How would police investigation work in Anarcho-capitalist society?

Miscellaneous General
1

I recently finished reading Chaos Theory: Two Essays On Market Anarchy, while I was able to follow the arguments of the idea of voluntary laws, I has some problems with the criminal law.

Would the entire system of punishment be based on insurance? People would have to register with an insurance company, and would not be allowed onto premises without it?

While it may be voluntary, it seems like the insurance companies would have more influence on our private lives than the state does today. And we would have to carry around the equivalent of a national id card in order to prove our level of insurance coverage.

I think the only way you could have a secure society is if at the minimum all citizens were requited to have a minimum of both victim and criminal insurance. The victim’s insurance company would immediately pay-out a market rate compensation for any crime committed. The VIC would then have a monetary incentive to apprehend the criminal and bill the criminal’s IC.

Would prison be based purely on property rights? In that by entering my property you agree if you commit X crime, you agree to forfeit your liberty for X years.

Who would bear the cost if a non-insured person committed a crime?

If a crime victim has not registered with a private police force, would the criminal get away with it scot free? Even if you argue that the victim made a market choice, the criminal who is more likely to commit further crimes puts the general public in danger.

While ancap legality may deal with aspects of compensation and deterrent, it does not protect people from those more likely to commit future crimes.

Also it seems that police investigation would be far more difficult. The majority of crimes are solved by interrogation, but without the threat of state coercion, there is little incentive to talk to private detectives voluntarily.

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2

No one know what bright things entrepreneurs will come up with.
What you have read is only one possible business model to meet the demand of safety and justice.

Who exactly would have reason to require this to do business with you and why?

Or we could just arm ourselves and shoot criminals in the head…

Again I am not sure which business models would prevail. But we can speak of right and wrong responses to crime and what we have a right to do against criminals.
For murderes I think it is just to do whatever we want with them. I am of the opinion that they have basically forfeit there right to life, ie you can not murder a murderer. Persons that have proven themselves to be dangerous can be removed from society based on the risk they are causing to there surroundings.
It would also be just to imprison people if that is necessary to obtain financial compensation for a crime from them.

(Just to be clear here I do not support the death-penalty. It is not wrong on moral grounds but it is legally repulsive. I would never patron a court that was in the practice of sentencing people to death thus potentially committing murder itself. Courts should acknowledge they can commit error and leave the door open for financial restitution when such occur.)

Security is a service like any other. It costs money to provide and the consumers of the service pay for it.
There are many ways in we can try to achieve security and do it as cost effective as possible.

  1. We can buy guns.

  2. We can pay to have criminals prosecuted. Hopefully being able to transfer some of the cost to the people causing them.

  3. We can reduce the financial risk of being a victim to crime by insurance solution.

  4. We can combine these methods…

Criminals can pay restitution for individual crimes, they do not pay for our security services and there is no reason they should.
You have to differentiate between a potential and a actual crime.

Entrepreneurs in the security industry would most likely choose to pursue all violent criminals in order to provide a better service and reduce cost.

In America there is this thing called the fifth amendment and it doesn’t seem to have made solving crimes impossible. Further more you could easily create strong incentives to divulge information by blacklisting and social expulsion of people that obstruct justice. Finally everyone that isn’t a criminal will benefit if criminals are caught so why wouldn’t they help? As for criminals ratting on each other I don’t see how a private justice system would be less capable of extracting information from criminals.

3

Well at least from the model in Chaos Theory, insurance companies play a major role in ancap society, replacing many of the functions of the government including the military. While all relations are voluntary, the main safe-guard from crime is that in order to be allowed onto property or gated communities, applicants would have to be ensured so that the community will be sure of compensation should he commit any crimes. Since the monetary value of certain crimes would be beyond the ability of an average person to pay, insurance would be the only guarantee that victims would be compensated.

4

Forget Chaos Theory. It makes no sense.

5

I LOVE that book, the best from an Austrian Economists since Rothbard, and it had a very profound influence on my life.

Now, my take on what you ask…

Would the entire system of punishment be based on insurance? People would have to register with an insurance company, and would not be allowed onto premises without it?

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To paraphrase: would you, as a china shop owner, allow anyone in without liability insurance? That’s up to you but I highly suspect that, in time, most premises would require “guest” to have LI.

While it may be voluntary, it seems like the insurance companies would have more influence on our private lives than the state does today. And we would have to carry around the equivalent of a national id card in order to prove our level of insurance coverage.

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Do you resent having to carry a metro card to use the underground? Or a celphane? Or a credit card? An LI coverage card would be no different. If anything, I’d thing that someone would actually come out with a multipurpose card, in which dozens of other “cards” can be loaded. Where is privacy at risk here?

“Required” is far too harsh. People are free to do as they wish. If they value increased security, both physical and financial ,they will purchase both types of insurance. As a side note, Guillory and Drake have a couple of exquisite articles here on property insurance. Besides being minutely detailed, they also make it clear that property insurance would only be supplementing, not competing with, liability insurance.

I don’t think it would work like that. Rather like this: if A is considered guilty of a crime, his liability company offers a money price to the offended party to make them relinquish they right of retaliation. If they don’t accept, or if A had no LI coverage to begin with, than the offended party just takes revenge as it sees fit.

If the offer is accepted, than A is free but his premium has just skyrocketed. Without LI coverage NO ONE will allow him on his premises. He won’t be able to buy bread, or indeed go out at all! So, the insurance company approaches him with this offer:”you can’t possibly pay you new premium, and you are now condemned to living within this house forever. If, however, you agree to come with me to a secure facility, when you’ll work for us, we’ll set your premium back in X years. So, you either work for us in our facility (form which you can leave whenever you want, but where would you be allowed to go?) for X year, or you stay here forever or you just shoot yourself. Here is my number, when you’ve made u your mind, call me”.

Molineux’s Practical anarchy (I cant provide the link right now, my connection is killing me) is very well-though out in this respect.

Your property insurer, and if you have none, you. Hope you’re a good shot.

You have the right to retaliate. So just pay some agency to “prosecute him” so that you may get satisfaction in knowing that he’s been beaten up (if he stole you car), if you’re into that of course. Mobsters already perform this service (as in the Godfather), and it is indeed invaluable. In anarchy it would only get more appreciated. How does a good old broken leg look like a “disincentive”?

Armed citizenry, a good property insurer with PX4-armed patrols and frigin’ dogs, or secret-service-like trained “retaliation agencies” would.

And than again, the absolute majority of crimes are small-time, property theft. Violent crimes are a small minority (and would drastically decrease under statelessness: look at ).

Also it seems that police investigation would be far more difficult. The majority of crimes are solved by interrogation, but without the threat of state coercion, there is little incentive to talk to private detectives voluntarily.

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Again to take a leaf from Molineux. Say my car has been stolen and I strongly suspect my neighbor’s son to be involved. If I only could get his fingerprint, I would know. My (or his) LI company goes over to him and says: “son, you’re the prime suspect of such crime. Now, you either collaborate and give me you fingerprints, or else I’ll be forced to hold you responsible without any poof at all. Now, would you like to cooperate?”

See, this guy’s property right is not being broken, as even if found “guilty”, he wouldn’t pay a penny. His LI company will (his premium rates would skyrocket though). Thus, interrogation would, without coercion, be much more effective as it would pay for the criminal to voluntarily “come clean” is suspected. As it turns out, suspects are most of the time the true perpetrators.

I hope I’ve answered some of you questions.

6

Sarcasm?

7

ok just sort of flushing this idea out in text, it might not make sense by the end.

Its about social ostracism as a deterrent/penalty.

I think its pretty obvious that there would be a black market for these ostracized folks, or at least the demand certainly wouldn’t go away. Maybe that is just the point, that you can’t prevent these people from buying bread, but you can force them to pay the “black market tax” on everything thing they buy, and it would be very risky for businesses to try and break their agreements not to sell to these black listed folks because off of one person they can only make so much profit, but could potentially lose a lot if they are found out and then themselves blacklisted.

One problem I see is the networking effect. The more companies that get exposed for dealing with black listed customers, the less of an issue it becomes.

8

Greta insight. I might only add that calling it a “black market” would be inappropriate. No one is forbidding transactions with non-covered guys. It just makes no sense to transact with them,. But it is true, they would come to buy and sell (perhaps a home-delivery system would spring up). Yet, I can’t really imagine them being able to get out of their homes, and there’s no way around that. So, they either remain under house arrest as long as they live, or they accept some years of hard labor and get over it.

9

From what I’ve seen, Contrarian - a person who deliberately behaves in a way that is different from the people around them.

So, he chooses to be a statist. Where most people act helpful, he chooses to be unhelpful.

In terms of the OP - How would police investigation work in Anarcho-capitalist society?

Answer: Well. [:)]

The Right to Self-Defense by MNR, answers a lot of your questions.

10

Well I didn’t mean black market in being illegal, although maybe it would be illegal if you had a retail shop and entered into a contract with a credit reporting company that part of the deal is that they agree to give you instant screens on your customers if you also agree not to sell to anyone below a certain level of reputation. Or at least you would not be able to advertise in your shop window “Only sell to 90% reputation and up” if you actually followed through with the promise. And then the rep agency could send in test subjects that would screen as not up to standard, and if the shop failed the test they could be penalized and eventually blacklisted themselves.

So what I meant by black market would be doing deals in the shade, selling an a criminal some groceries at 1000% mark up. But on the other hand like you pointed out, it would be hard to get anywhere, or at least anywhere that was worth being without a good rep. Parks, sidewalks, streets, might all have an incentive to try and cater to only people with high enough reps.

Another thing is what prevents us from having reputation companies now? Discrimination laws? Assuming that all the bad people would be put in jail by the state? or its not important in the market? or something else? And I know that we do have them in some things like ebay, but I guess there could be some minimum threshold for where it would matter to check for reputations ? Such as people might not care about what sort of fast food restaurant they go to (in terms of what reputation standards it holds for its clients) and thus a company that pays the extra money (or sacrifices the potential money) to only cater to upstanding people would be at a disadvantage to one that did not discriminate. I guess only the market could know such a thing.

So maybe you could buy groceries, but it would be much harder to get a loan, a job or an apartment, or buy a gun, which I guess is already the case in a way.

11

What?

12

I haven’t read Chaos Theory yet, but reading the responses there is one thing I don’t understand.

How could insurance companies insure you against you committing a crime? Insurance only works on things that are uncertain, such as accidents, as described here by Hoppe: http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/uncertainty-insurance.html.

Whether or not you are going to steal someone’s car is not an unpredictable event. You are either going to commit crimes or you aren’t. This means that non-criminals who buy “liability insurance” will be subsidize criminals. Why would anyone who doesn’t plan on stealing or killing anyone buy this insurance? The only people who would need it are people who are going to commit crimes, at which point the insurance companies could not profit.

13

not an expert but I think it is supposed to work like car insurance. If you run into somebody else that person’s car insurance is going to get money from your insurance and then your insurance is going to raise your rates.

14

Liability insurance doesn’t insure you, rather the party whom you tort. They will be offered a price to forfeit their right to retaliate on you. So you live, and they get some money. And the offended party has no influence of whether it will suffer a tort or not. So it works.

15

I’m not sure how it would work but it probably wouldn’t take 2+ years for you to get justice after your loved one was murdered, all while being camera’d, and all of the necessary evidence provided up front.

Legal justice in this country needs to be desperately cleaned up. Anyone who has had to go through the state justice department knows this. It’s terribly disfunctional atm.

16

Some people said that if you aren’t insured, no one will let you on there property. To me this makes it sound like I will pay a premium to the insurance company, and they will pay anyone that I commit a crime against. This also fits with what I think you are saying. Am I misinterpreting it?

If I am not, then it is still the same problem. Why would I buy insurance if I do not plan on committing a crime?

If I am misinterpreting, and I would buy insurance to cover crimes against me, I suppose that would make sense.

17

Exactly!

Well, next time you want to get admitted to a campus, or enter some shopping mall, just promise that you wont kill anyone, or shoplift, and I’m sure they’ll let you in.

See, a LI company gets paid not only to keep the criminal from being wacked. It also guarantees your name. No one needs to know you personally to certify that you’re a trustworthy guy. A simple LI coverage will do that. It works just as VISA or Moody’s: someone is paid to rate people, so that I myself can devote the resources I’d need to ascertain myself you reliability, to other uses. So, the what I see it, you have two choices, and two alone: you pay a small (and decreasing!) premium and you’re freed forever from fear of retaliation and enjoy low prices in everything you buy, or else you confine yourself to doing business with at most a small community where everyone knows everybody. The choice be yours.

PS: Even if you don’t plan on committing a crime, you should understand that most “crimes” are unintentional. A car accident, breaking something, etc.

18

I’m on a campus right now. If I steal something, I will be held accountable. Why is insurance needed?

I still don’t see why it wouldn’t make sense in most cases for the property owner to insure his property, rather than everyone insuring themselves against having to pay for stuff they break.

19

It is true that LI and property insurance (against crime) would seem to be mutually exclusive. But as I said earlier Guillroy designed just the kind of property insurance that would help, instead of hinder, LI insurance. To make a long story short, suppose that for small crimes, i.e. vandalism or break-in attempts, patrols would be efficient. Everything that can be stopped right there, around your house, would be handled by insurers patrols.

More serious crimes, such as successful theft (which have been unsuccessfully prevented by patrols), severe property damage, health-damaging crimes and generally crimes that do not happen in the premises of you house (fraud), would probably be handled by LI. It is not difficult to se how both types of insurance could be offered in a package, at least some of the time.

You would of course be free to elect top have one, both or neither. I believe that most people would agree to have both. To se why, Guillray calculates that the pure premium rate of a patrol-property insurance (against crime alone) such as he devised would amount to 30 USD per year! Add in some profits and you get…50, at most 100 USD per year. Does one even consider that?

20

Well, I don’t see how he can calculate that, but I plan on reading the book anyway, so maybe that will answer my questions.