Police Stop, Handcuff Every Adult at Intersection in Search for Bank Robber

[ClaytonB]

To me, catching the criminal matters

Why?? How is that not an arbitrary moral position??

consumer preferences provide a method of calculation for the proper distribution of goods throughout an economic system

Wha?

Consumers matter to you more than they matter to me because I have other priorities than just properly allocating resources within our economic system.

I don’t give a rat’s ass about “properly allocating resources”.

The only law of human nature that would seem to apply here is the universal understanding that if it can be done to them it can be done to me. There is a sort of possible reciprocality at work here that one must recognize. However, I cannot say that I would not be willing to trade two hours of my time if it meant that a criminal might be caught particularly if such a situation only occurs occasionally. There are ofcourse other possible considerations that might lead me to weigh such a trade differently but no such information was presented in the article that would cause me to do so.

When I say “law of human nature” I mean a law of human behavior (praxis, praxeological law). You, like most people, are deeply confused about the nature of morality. There are multiple, often conflicting, connotations to moral language. If you want to analyze moral questions and actually get somewhere rather than just chasing your tail, you need to be clear on which connotation you are talking about.

The laws of human nature - the facts about how human beings behave - are not subject to revision. Even governments, with their immense material resources, cannot change human nature. Hence, questions like “should we have a society where there is murder?” are absurd. The conditions that lead to murder are hard-wired into human nature. The fact of murder is ineradicable.

Questions of government policy, on the other hand, are entirely different. There is nothing inevitable about police dragnets. All we have to do in order to not have police dragnets is not have police dragnets. Heart surgery, transplant organ transport, nuclear waste transport, overnight parcel delivery, and commerce of every imaginable kind is inevitable in the sense that humans act.

We cannot remake society into a prison complex to suit the preferences of the police who want to be able to yell “freeze!” at any moment and stop-motion the entire social order while they “sort things out”. The logic of “the police power” is upside-down and backwards. The world is what it is. The police have to learn how to operate within the world as it is. The rest of the world will not reconfigure itself to adapt to the lazy-ass procedures of the cops.

This is not a statement of “my preferences” or some kind of subjective assessment. It’s the case in fact.

Clayton -