Last Friday's guest speaker was Dr Tim Evans, President of the Libertarian Alliance, the UK’s radical civil liberties think tank. Tim Evans has a PhD from the London School of Economics and has worked for the Foundation for Defence Studies, for Slovakia's Prime Minister’s Policy Unit, for the Independent Healthcare Association in London and for the Centre for the New Europe, the leading European public policy think tank. Impressive career.
The evening's debate was about security and law enforcement in a free market. Tim Evan's talk consisted of showing how the private sector is already fulfilling an important role in the provision of defence, police, prisons, administration of justice, and other security-related functions.
As the introductory email from Christian Michel read:
The figures are startling. For every policeman in the UK, there are more than two private security guards. They patrol stores, shopping malls, office buildings and the thousand ‘gated communities’ in the country (in the US 6% of the population live in these enclaves with their own police). Non-state companies operate an increasing number of prisons in England and Wales. And as the country’s publicly funded court system fails to keep up with demand, ever more people are seeking legal recourse through a range of private arbitration and mediation services. Certainly, when I was in business, I don’t think I ever signed a contract that didn’t call for private arbitration.
There is more. A large number of defence-related services has been privatised or contracted-out to the private sector. Under rubrics of ‘greater competition’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘value for money’, much of Royal Navy fleet servicing, logistical support, personnel training and even, bewilderingly, warship provision is now reliant upon private sector capital.
What’s going on here? For-profit prisons? Gunboats owned by investment companies?? The media haven’t really seized on the issue; yet the state signing away swathes of its core functions must have long-term consequences on the social and political foundation of the country. How should we react to these developments? What should we watch for in the years ahead?
Tim postulated that the private sector has deployed the security and justice functions in the past, but that the state has taken over not because of an optimisation of the cost-benefit calculation but because of both the corporativism and the government's pursuit of all-mighty power. These two forces are recurrent behind the statism. The damage of the corporativism is clearly explained by Milton Friedman in Free to Choose. The suppliers who are already in the business would push to increase the barriers to entry and to do that they will convince the government to regulate the activities in such a way that the current suppliers are the only ones that can perform such business; those suppliers would soon dictate the regulations themselves either by lobbying or directly forming the regulatory councils. All this is always allegedly done for the general interest, but always end up benefiting the particular interests. This is obviously NOT free market but on the contrary the main obstacles for the free market.
Tim Evans claimed that 150 years of libertarian literature on this topic of free market security and law enforcement was being fully ignored by academics in the theoretical debate. Libertarians should pay more attention to this topic of security and justice, which is one of the main objections that a non-libertarian raises against free-marketeers. If the libertarians find appropriate response and approach to these objections, lots of people who are now sceptical of the free-market would embrace libertarian ideas.
The after-talk debate raised issues around how to handle terrorism, foreign attacks, state-led agressions, or petty crime in a region with no central government-led security. All in all a very interesting evening which I wish can be repeated soon.
Love and freedom.
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