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Volume 9, Number 1 (1989)

In 1849, at a time when classical liberalism was still the dominant ideological force and "economist" and "socialist" were generally—and rightly so—considered antonyms, Gustave de Molinari, a renowned Belgian economist, wrote, "If there is one well-established truth in political economy, it is this: That in all cases, for all commodities that serve to provide for the tangible or intangible need of the consumer, it is in the consumer's best interest that labor and trade remain free, because the freedom of labor and trade have as their necessary and permanent result the maximum reduction of price. And this: That the interests of the consumer of any commodity whatsoever should always prevail over the interests of the producer. Now, in pursuing these principles, one arrives at this rigorous conclusion: That the production of security should in the interest of consumers of this intangible commodity, remain subject to the law of free competition. Whence it follows: That no government should have the right to prevent another government from going into competition with it, or require consumers of security to come exclusively to it for this commodity." And he comments on this whole argument by saying, "Either this is logical and true, or else the principles on which economic science is based are invalid."

There is apparently only one way out of this unpleasant (for all socialists, that is) conclusion: to argue that there are particular goods to which for some special reasons the above economic reasoning does not apply. It is this that the so-called public goods theorists are determined to prove. However, I will demonstrate that in fact no such special goods or special reasons exist, and that the production of security in particular does not pose a problem any different from that of the production of any other good or service, be it houses, cheese, or insurance. In spite of its many followers, the whole public goods theory is faulty, flashy reasoning, ridden with internal inconsistencies, nonsequiturs, appealing to and playing on popular prejudices and assumed beliefs, but with no scientific merit whatsoever.

What, then, does the escape route that socialist economists have found in order to avoid drawing Molinari's conclusion look like? Since Molinari's time it has become more common to answer yes to the question of whether there are goods to which different sorts of economic analyses apply. As a matter of fact, it is almost impossible to find a single contemporary economics textbook that does not make and stress the vital importance of the distinction between private goods, for which the truth of the economic superiority of a capitalist order of production is generally admitted, and public goods, for which it is generally denied. Certain goods or services—among them, security—are said to have the special characteristic that their enjoyment cannot be restricted to those who have actually financed their production. Rather, people who do not participate in their financing can also draw benefits from them. Such goods are called public goods or services (as opposed to private goods or services, which exclusively benefit those people who actually paid for them). And it is because of this special feature of public goods, it is then argued, that markets cannot produce them, or at least not in sufficient quantity or quality, and hence compensatory state action is required.

The examples given by different authors of alleged public goods vary widely. Authors often classify the same good or service differently, leaving almost no classification of a particular good undisputed, which clearly foreshadows the illusory character of the whole distinction. Nonetheless, some examples that enjoy particularly popular status as public goods are the fire brigade that stops a neighbor's house from catching fire, thereby letting him profit from my fire brigade, even though he did not contribute anything to financing it; or the police that, by walking around my property scare away potential burglars from my neighbor's property as well, even if he did not help finance the patrols; or the lighthouse, an example particularly dear to economists, that helps a ship find her way even though the ship's owner did not contribute a penny to its construction or upkeep.

Before continuing with the presentation and critical examination of the theory of public goods, let me investigate how useful the distinction between private and public goods is in helping decide what should be produced privately and what by the state or with state help. Even the most superficial analysis could not fail to point out that using the alleged criterion of inexcludability, rather than presenting a sensible solution, would get one into deep trouble. While at least at first glance it seems that some of the state-provided goods and services might indeed qualify as public goods, it certainly is not obvious how many of the goods and services that are actually produced by states could come under the heading of public goods. Railroads, postal services, telephone, streets, and the like seem to be goods whose usage can be restricted to the persons who actually finance them, and hence appear to be private goods. And the same seems to be the case regarding many aspects of the multidimensional "good security": everything for which insurance could be taken out would have to qualify as a private good. Yet this does not suffice. Just as a lot of state-provided goods appear to be private goods, so many privately produced goods seem to fit in the category of a public good. Clearly my neighbors would profit from my well-kept rose garden—they could enjoy the sight of it without ever helping me garden. The same is true of all kinds of improvements that I could make on my property that would enhance the value of neighboring property as well. Even those people who do not throw money in his hat can profit from a street musician's performance. Those fellow passengers on the bus who did not help me buy it profit from my deodorant. And everyone who ever meets me would profit from my efforts, undertaken without their financial support, to turn myself into a most lovable person. Now, do all these goods—rose gardens, property improvements, street music, deodorants, personal improvements—since they clearly seem to possess the characteristics of public goods, then have to be provided by the state or with state assistance?

As these examples of privately produced public goods indicate, there is something seriously wrong with the thesis of public goods theorists that public goods cannot be produced privately, but instead require state intervention. Clearly they can be provided by markets. Furthermore, historical evidence shows us that all of the so-called public goods that states now provide have at some time in the past actually been provided by private entrepreneurs or even today are so provided in one country or another. For example, the postal service was once private almost everywhere; streets were privately financed and still are sometimes; even the beloved lighthouses were originally the result of private enterprise; private police forces, detectives, and arbitrators exist; and help for the sick, the poor, the elderly, orphans, and widows has been a traditional concern of private charity organizations. To say, then, that such things cannot be produced by a pure market system is falsified by experience a hundredfold.

Apart from this, other difficulties arise when the public-private goods distinction is used to decide what and what not to leave to the market. For instance, what if the production of so-called public goods did not have positive but negative consequences for other people, or if the consequences were positive for some and negative for others? What if the neighbor whose house was saved from burning by my fire brigade had wished (perhaps because he was overinsured) that it had burned down; or my neighbors bate roses, or my fellow passengers find the scent of my deodorant disgusting? In addition, changes in the technology can change the character of a given good. For example, with the development of cable TV a good that was formerly (seemingly) public has become private. And changes in the laws of property—of the appropriation of property—can have the very same effect of changing the public-private character of a good. The lighthouse, for instance, is a public good only insofar as the sea is publicly (not privately) owned. But if it were permitted to acquire pieces of the ocean as private property, as it would be in a purely capitalist social order, then as the lighthouse shines over only a limited territory, it would clearly become possible to exclude nonpayers from the enjoyment of its services.

Leaving this somewhat sketchy level of discussion and looking into the distinction between private and public goods more thoroughly, we discover that the distinction turns out to be completely illusory. A clear-cut dichotomy between private and public goods does not exist, and this is essentially why there can be so many disagreements on how to classify a given good. All goods are more or less private or public and can—and constantly do—change with respect to their degree of privateness/publicness as people's values and evaluations change, and as changes occur in the composition of the population. In order to recognize that they never fall, once and for all, into either one or the other category, one must only recall what makes something a good. For something to be a good it must be recognized and treated as scarce by someone. Something is not a good as such, that is to say; goods are goods only in the eyes of the beholder. Nothing is a good unless at least one person subjectively evaluates it as such. But then, when goods are never goods-as-such—when no physicochemical analysis can identify something as an economic good—there is clearly no fixed, objective criterion for classifying goods as either private or public. They can never be private or public goods as such. Their private or public character depends on how few or how many people consider them to be goods, with the degree to which they are private or public changing as these evaluations change and ranging from one to infinity. Even seemingly completely private things like the interior of my apartment or the color of my underwear can thus become public goods as soon as somebody else starts caring about them. And seemingly public goods, like the exterior of my house or the color of my overalls, can become extremely private goods as soon as other people stop caring about them. Moreover, every good can change its characteristics again and again; it can even turn from a public or private good to a public or private had or evil and vice versa, depending solely on the changes in this caring or uncaring. If this is so, then no decision whatsoever can be based on the classification of goods as private or public. In fact, to do so it would become necessary to ask virtually every individual person with respect to every single good whether or not he happened to care about it—positively or negatively and perhaps to what extent—in order to determine who might profit from what and who should therefore participate in the good's financing. (And how could one know if they were telling the truth?) It would also become necessary to monitor all changes in such evaluations continuously, with the result that no definite decision could ever be made regarding the production of anything, and as a consequence of a nonsensical theory all of us would be long dead.

But even if one were to ignore all these difficulties, and were willing to admit for the sake of argument that the private-public good distinction does hold water, even then the argument would not prove what it is supposed to. It neither provides conclusive reasons why public goods—assuming that they exist as a separate category of goods—should be produced at all, nor why the state rather than private enterprises should produce them. This is what the theory of public goods essentially says, having introduced the aforementioned conceptual distinction: The positive effects of public goods for people who do not contribute anything to their production or financing proves that these goods are desirable. But evidently they would not be produced, or at least not in sufficient quantity and quality, in a free, competitive market, since not all of those who would profit from their production would also contribute financially to make the production possible. So in order to produce these goods (which are evidently desirable, but would not be produced otherwise), the state must jump in and assist in their production. This sort of reasoning, which can be found in almost every textbook on economics (Nobel laureates not excluded ) is completely fallacious and fallacious on two counts.

For one thing, to come to the conclusion that the state has to provide public goods that otherwise would not be produced, one must smuggle a norm into one's chain of reasoning. Otherwise, from the statement that because of some special characteristics they have. Certain goods would not be produced. One could never reach the conclusion that these goods should be produced. But with a norm required to justify their conclusion, the public goods theorists clearly have left the bounds of economics as a positive, wertfrei science. Instead they have moved into the realm of morals or ethics, and hence one would expect to be offered a theory of ethics as a cognitive discipline in order for them to do legitimately what they are doing and to justifiably derive their conclusion. But it can hardly be stressed enough that nowhere in the public goods theory literature can there be found anything that even faintly resembles such a cognitive theory of ethics. Thus it must be stated at the outset, that the public goods theorists are misusing whatever prestige they might have as positive economists for pronouncements on matters on which, as their own writings indicate, they have no authority whatsoever. Perhaps, though, they have stumbled on something correct by accident, without having supported it with an elaborate moral theory? It becomes apparent that nothing could be further from the truth as soon as one explicitly formulates the norm that would be needed to arrive at the conclusion that the state has to assist in the provision of public goods. The norm required to reach the above conclusion is this: Whenever one can somehow prove that the production of a particular good or service has a positive effect on someone else but would not be produced at all or would not be produced in a definite quantity or quality unless certain people participated in its financing, then the use of aggressive violence against these persons is allowed, either directly or indirectly with the help of the state, and these persons may be forced to share in the necessary financial burden. It does not need much comment to show that chaos would result from implementing this rule, as it amounts to saying that anyone can attack anyone else whenever he feels like it. Moreover, as I have demonstrated in detail elsewhere this norm could never be justified as a fair norm. To argue so, in fact to argue at all, in favor of or against anything, be it a moral, nonmoral, empirical, or logico-analytical position, it must be presupposed that contrary to what the norm actually says, each individual's integrity as a physically independent decision-making unit is assured. For only if everyone is free from physical aggression by everyone else could anything first be said and then agreement or disagreement on anything possibly reached. The principle of nonaggression is thus the necessary precondition for argumentation and possible agreement and hence can be argumentatively defended as a just norm by means of a priori reasoning.

But the public goods theory breaks down not only because of the faulty moral reasoning implied in it. Even the utilitarian, economic reasoning contained in the above argument is blatantly wrong. As the public goods theory states, it might well be that it would be better to have the public goods than not to have them, though it should not he forgotten that no a priori reason exists that this must be so of necessity (which would then end the public goods theorists' reasoning right here). For it is clearly possible, and indeed known to be a fact, that anarchists exist who so greatly abhor state action that they would prefer not having the so called public goods at all to having them provided by the state. In any case, even if the argument is conceded so far, to leap from the statement that the public goods are desirable to the statement that they should therefore be provided by the state is anything but conclusive, as this is by no means the choice with which one is confronted. Since money or other resources must be withdrawn from possible alternative uses to finance the supposedly desirable public goods, the only relevant and appropriate question is whether or not these alternative uses to which the money could be put (that is, the private goods which could have been acquired but now cannot be bought because the money is being spent on public goods instead) are more valuable—more urgent—than the public goods. And the answer to this question is perfectly clear. In terms of consumer evaluations, however high its absolute level might be, the value of the public goods is relatively lower than that of the competing private goods because if one had left the choice to the consumers (and had not forced one alternative upon them), they evidently would have preferred spending their money differently (otherwise no force would have been necessary). This proves beyond any doubt that the resources used for the provision of public goods are wasted because they provide consumers with goods or services that at best are only of secondary importance. In short, even if one assumed that public goods that can be distinguished clearly from private goods existed, and even if it were granted that a given public good might be useful, public goods would still compete with private goods. And there is only one method for finding out whether or not they are more urgently desired and to what extent, or mutatis mutandis, if, and to what extent, their production would take place at the expense of the nonproduction or reduced production of more urgently needed private goods: by having everything provided by freely competing private enterprises. Hence, contrary to the conclusion arrived at by the public goods theorists, logic forces one to accept the result that only a pure market system can safeguard the rationality, from the point of view of the consumers, of a decision to produce a public good. And only under a pure capitalist order could it be ensured that the decision about how much of a public good to produce (provided it should be produced at all) would be rational as well. No less than a semantic revolution of truly Orvellian dimensions would be required to come up with a different result. Only if one were willing to interpret someone's "no" as really meaning "yes," the "non-buying of something" as meaning that it is really "preferred over that which the nonbuying person does instead of non-buying," of "force" really meaning "freedom," of "non-contracting" really meaning "making a contract" and so on, could the public goods theorists' pint be "proven." But then, how could we be sure that they really mean what they seem to mean when they say what they say, and do not rather mean the exact opposite, or don't mean anything with a definite content at all, but are simply babbling? We could not! M. N. Rothbard is thus completely right when he comments on the endeavors of the public goods ideologues to prove the existence of so-called market failures due to the nonproduction or a quantitatively or qualitatively "deficient" production of public goods. He writes, "such a view completely misconceives the way in which economic science asserts that free market action is ever optimal. It is optimal, not from the standpoint of the personal ethical views of an economist, but from the standpoint of free, voluntary actions of all participants and in satisfying the freely expressed needs of the consumers. Government interference, therefore, will necessarily and always move away from such an optimum."

Indeed, the arguments supposedly proving market failures are nothing short of patently absurd. Stripped of their disguise of technical jargon all they prove is this: A market is not perfect, as it is characterized by the nonaggression principle imposed on conditions marked by scarcity, and so certain goods or services that could only be produced and provided if aggression were allowed will not be produced. True enough. But no market theorist would ever dare deny this. Yet, and this is decisive, this "imperfection" of the market can be defended, morally as well as economically, whereas the supposed "perfections" of markets propagated by the public goods theorists cannot. It is true enough, too, that a termination of the state's current practice of providing public goods would imply some change in the existing social structure and the distribution of wealth. And such a reshuffling would certainly imply hardship for some people. As a matter of fact, this is precisely why there is widespread public resistance to a policy of privatizing state functions, even though in the long run overall social wealth would be enhanced by this very policy. Surely, however, this fact cannot be accepted as a valid argument demonstrating the failure of markets. If a man has been allowed to hit other people on the bead and is now not permitted to continue with this practice, he is certainly hurt. But one would hardly accept that as a valid excuse for upholding the old (hitting) rules. He is harmed, but harming him means substituting a social order in which every consumer has an equal right to determine what and how much of anything is produced, for a system in which some consumers have the right to determine in what respect other consumers are not allowed to buy voluntarily what they want with the means justly acquired by them and at their disposal. And certainly, such a substitution would be preferable from the point of view of all consumers as voluntary consumers.

By force of logical reasoning, then, one must accept Molinari's conclusion that for the sake of consumers, all goods and services be provided by markets. It is not only false that clearly distinguishable categories of goods exist, which would render special amendments to the general thesis of capitalism's economic superiority necessary; even if they did exist, no special reason could be found why these supposedly special public goods should not also be produced by private enterprises, since they invariably stand in competition with private goods. In fact, in spite of all the propaganda from the public goods theorists, the greater efficiency of markets as compared with the state is increasingly realized with respect to more and more of the alleged public goods. Confronted daily with experience, hardly anyone seriously studying these matters could deny that nowadays markets could produce postal services, railroads, electricity, telephone, education, money, roads and so on more effectively than the state, i.e., more to the liking of consumers. Yet people generally shy away from accepting in one particular sector what logic forces upon them: in the production of security. Hence, for the rest of this article I will turn my attention to explaining the superior functioning of a capitalist economy in this particular area—a superiority whose logical case has already been made by now, but which shall be rendered more persuasive once some empirical material is added to the analysis and it is studied as a problem in its own right.

How would a system of non-monopolistic, competing producers of security work? It should be clear from the outset that in answering this question one is leaving the realm of purely logical analysis and hence the answers must of necessity lack the certainty, the apodictic character of pronouncements on the validity of the public goods theory. The problem faced is precisely analogous to that of asking how a market would solve the problem of hamburger production, especially if up to this point hamburgers had been produced exclusively by the state and hence no one could draw on past experience. Only tentative answers could be formulated. No one could possibly know the exact structure of the hamburger industry—how many competing companies would come into existence, what importance this industry might have compared to others, what the hamburgers would look like, how many different sorts of hamburgers would appear on the market and perhaps disappear again because of a lack of demand, and so on. No one could know all of the circumstances and the changes that would influence the very structure of the hamburger industry—changes in the demands of various consumer groups, changes in technology, changes in the prices of various goods that affect the industry directly or indirectly, and so on. It must be stressed that although similar issues arise concerning the private production of security, this by no means implies that nothing definitive can be said. Assuming certain general conditions of demand for security services (conditions that more or less realistically reflect the world as it presently is) what can and will be said is how different social orders of security production, characterized by different structural constraints under which they have to operate, will respond differently. Let me first analyze the specifics of monopolistic, state-run security production, as at least in this case one can draw on ample evidence regarding the validity of the conclusions reached, and then compare this system with what could be expected if it were replaced by a nonmonopolistic one.

Even if security is considered to be a public good, in the allocation of scarce resources it must compete with other goods. What is spent on security can no longer be spent on other goods that also might increase consumer satisfaction. Moreover, security is not a single, homogeneous good, but rather consists of numerous components and aspects. There is not only prevention of crime, detection of criminals, and enforcement of the law, but there is also security from robbers, rapists, polluters, natural disasters, and so on. Moreover, security is not produced in a "lump," but can be supplied in marginal units. In addition, different people attach different importance to security as a whole, and also to different aspects of the whole thing, depending on their personal characteristics, their past experiences with various factors of insecurity, and the time and place in which they happen to live. Now, and here I address the fundamental economic problem of allocating scarce resources to competing uses, how can the state-an organization not financed exclusively by voluntary contributions and the sales of its products but rather partially or even wholly by taxes—decide how much security to produce, how much of each of its countless aspects, to whom and where to provide how much of what? The answer is that it has no rational way to decide this question. From the point of view of the consumers, its response to their security demands must thus be considered arbitrary. Do we need one policeman and one judge, or 100,000 of each? Should they be paid $100 a month or $10,000? Should the policemen, however many we might have, spend more time patrolling the streets, chasing robbers, and recovering stolen loot, or spying on participants in victimless crimes such as prostitution, drug use, or smuggling? And should the judges spend more time and energy hearing divorce cases, traffic violations, cases of shoplifting, and murder, or antitrust cases? Clearly, all of these questions must be answered somehow because as long as there is scarcity and we do not live in the Garden of Eden, the time and money spent on one thing cannot be spent on another. The state must answer these questions, too, but whatever it does, it does it without being subject to the profit-and-loss criterion. Hence, its action is arbitrary and necessarily involves countless wasteful misallocations from the consumer's viewpoint. Independent to a large degree of consumer wants, the state-employed security producers instead do, as everyone knows, what they like. They hang around instead of doing anything, and if they do work they prefer doing what is easiest or work where they can wield power rather than serving consumers. Police officers drive around a lot in cars, hassle petty traffic violators, and spend huge amounts of money investigating victimless crimes that many people (i.e., nonparticipants) do not like but that few would be willing to spend their money on to fight, as they are not immediately affected by them. Yet with respect to what consumers want most urgently—the prevention of hardcore crime (i.e., crimes with victims), the apprehension and effective punishment of hard-core criminals, the recovery of loot, and the securement of compensation of victims of crimes from the aggressors—the police are notoriously inefficient, in spite of ever higher budget allocations.

Further, whatever state-employed police or judges happen to do (arbitrary as it must be), they will tend to do poorly because their income is more or less independent of the consumers' evaluations of their services. Thus one observes police arbitrariness and brutality and the slowness in the judicial process. Moreover, it is remarkable that neither the police nor the judicial system offers consumers anything even faintly resembling a service contract in which it is laid down in unambiguous terms what procedure the consumer can expect to he set in motion in a specific situation. Rather, both operate in a contractual void that over time allows them to change their rules of procedure arbitrarily and that explains the truly ridiculous fact that the settlement of disputes between police and judges on the one hand and private citizens on the other is not assigned to an independent third party, but to another policeman or judge who shares employers with one party-the government-in the dispute.

Third, anyone who has seen state-run police stations and courts, not to mention prisons, knows how true it is that the factors of production used to provide us with such security are overused, badly maintained, and filthy. Since no one using these factors of production actually owns them (no one can sell them and privately appropriate the receipts from sale) and losses (and gains) in the value embodied in the capital used are thus socialized, everybody will tend to increase his private income resulting from the use of the factors at the expense of losses in capital value. Hence, marginal cost will increasingly tend to exceed the value of marginal product, and an overutilization of capital will result. And if, in an exceptional case, this happens not to be so and an overutilization should not be apparent, then this has only been possible at costs that are comparatively much higher than those of any similar private business.

Without a doubt, all of these problems inherent in a system of monopolistic security production would be solved relatively quickly once a given demand for security services was met by a competitive market with its entirely different incentive structure for producers. This is not to say that a "perfect" solution to the problem of security would be found. There would still be robberies and murders; and not all loot would be recovered nor all murderers caught. But in terms of consumer evaluations the situation would improve to the extent that the nature of man would allow it to improve. First, as long as there is a competitive system, i.e., as long as the producers of security services depend on voluntary purchases, most of which probably take the form of service and insurance contracts agreed to in advance of any actual "occurrence" of insecurity or aggression, no producer could increase its income without improving services or quality of product as perceived by the consumers. Furthermore, all security producers taken together could not bolster the importance of their particular industry unless, for whatever reason, consumers indeed started evaluating security more highly than other goods, thus ensuring that the production of security would never and nowhere take place at the expense of the non- or reduced production of, let us say, cheese, as a competing private good. In addition, the producers of security services would have to diversify their offerings to a considerable degree because a highly diversified demand for security products among millions and millions of consumers exists. Directly dependent on voluntary consumer support, they would immediately be hurt financially if they did not appropriately respond to the consumers' various wants or change in wants. Thus every consumer would have a direct influence, albeit small, on the output of goods appearing on or disappearing from the security market. Instead of offering a uniform "security packet" to everyone, a characteristic of state production policy, a multitude of service packages would appear on the market. They would be tailored to the different security needs of different people, taking account of different occupations, different risk-taking behavior, different needs for protection and insurance, and different geographical locations and time constraints.

But that is far from all. Besides diversification, the content and quality of the products would improve, too. Not only would the treatment of consumers by the employees of security enterprises improve immediately, the "I-could-care-less" attitude, the arbitrariness and even brutality, the negligence and tardiness of the present police and judicial systems would ultimately disappear. Since policemen and judges would be dependent on voluntary consumer support, any instances of maltreatment of consumers, of impoliteness or ineptness could cost them their job. Further, the peculiarity that the settlement of disputes between a client and his business partner is invariably entrusted to the latter's judgment, would almost certainly disappear from the books, and conflict arbitration by independent parties would become the standard offered by producers of security. Most importantly, in order to attract and retain customers the producers of such services would have to offer contracts that would allow the consumer to know what he was buying and enable him to raise a valid, intersubjectively ascertainable complaint if the actual performance of the security producer did not live up to the contract. And more specifically, insofar as they are not individualized service contracts where payment is made by a customer for covering his own risks exclusively, but rather insurance contracts proper that require pooling one's own risks with those of other people, contrary to the present statist practice, these contracts most certainly would no longer contain any deliberately built-in redistributive scheme favoring one group of people at the expense of another. Otherwise, if anyone had the feeling that the contract offered to him required his paying for other people's peculiar needs and risks—factors of possible insecurity, that is, that he did not perceive as applicable to his own case—he would simply reject signing it or discontinue his payments.

Yet when all this is said, the question will inevitably surface, "Wouldn't a competitive system of security production necessarily result in permanent social conflict, in chaos and anarchy?" Several responses can be made to this question. First, it should be noted that such an impression would by no means be in accordance with historical, empirical evidence. Systems of competing courts have existed at various places (e.g., in ancient Ireland or at the time of the Hanseatic League) before the arrival of the modern nation state, and as far as we know they worked well. Judged by the then existent crime rate (crime per capita), the private police in the so-called Wild West (which incidentally was not as wild as some movies imply) were relatively more successful than today's state-supported police. And turning to contemporary experience and examples, millions and millions of international contacts exist even now—contacts of trade and travel—and it certainly seems to be an exaggeration to say, for instance, that there is more fraud, more crime, more breach of contract there than in domestic relations. And this, it should be noted, without there being one big monopolistic security producer and lawmaker. Finally it is not to be forgotten that even now in a great number of countries there are various private security producers alongside the state: private investigators, insurance detectives, and private arbitrators. Their work seems to confirm the thesis that they are more, not less, successful in resolving social conflicts than their public counterparts.

However, this historical evidence is very much subject to dispute, in particular regarding whether any general information can be derived from it. Yet there are systematic reasons, too, why the fear expressed by the question is not well-founded. Paradoxical as it may seem establishing a competitive system of security producers implies erecting an institutionalized incentive structure to produce an order of law and law-enforcement that embodies the highest possible degree of consensus regarding the question of conflict resolution. Such a structure will tend to generate less rather than more social unrest and conflict than would occur under monopolistic auspices. In order to understand this paradox, it is necessary to take a closer look at the only typical situation that concerns the skeptic and that allows him to believe in the superior virtue of a monopolistically organized order of security production: when a conflict arises between A and B, both are insured by different companies and the companies cannot come to an immediate agreement regarding the validity of the conflicting claims brought forward by their respective clients. (No problem would exist if such an agreement were reached or if both clients were insured by one and the same company—at least the problem then would not be different in any way from that emerging under a statist monopoly) Wouldn't such a situation always result in a shoot-out? This is highly unlikely. First, any violent battle between companies would be costly and risky, in particular if these companies had reached a respectable size (which would be important for them to have in order to appear as effective guarantors of security to their prospective clients in the first place). More importantly, under a competitive system with each company dependent on the continuation of voluntary consumer payments, any battle would have to be deliberately supported by each and every client of both companies. If there were only one person who withdrew his payments because he was not convinced a battle was necessary in the particular conflict at hand, there would be immediate economic pressure on the company to look for a peaceful solution to the conflict. Hence any competitive producer of security would be extremely cautious about engaging in violent measures in order to resolve conflicts. Rather, to the extent that it is peaceful conflict resolution that consumers want, each and every security producer would go to great lengths to provide it to its clients and to establish in advance, for everyone to know, to what arbitration process it would be willing to submit itself and its clients in case of a disagreement over the evaluation of conflicting claims. And as such a scheme could appear to the clients of different firms to be working only if there were agreement among them regarding such arbitrational measures, a system of law governing relations between companies that would be universally acceptable to the clients of all of the competing security producers would naturally evolve. Moreover, the economic pressure to generate rules representing a consensus on how conflicts should be handled is even more far-reaching. Under a competitive system, the independent arbitrators who would be entrusted with the task of finding peaceful solutions to conflicts would be dependent on the continued support of the two disputing companies insofar as the companies could and would select different judges if either one of them were sufficiently dissatisfied with the outcome of the arbitration work. Thus, these judges would be under pressure to find solutions to the problems handed over to them that, this time not with respect to the procedural aspects of law but its content, would be acceptable to all of the clients of the firms involved. Otherwise one or all of the companies might lose customers, thus inducing those firms to turn to different arbitrators the next time they were in need of one.

But wouldn't it be possible under a competitive system for a security producing firm to become an outlaw company—a firm, that is, which, supported by its own clients, started aggressing against others? There is certainly no way to deny that this might be possible, though again it must be emphasized that here one is in the realm of empirical social science and no one could know such a thing with certainty. And yet the tacit implication that the possibility that a security firm could become an outlaw company somehow indicates a severe deficiency in the philosophy and economics of a pure capitalist social order is fallacious.

First, it should be recalled that any social system, a statist-socialist order no less than a pure market economy, is dependent for its continued existence on public opinion and that a given state of public opinion at all times delimits what can or cannot occur as well as what is more or less likely to occur. The current state of public opinion in West Germany, for instance, makes it highly unlikely or even impossible that a statist-socialist system of the current Soviet type could be imposed on the West German public. The lack of public support for such a system would doom it to failure and make it collapse. And it is even more unlikely that any attempt to impose a Soviet-type order could ever hope to succeed among Americans, given American public opinion. Hence, in order for us to see the problem of outlaw companies correctly, the above question should be phrased as follows: How likely is it that any such event would occur in a given society with its specific state of public opinion? Formulated in this way, it is clear that the answer would have to be different for different societies. For some, characterized by socialist ideas deeply entrenched in the public, there would be a greater likelihood of the reemergence of aggressor companies, and for other societies there would be a much smaller chance of this happening. But then, would the prospect of a competitive system of security production in any given case be better or worse than that of the continuation of a statist system? Let us look, for instance, at the present-day United States. Assume that by a legislative act the state had abolished its right to provide security with tax funds and a competitive system of security production was introduced. Given the state of public opinion, how likely would it then be that outlaw producers would spring up, and what if they did? Evidently, the answer would depend on the reactions of the public to this changed situation. Thus, the first reply to those challenging the idea of a private market for security would have to be: What about you? What would your reaction be? Does your fear of outlaw companies mean that you would then go out and engage in trade with a security producer that aggressed against other people and their property, and would you continue supporting it if it did? Certainly the critic would be much muted by this counterattack. But more important than this is the systematic challenge implied in this personal counterattack. Evidently, the described change in the situation would imply a change in the cost-benefit structure that everyone would face once he had to make his decisions. Before the introduction of a competitive system of security production, it had been legal to participate in and support (state) aggression. Now such an activity would be an illegal activity. Hence, given one's conscience, which makes each of one's own decisions appear more or less costly, i.e., more or less in harmony with one's own principles of correct behavior, support for a firm engaging in the exploitation of people unwilling to deliberately support its actions would be more costly now than before. Given this fact, it must be assumed that the number of people, among them even those who otherwise would have readily lent their support to the state, who would now spend their money to support a firm committed to honest business would rise and would rise everywhere this social experiment was tried. In contrast, the number of people still committed to a policy of exploitation, of gaining at the expense of others, would fall. How drastic this effect would be would of course depend on the state of public opinion. In the example at hand—the United States, where the natural theory of property is extremely widespread and accepted as a private ethic, the libertarian philosophy being essentially the ideology on which the country was founded and that led it to the height it reached —the effect would naturally be particularly pronounced. Accordingly, security producing firms committed to the philosophy of protecting and enforcing libertarian law would attract the greatest bulk of public support and financial assistance. And while it may be true that some people, and among them especially those who had profited from the old order, might continue their support of a policy of aggression, it is very unlikely that they would be sufficient in number and financial strength to succeed in doing so. Rather, the likely outcome would he that the honest companies would develop the strength needed—alone or in a combined effort and supported in this effort by their own voluntary customers—to check any such emergence of outlaw producers and destroy them wherever and whenever they came into existence.