and innocent third parties called taxpayers are penalized to fund their incarceration.

In the ZGS a justice industry will evolve whose actual purpose will be to implement justice; that is, the restoration of such rights as the perps have damaged. Aggressors will be ordered to make good that damage, usually by paying restitution. Any who refuse to do that will be shunned by the society and become an outcast.

Like Socialists, therefore, Conservatives have an absurdly narrow view of what is right and wrong; they assume without reason that the existing law/punishment system must continue. Wrong. It must be, and in the ZGS will be, completely replaced; and not a moment too soon.

This month saw the annual gathering of government "leaders" and billionaires in Davos, Switzerland, called the "World Economic Forum" or WEF. This is the menace which promises that by 2030 we shall "own nothing, and be happy" while eating bugs. But this year, there was one speech radically different.

It was by Javier Milei, the new President of Argentina, and at tinyurl.com/37cut4bn you can see all 23 minutes of it with an English translation. Excellent value! I doubt any of the delegates had heard the like of it. Perhaps your friends haven't. Tell them!