[nokona13]

Interesting article, and it's nice to see a crazy conservative who's willing to go after the adventures of today's ruling "conservatives" (farm subsidies, foreign ventures sold on lies, etc...), as well as liberal ideas you naturally distrust, such as social security.

There's all kinds of things I disagree with here in principle (obviously this would never be implementable, so I won't argue those points), but I'm going to take two arguments more in line with where you're coming from.

First, as was mentioned briefly above, it seems like it should be obvious that a volunarily funded criminal justice system would be almost inconceivably corrupt, unfair, and generally undemocratic. Think south america. The rich band together and hire militias to protect their neighborhoods and private security to guard their persons and assets when outside their communities. The poor would get no police whatsoever. A few philanthropists might try to fund some kind of minimal public police for poor places, but obviously they would never have the budget to provide even the level of security currently provided by police. Sure Manhattan might have enough rich people who'd want it to stay safe that they'd fund some police there, but who's paying for the police in the ghetto in Queens? So what you want is all the gangs in this country to turn into better armed para-militaries in neighborhoods with no law enforcement? That's GREAT for society...

The second is just to point out a basic of economics and of game theory that you probably have heard but are ignoring for ideological reasons. One thing everyone learns in their first semester econ class is the tragedy of the commons. People just don't treat things they don't personally own very well. You don't own someone else's neighborhood. You don't own someone else's grandparent's horrible destitution. You're not going to pay for those things. Do you really wanna go back to the 1920s, where the next stock market crash might wipe out any savings you have and leave you to retire to some back alley?

The game theory point I think is even more persuasive. Think of the prisoner's dilemma. Sure, in some fantasy world, you might be able to get 300 million Americans together and convince them that they need to support law enforcement, and then get everybody to give money. But in real life, you never know who else is going to contribute. Since most of the budget, since it's so huge, would have to come from regular people making small payments, each incremental payment would do very little to increase security. If the land is lawless and the small police force is corrupt and owned by a few rich types in your neighborhood, are you gonna give a few hundred bucks? You would get exactly zero for that contribution. So the equilibrium point would always be everyone giving exactly nothing except those rich enough to buy their own security force effective enough to actually protect themselves. Even if you got people starting to contribute to a police force and it was effective for a time, most people would stop giving, since it seemed like the police were effective enough and they could better spend their $1,000 on that super expensive private school you want them to pay for on their own. So there's not even two equlibrium points, but just a single one where most of society gets no protection.