around these parts, it would be. They get in trouble for bad stuff.
I think we need a little more Wildwest and a lot less state babysitter
I‘d finally start working out consistently, for one
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But what bad stuff. Let’s get into the meat of it, shall we?
These are criminals who cannot live but through violence. Horrifying actions they will take. But that is not the question.
The question is how horrifying, really, would it be for a normal Joe, or at least a decent one, if the police disappeared and gangs inevitably filled the gap.
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so this quote was already in the window when I pressed reply, and I think it is appropriate, even though I myself did not select it
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Taken from the organized crime post of yours. First off, I think it is very hard to predict what would happen once the situation stabilizes. Once criminals of all kinds know there are no police there would likely be a huge increase is crimes of all kinds. (we should probably pick a country for this through experiment because the public will then react and the vastly more heavily armed US population, as opposed to, say, the UK’s, would probably lead to a different new equilibrium). In some places in Africa, where people cannot count on police or effective policing, the non-criminal citizens often enact immediate harsh mob justice. There would certainly be some of that or a lot of that. If I understand the organized crime idea, you were thinking that the criminals themselves would want order - which can be the case already in certain neighborhoods - and they would police. I think that’s likely. There would be something like local lords forming, each with their own policies. But organized crimes does lead to individual chaos. Like protection rackets where they go in demand money from storeowners, often sooner or later taking a share of the business and driving it down into nothing. The criminals in organized crime organizations can be rapists also. They might shut down rape by people outside their group, but likely not as one of the privileges of their own members. It might well be done ‘discretely’.
I would guess that the crime lords would have more wars. The only danger in attacking an enemy is the war itself, not that it drags in the police.
I think in general the crime lords would be able to accumulate more power, taking more out of other businesses, selling drugs without concern, bribing or otherwise controlling local government. So, it might shift the oligarchy from corporate/finance to something more like corporate/finance/crime lord. How that settles I don’t know. They might slide into more legal parasitical activities once they are directly competing with people making money off derivatives and the like.
If they actually do move into policing in some systematic way, I assume they will start taxing. Not just through the more random-target protection rackets, but everyone they are protecting as de facto police. They probably have to set up a larger ‘holding court’ process, where taxpayers can come with complaints about the behavior of the soldiers of other lords or other citizens inside the purview of the lord.
So, we end up with local feudalism, inside the general sort of democracy (thought I think it’s an oligarchy in the US already.
I don’t think this is stable, the current oligarchy is either going to clean these guys up and turn them into more stable entities they prefer to deal with, or there will be ongoing struggle between the lords and the federal government front for the now traditional oligarchy.
I think this will work out to be worse for the average person. Organized criminals want income without creating stuff. They will accumulate more wealth, not taxed, without producing, so there will be less wealth for the non-criminals to get a piece of. Organized crime teaches and parents sociopathy. The streets may seem crime free but I would guess they will be worse behind the scenes, and then the constant turf wars will be public.
In the US the armed public will have to be monitored by the crime lords. In fact I can see them disarming the public after the very, very violent transition period.
I think it would be short-term horrific and worse in the long run. A lot depends on how the current oligarchy reacts to the rise of feudal lords. I would guess they would send in the national guard. They’d start to treat New York, say, a bit like how they have treated Latin American countries. Regular military interventions.
I just realized another destabilization:
People stop paying for public transportation. Paying rent becomes optional without eviction enforcement. Normal, non-crime lord debts, cannot be enforced by banks - unless people can be frozen out of the economic system through new tech.
If there is no law enforcement - which goes beyond no police, but it might be what you meant - protection becomes privatized - witness protection, protection of public officials, protection at public events and other things I can’t think of at the moment all goes private. So, people who need protection need money.
No traffic law enforcement. At least until the crime lords take over that, if they do. Safety will go down and unliscenced driving will go up. Loss of safety there. More chaos.
The transition period will be horrific, I think. Longer term might be ok and the crime lords might become more civilized, that’s a gut assessment. But I think it will be more like warring tribes, so there will be ongoing chaos we don’t usually have. Of course they fight each other now. But without law enforcement they can do this more openly and use whatever weapons they want. I can’t imagine the federal government not using soldiers to control or eliminate organized crime, which is more or less a police force.
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There is the Anarcho communism which focuses on community, equality and social ownership advocated by Peter Kropotkin, which nobody here seemed to warm to.
What did Max Stirner have to say?
Here it is, in essence
"You are your own masters; work for your own interests. Respect no ideal’ do not make your actions conform to any moral standard. Scorn custom, duty, morality, justice, law.
I am God, and king and law.
Would this work, considering the level of corruption that dwells in human nature.
Yes this would do well in society today rather than forced laws.
No rulers, no formal government, or enforced hierarchy.
Thank you for the long and thoughtful post.
I think most of your criticisms of organized crime, actually all of them, apply to police. One is just so used to having them in the background that one fails to see it in conscious awareness.
When violence finds a gravitational center, as is inevitable, this center will produce abuse.
I think most, or even all, of the mechanisms you see a void for actually already have counterparts in organized crime.
About gang wars: I think the US mafia and cartels in Mexico and many others have proved that, if the police fades enough, they get tired of the financial losses involved in war and find stable hierarchies not too different from local jurisdictions. The small warlords don’t have to like it, heavy gangs can impose law.
Another thing I think is getting overlooked is the massive savings. You say gangs are unproductive, but the police doesn’t even sell drugs or prostitution or gambling, they literally produce nothing. Add to that that the police budget would disappear, and additionally all “war on crime” money would also, we are easily talking trillions.
In general, I don’t think the difference would be so much in volume: of enforcement, of taxes (though my own gut tells me taxes would go down, maybe even dramatically), of weaponization, of mechanisms. I think it would be more in style. A police has a court, a chain of custody, etc. A gang has a man’s word, the word on the street, etc. And before you brush this off, ask yourself if you believe, in your heart, that you could ever rip off the Mafia, or the Angels, run anywhere in the world, and get away with it. The reality is that they make the FBI look incompetent.
To your point about citizen gun owners, I think it would depend on local conservative values. I imagine a Hell’s Angel thinking very highly of armed citizens, and working with and promoting it. Maybe somewhere like the Philippines, local gangs would act as gun control. I think this fact, of gang members having a marked tendency towards a defined set of conservative, which, by definition, means local values, is not being accorded its proper weight. And it happens to matter a lot, specially in terms of how Decent Joe would experience the whole thing.
Many things that the police “regulate,” like housing rental, actually would probably self-regulate far more efficiently, both on the eviction side and the tennant’s rights side. People are not idiots. And, worse comes to worse, you can always call up uncle Vito (for a fee). Same for traffic, disputes, and a long etc. The busiest intersection on the planet is in India and suffers no police intervention, let alone law abiding citizens.
I agree. And I think it’s a good topic to raise. I like topics where we 1) look at something that seems like a given and 2) we’re willing to explore what might happen, rather than what happens in the first few days. 3) it’s systemic, so the actual effects are very complicated. Most people who will look at something like this will think it’s easy to say what will happen. I’m skeptical. There will be all these different causes swirling out into society lead to other cascades.
I am very critical of the police. There are two very important theoretically low stakes interactions between citizen and police, and the police seem to have little understanding of the law. This is when they see someone they think is out of place or acting oddly or they have received a complaint and they assume they can demand ID. (USA). The other is with traffic stops - when they can demand passenger ID, when they can search the vehicle and so on. These laws here are constantly broken by police. The real problem is why. Because this means that prosecutors, and admin police don’t care about this. Nor do politicians or it wouldn’t be a systematic problem. Other problems involve how much police can flip to rage over speech or ‘attitude’ or pointing out rights, etc. So, I am not pleased with the status quo, without even looking at more high stakes interactions between police and citizens. And I wish more conservatives were concerned about ICE with its non-judicial warrents and increasing power. One can be anti-influx and anti-that stuff at the same time.
I think that’s short term. I think the gangs will tax everyone not just run protection on some business owners. And I think the protection racket - which is a sort of tax - will become systematic. Why not do every single store on your turf. If the gangs don’t shift to longer term planning, this will gut retail and other smaller businesses. Perhaps, as I mentioned, longer term stability will civilize - shift to more delayed and steady gratification - the gangs. I don’t know. But I wonder if this doesn’t end up being just a new kind of police force. Gang centered, tax/tithe based, and sort of outsourced perhaps to one senior gang member. And won’t their policing be then more like, say, 3rd world policing where you have to pay them to get places? To bribe for your own safety and convenience. New Boss same as old boss.
Portugal - this is rarely mentioned anywhere where most people can find out about it - legalized illegal drug use. It worked. Much less deaths. Less money spent. Less people dying from the drugs. Less violence from the criminals. It is still illegal to sell there, but using is legal. So, the ‘clients’ don’t go to prison. Savings all over the place. I think it is Uruguay that has shifted to this also. The head of the narcotics division in Portugal was one of the fiercest critics of this idea when it was brought up. He fought it tooth and nail. Now he wonders why the rest of Europe hasn’t made this change. Switzerland had a clinic where you could get free heroin. You have to go to the clinic to get the shots. What they found was that now the addicts were getting high quality drugs and clean needles and they did not die. Most managed to work. And nearly all of them, on their own initiative gave up heroin use after, I think it was, 10 years.
I realize this is a tangent, but it is no small part of policing. And we are generally policing people who are self-medicating for things like Ptsd from abuse.
One concern I’d have is gangs want efficiency. That does have positive side. But the downside is, yah, why not shoot him, it looks likely he did X. I am not naive about the current justice processes, but I think the abuse would be more brutal and it’s a system that can be gamed not just by the rich but by anyone.
So, a general reaction I have to your position - not that I’m sure your wrong is this: in the transition period gangs are going to be brutal and chaotic for most people. Justice, if there is any, will be violent and impulse driven.
OK, that’s short term. After stabilization, one can argue, there will be more order, less chaos. But I think there’s a good chance that will lead to reinvention of the ‘wheel’ - police again. Perhaps private, perhaps gang lord soldiers. But as it settles will settle towards a system not so different from what we have now.
So, either it will be run at a kind of impulse/short term gain level, which I think will be harsh on people not in these organizations OR they learn to control their sociopathy, to systematize it, and appear, at least more organized and long term stable - and I think this will be much like it is now.
I’d at least like a model of how the new system in the stable phase is not either of those.
India has 1% of the world’s cars and 10-11% of the world’s traffic fatalities. I once took a bus from Mumbai north and it was the scariest experience I have ever had. But I may have misunderstood your point here.
I suppose my general question is, coming at it differently from the sociopath impulse model, why won’t this lead to a kind of redoing of history.
We get feudalism, after a while, which takes the edge off transition extremes, we hope.
So Feudalism’s way of ‘policing’ - Tithings and Collective Responsibility: Adult men were arranged into groups of ten (tithings). If one person committed a crime, the others were responsible for bringing them to justice. Hue and Cry: If a crime occurred, the victim would yell for help. All nearby villagers were legally required to drop their work and join the chase (the “hue and cry”). The Sheriff and Posse: The “shire reeve” (sheriff) acted as the king’s local agent. If the community failed to catch a criminal, the sheriff would create a posse comitatus (a group of armed citizens) to hunt them down. Manor Courts: a kind of justice system. I think the crime lords will move things in this direction.
Now I could be wrong. Maybe it wouldn’t be like Feudalism. And I am still unclear about how you think (and how I think) the current power players in the oligarchy (corporations and finance) would relate to these crime lords.
Feudalism slid into nation states and slowly moved toward federal and local taxes funding police. How do we prevent the same system from coming out of this.
I think the crime lords will take over more of society. They will be bigger players than they are now. More like Mexico. I would guess this would be a bit like ongoing civil wars. Nothing on the scale of the US civil war, but still turf takeovers and skirmishes and negotiations and repeat. That’s going to have side effects on civilians.
I’m taking general taxation as a given. What I don’t see at all is it gutting businesses. Right now, effective tax rates in most of the world is about 50% all things accounted. That’s brutal. I can’t see gangs being that ruthless. Beside the fact that this would only be one of their avenues of income, and the additional fact that no taxes would be needed to fund the police itself, or its war on crime.
The obsession of gangs tends to be, more than taxing the locals (which they do do), keeping a smooth flow for their activities, usually involving trafficking of all sorts above all.
In a sense, I am almost treating this as a given. I don’t mean 1:1, but I do think that humanity is simply an animal that tends toward centralization of groups and of violence. It will happen, whether it’s police or whoever. Mad Max could never happen because it is too fantastical in terms of the dispersal of violence.
Another way to say this is that you can pay them (for their services). Police take bribes also, and when they don’t, they fine you anyways. Being able to deal with the violence monopolizers on one to one financial basis, as one does with every other service, is at least debatable as a plus, rather than a minus.
In a sense it’s a tangent, but I do think it’s relevant, if for possibly a different reason. The reason I see is that drug use, as so many other police regulated things, often is largely a problem because of the police regulation to begin with. People have a high capacity to make their own decisions, despite what government lovers might like to declare. And gangs do, anyways, pay attention to these things and tend to have a conservative’s dislike for random bums and addicts making life dificult for everybody.
But it’s game theory, repeated prisoner’s dilemma. Gangs will usually actually take much more pains than police to find the guilty and leave the innocent, because their rep will hurt otherwise. People can get the idea that you can rip them off and set a patsy up to take the fall. That’s bad business.
I don’t know why you should think this is the case. Gangs wouldn’t spring up out of nothing like ignorant youths. They exist already and have long operational histories, they are mature institutions.
Like I said, my argument is that the phenomenon itself is an unavoidable given, and it is a question of which is, looking at it clinically, preferrable.
The advantage gangs have is that they are: #1 self regulating, #2 stable, #3 have predictable politics, #4 those politics tend to be in line with local custom and ideas. What you are asking leads to a situation much like the current one, where mad projects get their day in the sun and trillions at their disposal, as well as all armed forces and every tentacle of the state. Do we want a gun in the monkey’s cage, or do we want the tiger we know?
You did. I was not referring to India as a whole, but a specific intersection. If you think it’s important, I will fetch it and link.
I hope my replies above address your closing remarks and questions, I think they might.
I realize I left this in the cold, which I shouldn’t have. It’s a different topic that I would be happy to defend, but can start falling off the course of the current one.
Regular armed forces, that is, national military, is not what I am discussing. Police or gang can deal with crime in detail. But when it reaches the massive proportions of human trafficking in the US, a more militarized approach does make sense, and does fall into the purview of national security as opposed to local crime.
My guess is that most conservatives, like me, actually think of ICE as a negociated concession to leftists, and we would, in reality, much prefer Trump 1’s suggestion of employing the National Guard for at least an initial phase.
This just to illustrate that I consider some problems, such as this, to be a matter of national armed forces rather than local police or gangs.
When I grew up, we were taught the gangs really don’t mess with you unless you’re a rival gang.
Apparently, if you try to do stuff that messes with unchecked greed (not just capitalism, but greed in socialism‘s clothing), you’re a rival gang. Like demand fair pay, and refuse to pay exorbitant rent nobody holds in check in an intentionally low income-based-housing inventory “demand”-priced economy. You think you got power of the purse, but they be purse snatchin and making you disappear (deport) if you think you have something to complain about.
The capitalists use people-funded law-enforcement to protect their private/corporate property… from the people whose wages they hoard, and whose bodies they sweep off the streets into less obvious places (like, dead).
Most people are just keeping their head above water to avoid all that gang violence. How many of “our” law-enforcement officers know the cartels have the politicians (and people of industry who tell the law-enforcement people what to focus on) by the nuts?
As if “the mob” (the undrained swamp Trump is part of) isn’t competing with the cartels.
As long as you don’t mess with the gangs, they won’t mess with you. Still true. That’s why a felon is in complete charge of our military & Epstein didn’t kill himself.
D.A.R.E. What does it stand for? I don’t remember. Just say no to branding the herd via streamlined global public health (big pharma) policy.
See above.,.,.,.
They don’t run it like a normal business. They run it like all their members have to come up with a certain amount of money. So obviously people go after money where they can with whatever skill set they have, and then they bump upwards through the hierarchy, the money. So when I talk about gutting businesses, I’m first thinking of protection racket-like stuff. Or if you owe money because you’ve used them as loan sharks, then they come after your business and they’ll gut it. They’ll just use your credit, you know, buy things you don’t need, sell them, and take the cash until you have no business. Now, maybe in a world without policing, they’d change, but there’s no real reason to. You know, it’s its own initiative, going out there and getting money however you can with whatever your expertise is, whether it’s prostitution, or it’s through selling drugs, or it’s protection rackets, or it’s holding up trucks, whatever it is. Actually, I don’t really know what they do these days. It’s been a long time since I really looked at organized crime. Is there taxation? I guess it depends on how much of local society they take over, but you’d still be paying taxes to the federal government, I assume. And in any case, that’s an issue to look at. I don’t see the gangs maintaining like the highways or the sewer systems, so you would even have perhaps state and local taxes too. It’s just I think they would end up, and this is my guess, that they would end up taxing for anything that is a regular expected service, rather than a now and then where someone comes and asks for help with something.
Mad Max is infrastructure total collapse. There’s no reason for this to be infrastructure total collapse.
Yes there are police bribes and there are fines, but the difference is, you know, in the third world, is that the individual police directly can get a lot of money. So they pull your car over and they demand money, or they have roadblocks and demand money. The police bribes aren’t so much aimed at every single citizen, but now every single citizen is open for these kinds of extortive, you know, police stops and police blockades.
I’m not convinced that they worry so much about finding the guilty party, but it’d be very speculative. I think they would more or less think if we killed them, they were guilty. And who steps up to complain about that?
Well, I do think gangs will pop up, because suddenly the market is much larger. Also, the market now being larger means the gangs are exploding outward. They’re moving into areas they couldn’t move into so easily before. I can see them diving into real estate, threatening their way to good prices, turning things over, finding people to sign for the house so they can’t be seen as turning it over so fast, and so on. And yes, there are mature institutions, but again, at the lower echelons, it’s, you know, it’s very entrepreneurial. And as they expand, which I think they would, I think there’d be a lot of chaos, and there would be violent interactions between the new gangs popping up, between the larger organizations over the new turf, and so on. I mean, I don’t know, this is all in the spirit of speculation. I can’t see why they would be better than police, having less rules, less checks on their power, however badly enforced these are now.
I didn’t get this. Gangs may well be pretty stable, but there will be enormous instablity for a while and now the gangs are much more diversified, with no checks on their power. Or the corporate/finance ‘federal’ puts in checks and I don’t know what happens with that.
I was referring to your question about a model or a plan or a system for your stable phase. Letting the gangs loose is not so much a plan as letting nature take its course. When you start to plan and lay out systems, you are talking about top-down government planning. So what I mean is, instead of a predictable violent element that acts according to predictable, stable, sustainable and (in my view, and this was really the part I was most looking forward to defending) desirably conservative lines, you would have a gigantic, multi-trillion, perfectly obedient, unimaginably well armed machine that gets driven by whoever manages to make their way to the top, bringing whatever mad plan or scheme they had along with them, whether it makes any sense or not. Big Brother is an abstract thinker.
I think this phenomenon is less common than people think. You have probably never been an immigrant, so you are probably ignorant of another phenomenon: the fact that “loan sharks” are often the only source of credit for many people, and is usually a fiercely effective one. It’s not there to bankrupt people, it’s there to turn them into succesfull businesses that will pay good interest and probably rely on their services again once they are up and running.
There is no reason to believe that gangs, given granted exceptions, would act self-destructively, which is what driving every business to the ground would be.
I want to set a general aside here, and just say that for every undesirable thing you have pointed out about organized crime, if you look (air conditioner in the background not seeming to make noise effect), the police or government does it the same or worse. It’s just codified so it sounds like it isn’t utter bullshit and abuse.
But then, we don’t really know to what extent urban sprawl is as useful as government makes it out to be. Maybe if truckers need roads, they will make sure roads are there, and so forth.
My point is that, given the gang’s proven sustainable economic model, I sincerely believe that, even with federal tax (which would now amount basically to funding for the armed forces, certain administrative things, money printing, and not much else), the savings would be gargantuan. I would bet a limb that it would be a significant decrease from the 50% (or, like the Joker says in that movie, ‘half’) that it currently more or less is.
Contrived excuses to extort money from honest, hard working people? Never the government. I think this is another case of that you don’t notice it because it is codified and you have been conditioned. Think alone of the times you have silently cursed the government for some unexpected fee or charge that suddenly ruins your weekend plans.
The difference is that gangs run on the spot, on the ground, and they would not be able to abstractly decide how much to extort. They would have a market to answer to.
Much less than you might think. Strong gangs really do impose laws on small ones. It’s not so different from how everything else operates.
Of course there are checks. On this very day, would you be confident in stating that the only checks on gang activity are police intervention?
A given market relationship, much like exists with police today. When market spheres meet, they tend to figure their relationship out very naturally and efficiently.
Well, I am an immigrant, no longer in the US, and taxes are significantly higher here. I am aware of everything you have mentioned I might not be. I honestly have no idea how to compare things are they are (here or in the US) and what would happen if the police were just removed. You might be right that there will be savings and much less chaos than I expect, but also, again my perspective you might be wrong. I tend to think there will either be significantly more chaos or people will end up spending about as much to appease their local lord. Yes, if we stopped putting money into the military, that would be huge. I wonder how China and Russia would view the neofeudal system. They might consider the country now worth taking over. More likely I think is that China would start buying its way in - which it is doing now - but also manipulating lords against lords. No idea what that would do. But if there’s no overriding military, the game with those two countries changes somehow.
I’m not sure the corporate/finance is going to just allow all this, so that’s another set of dice in the air for me.
No, but the moment the police are gone, whole new markets open up. And the racketeering legislation really did make a big difference with organized crime. The top was suddenly much more vulnerable.
But they’ve guided the priorities of the police. Now they’d be different. I suppose the elites might pull completely back into gated communities and rely completely on private security and let the rest of the country go the way it goes. Which would make them feudal lords also with a different set of businesses, at least in the beginning. There seems a change that we have competing countries, at least in the US rather than a country. Anyway. I doubt I have much to add at this point. I’ll read what others say and see if something new from me arises.
There are multiple scenarios of transition. You should have specified that in order to explain the specific scenario you are going for.
Apparently you imagine this transition as simply defunding the police fully and letting the already existing power structures take over, which would be likely something like globalism and/or the dystopian corporatocracy.
Meanwhile i imagined transition as the prelude or consequence of chain supply collapse and/or some kind of global catastrophe that would result in the breaking the chain of supply.
/
With that being clarified its still a pointless question because the powergap would be simply filled by the next largest player whether thats a corporation, the military (coup) or the local biker gang.
What is SURE to happen in the process that nobody would give a single damn about your rights (even less than under the current system).
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“The question is how horrifying, really, would it be for a normal Joe, or at least a decent one, if the police disappeared and gangs inevitably filled the gap”
It’s just an unthinkable hypothetical, bro. It would be a silly question if there were something else to talk about instead. For so many reasons. Do these guardian angel gangs adhere to some kind of constitution, some kind of due process and protocol? If so, then they’re nothing more than POleece… only they’re KISS fans in sleeveless leather vests. Now you’re back to the beginning and have gone nowhere. The hypothetical dissolves because it is logically impossible. Shame a smart young man like you is aksing such weird questions instead of studying Locke or something.
Say Clarence, the San Diego chapter leader, decides not to arrest a dude… or to arrest a dude that shouldn’t be arrested… and the whole city is outraged, and everything goes to shit. Only the following conclusions are logically possible:
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A force is established over and above the Hells Angel POleece to keep it in check and you’re back to regular POleece.
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Clarence’s whimsical enforcement of law (or lack thereof) completely disregards the citizen’s objection to it and therefore becomes illegitimate as a representative democracy. You now have a fascist state. That’s what you get for listening to too much Allman Brothers and wanting to be a renegade Hells Angel philosopher.
So we have either POleece or no POleece at all… but never Hells Angel’s Poleece.
Out of the options you laid out, I pick the biker gang.
I challenge us to look deeper into the nitty gritty. How do they compare? In specific terms?
Forget rights for a moment, that is too abstract. What would the reality look like? What would the relationship look like? What would change and how? Thinking of Decent Joe here, the regular person’s experience.
It would be a tribal system.
The ppl with the sticks tell the rest of the ppl how to behave. Thats that.
No 2’000’000 page documentation on laws and 3 separate councils on how to interpret them.
You do something the ppl with sticks disapprove → You get exiled or hanged in the town border.
If anything its the wild west scenario.
The sheriff is elected to represent the community, and if the sheriff disapproves of you, you either get to speed off into the sunset or get a bunch of extra holes. Alternatively both.
That’s basically already the case. Except for the codification, which gangs have as strict and structured, if unwritten, of a set of.
That also still sounds like a movie. Specifically, on a one to one. If you had to reckon with a Hell’s Angel rather than a cop.