Any thoughts?Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is literally roasting prisoners alive. Temperatures inside the tents at the prison camp the Sheriff operates are reaching 145°F. By way of comparison, a round of roast beef is said to be medium-rare when it reaches a core temperature of 130°F to 140°F.
Obviously, this is a horrific crime on the part of the Sheriff and all working for him. While it’s common to label such abuses under statism as an aberration, both the ovens of Maricopa County and Dachau are logical consequences of the perverse economic incentives of monopoly government.
The entire punishment-based approach to justice, including punishment for victimless non-crimes such as drug use or being Jewish, is an example of the Misesian calculation problem in the context of the state’s monopoly of law. Abuses such as Arpaio’s are an inevitable result so long as monopoly government is in place.
Market anarchists correctly recognize genuine crimes to be best understood as torts. Any genuine offense is an offense precisely because it’s an injury to someone else who did not deserve it. If some behavior could not be treated as a tort, it is injustice to treat it as a crime. No victim, no crime.
Flowing from the above is the understanding that justice is not punishment but compulsory restitution. Yet without a free market for adjudication of disputes, the monopoly state has no way to find rational price information for compensation of victims — no more so than Soviet central planners could figure out a rational price for a loaf of bread that would keep bread on the shelves without terror.
The state, any state, is in all cases economically blind and can’t calculate. As a result, the state must maintain the pretense that arbitrary punishment is justice, instead, and insulate those who carry it out from the liability costs for their criminal (i.e. tortious) actions that a free market would place upon them.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Sheriff Arpaio's Tent Prisons
Since there hasn't been anything posted here in a while, I'd like to find out everyone's thoughts on the controversial Arizona sheriff, Joe Arpaio. I've posted below a brief commentary on the subject from Brad Spangler of the Center for a Stateless Society which I'd also like to discuss:
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2 comments:
I found this piece to be largely incoherent and unhelpful. What is this guy's point? That we eliminate the criminal "justice" system and start treating all wrongs as torts? Ok ...
By the way, these prisoners have access to ice and fans. So to compare this tent prison to Dachau is absurd - as is comparing the act of drug use to being a member of a particular faith. Yeah, it wouldn't be fun to be in a place like that, but maybe they should have thought about that before they broke the criminal law.
I can see how you would consider the article to be incoherent. He has a unique writing style, and approaches the subject from the perspective of a voluntaryist, not as one would normally approach the subject of law.
He is comparing our current system of monopolistic, statutory law to a competing system of polycentric law, as well as malum prohibitum vs. malum in se. Under the non-aggression principle, malum prohibitum is not just, and the law focuses on punishment instead of restitution.
For example, if a woman's husband is murdered and the murderer caught and found guilty, under the State's statutory legal system, the woman is forced (through taxation) to provide the murderer with free room and board for the rest of his life. In a polycentric legal system based on restitution, the murderer would be required to provide restitution in a manner to be determined efficiently by competing providers of law.
The economic calculation problem referenced by the author refers to Von Mises' criticism of central economic planning. Without the price mechanism of the free market, the State has no way to efficiently allocate resources. The author extrapolates this principle to the monopolized, coercive provision of "justice" the State attempts to serve. In the case of law, the State is unable to efficiently determine proper restitution. This corrupt system has eventually led us to where we are now, where restitution is barely an afterthought, and the purpose of law is punishment as an example to rest of the populace (as well as many other corrupt purposes).
I posted this here because there are many attorneys in your family and thought it might stimulate some interesting discussion. I don't know if you've looked into polycentric law before. I am fascinated by the concept and have been reading up on historical applications, such as medieval Ireland and Iceland. Have you studied this subject at all?
So to follow up on your comment: would you care to explain your dismissal of the author's proposal to eliminate statutory criminal law in favor of a common law based on torts?
In the context of justice, the comparison of drug use with religious practice is apt because they are each consensual acts that do not harm any non-consenting others. The prohibition of either would be strictly statutory, and the use of force to punish either would be unjust.
"Maybe they should have thought about that before they broke the criminal law." This is argument by dismissal again. Care to elaborate?
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