# Think Tank > History >  The History of Policing in the United States

## phill4paul

I am placing this treatise in the U.S. Political News as opposed to _Individual Rights Violations: Case Studies_ for a simple fact...the actions of the law enforcement community is inseparable from the dictum of the forum definition.




> Only for political news and related current events pertaining to the U.S. government, topics include both domestic and foreign affairs.


  This is indeed political news pertaining to the U.S. Government, with regards to domestic affairs, for some.  

  As you will read, law enforcement is inseparable from politics. 

  This is the site of this article: http://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/...-states-part-1

  I encourage everyone to give it some traffic. Order the book ( I'm going to). Or take his online course. 

  Dr. Gary Potter is a professor of online and on-campus courses for the EKU School of Justice Studies. His current research areas include transnational organized crime, human trafficking and the sex industry, and drug trafficking by teenagers in rural Kentucky.




> The History of Policing in the United States, Part 1
> 
> Written by Dr. Gary Potter
> 
> The development of policing in the United States closely followed the development of policing in England. In the early colonies policing took two forms. It was both informal and communal, which is referred to as the "Watch," or private-for-profit policing, which is called "The Big Stick” (Spitzer, 1979).
> 
> The watch system was composed of community volunteers whose primary duty was to warn of impending danger. Boston created a night watch in 1636, New York in 1658 and Philadelphia in 1700. The night watch was not a particularly effective crime control device. Watchmen often slept or drank on duty. While the watch was theoretically voluntary, many "volunteers" were simply attempting to evade military service, were conscript forced into service by their town, or were performing watch duties as a form of punishment. Philadelphia created the first day watch in 1833 and New York instituted a day watch in 1844 as a supplement to its new municipal police force (Gaines, Kappeler, and Vaughn 1999).
> 
> Augmenting the watch system was a system of constables, official law enforcement officers, usually paid by the fee system for warrants they served. Constables had a variety of non-law enforcement functions to perform as well, including serving as land surveyors and verifying the accuracy of weights and measures. In many cities constables were given the responsibility of supervising the activities of the night watch.
> ...

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## phill4paul

Part 2.




> The History of Policing in the United States, Part 2
> 
> Written by Dr. Gary Potter
> 
> Maintaining a stable and disciplined work force for the developing system of factory production and ensuring a safe and tranquil community for the conduct of commerce required an organized system of social control. The developing profit-based system of production antagonized social tensions in the community. Inequality was increasing rapidly; the exploitation of workers through long hours, dangerous working conditions, and low pay was endemic; and the dominance of local governments by economic elites was creating political unrest. *The only effective political strategy available to exploited workers was what economic elites referred to as "rioting," which was actually a primitive form of what would become union strikes against employers (Silver 1967). The modern police force not only provided an organized, centralized body of men (and they were all male) legally authorized to use force to maintain order, it also provided the illusion that this order was being maintained under the rule of law, not at the whim of those with economic power.*
> 
> Defining social control as crime control was accomplished by raising the specter of the "dangerous classes." The suggestion was that public drunkenness, crime, hooliganism, political protests and worker "riots" were the products of a biologically inferior, morally intemperate, unskilled and uneducated underclass. The consumption of alcohol was widely seen as the major cause of crime and public disorder. The irony, of course, is that public drunkenness didn't exist until mercantile and commercial interests created venues for and encouraged the commercial sale of alcohol in public places. This underclass was easily identifiable because it consisted primarily of the poor, foreign immigrants and free blacks (Lundman 1980: 29). This isolation of the "dangerous classes" as the embodiment of the crime problem created a focus in crime control that persists to today, the idea that policing should be directed toward "bad" individuals, rather than social and economic conditions that are criminogenic in their social outcomes.
> 
> In addition, the creation of the modern police force in the United States also immutably altered the definition of the police function. *Policing had always been a reactive enterprise, occurring only in response to a specific criminal act. Centralized and bureaucratic police departments, focusing on the alleged crime-producing qualities of the "dangerous classes" began to emphasize preventative crime control.* The presence of police, authorized to use force, could stop crime before it started by subjecting everyone to surveillance and observation. *The concept of the police patrol as a preventative control mechanism routinized the insertion of police into the normal daily events of everyone's life, a previously unknown and highly feared concept in both England and the United States* (Parks 1976).
> ...

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## phill4paul

Part 3.




> The History of Policing in the United States, Part 3
> 
> Written by Dr. Gary Potter
> 
> In the post-Civil War era, municipal police departments increasingly turned their attention to strike-breaking. By the late 19th century union organizing and labor unrest was widespread in the United States. New York City had 5,090 strikes, involving almost a million workers from 1880 to 1900; Chicago had 1,737 strikes, involving over a half a million workers in the same period (Barkan 2001; Harring 1983). Many of the "riots" which so concerned local economic elites were actually strikes called against specific companies. The use of public employees to serve private economic interests and to use legally-ordained force against organizing workers was both cost-effective for manufacturing concerns and politically useful, in that it confused the issue of workers rights with the issue of crime (Harring 1981, 1983).
> 
> Police strike-breaking took two distinct forms. The first was the most obvious, the forced dispersal of demonstrating workers, usually through the use of extreme violence (Harring 1981). The second was more subtle. In order to prevent the organization of workers in the first place, municipal police made staggering numbers of "public order" arrests. In fact, Harring concludes that 80% of all arrests were of workers for "public order" crimes (Harring 1983). In Chicago, according to Harring the police force was "viciously anti-labor ... On a day-to-day basis it hauled nearly a million workers off to jail between 1975 and 1900 ... for trivial public order offenses" (Harring 1981). In other cities police made use of ambiguous vagrancy laws, called the "Tramp Acts," to arrest both union organized and unemployed workers (Harring 1977).
> 
> Anti-labor activity also compelled major changes in the organization of police departments. Alarm boxes were set up throughout cities, and respectable citizens, meaning businessmen, were given keys so that they could call out the police force at a moment's notice. The patrol wagon system was instituted so that large numbers of people could be arrested and transported all at once. Horseback patrols, particularly effective against strikers and demonstrators, and new, improved, longer nightsticks became standard issue.
> ...

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## phill4paul

Part 4.




> The History of Policing in the United States, Part 4
> 
> Written by Dr. Gary Potter
> 
> By the end of 19th century municipal police departments were firmly entrenched in the day-to-day political affairs of big-city political machines. Police provided services and assistance to political allies of the machine and harassed, arrested and interfered with the political activities of machine opponents. This was a curious dichotomy for an ostensibly crime control organization. Political machines at the turn of the century, were in fact, the primary modality through which crime was organized in urban areas. Politicians ran or supervised gambling, prostitution, drug distribution and racketeering. In fact, organized crime and the dominant political parties of American cities were one in the same. Politicians also employed and protected the many white-youth gangs that roamed the cities, using them to intimidate opponents, to get out the vote (by force if necessary), and to extort "political contributions" from local businesses. At the dawn of the 20th century, police were, at least de facto, acting as the enforcement arm of organized crime in virtually every big city.
> 
> Police also engaged in and helped organize widespread election fraud in their role as political functionaries for the machine. In return, police had virtual carte blanche in the use of force and had as their primary business not crime control, but the solicitation and acceptance of bribes. It is incorrect to say the late 19th and early 20th century police were corrupt, they were in fact, primary instruments for the creation of corruption in the first place.
> 
> Police departments during the machine-era provided a variety of community services other than law enforcement. In New York and Boston they sheltered the homeless, kept tabs on infectious epidemics, such as cholera, and even emptied public privies. While this service function of police continues to be important today, it is important to recall that in the context of political machine, government services were traded for votes and political loyalty. And while there is no doubt that these police services were of public value, they must be viewed as primarily political acts designed to curry public favor and ensure the continued dominance of their political patrons.
> ...

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## phill4paul

Part 5.




> The History of Policing in the United States, Part 5
> 
> Written by Dr. Gary Potter
> 
> On a national basis, President Hoover appointed the Wickersham Commission in 1929 to examine what was perceived as a rising crime rate and police ineffectiveness in dealing with crime. It is no accident that in looking at those issues, the Wickersham Commission also became the first official governmental body to investigate organized crime.
> 
> Commissions, while shedding light on the extent of corruption and serving to inform the public have little lasting impact on police practices. As external organizations they report, recommend and dissolve. The police department continues on as a bureaucratic entity resistant to both outside influence and reform.
> 
> Other attempts to reform policing have come from within the ranks of the departments themselves. Reform police commissioners and chiefs, often appointed in the wake of one or another scandals, made efforts to change the nature of the police bureaucracy itself. Among the reforms instituted within police organizations were the establishment of selection standards, training for new recruits, placing police under civil service, and awarding promotion as a result of testing procedures. The hope of these reforms was to lessen the hold of politicians, and particularly ward leaders on police officers. If the recruitment, selection and promotions processes were housed within the department and governed by objective criteria, the hope was that officers would no longer owe their jobs and their ranks to political operatives.
> ...

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## phill4paul

Part 6.




> The History of Policing in the United States, Part 6
> 
> Written by Dr. Gary Potter
> 
> By the 1960s, massive social and political changes were occurring in the United States. The civil rights movement was challenging white hegemony in the South and racist social policies in the North. The use of professional police forces to suppress the Civil Rights movement, often by brute force did irreparable damage to American policing. From 1964 to 1968 riots, usually sparked by police brutality or oppression, rocked the major cities in the United States. Police handling of large demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s was also controversial. In the 1967-1968 school years there were 292 mass demonstrations on 163 college campuses across the country. All of this political instability was further antagonized by a series of political assassinations: President John Kennedy in 1963; Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968; Governor George Wallace in 1972. Other political leaders, particularly in the African-American community, such as Malcolm X and Medger Evers were also assassinated. National commissions created to investigate riots and political instability frequently and universally pointed to the police as a source of social tension.
> 
> The police and criminal justice system response was twofold. First in 1968, as part of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, large sums of federal money were made available for rather cosmetic police-community relations programs, which were mostly media focused attempts to improve the police image. By the 1980s many police departments had begun to consider a new strategy, community policing. Community policing emphasized close working relations with the community, police responsiveness to the community, and common efforts to alleviate a wide variety of community problems, many of which were social in nature. Community policing is the latest iteration in efforts to (1) improve relations between the police and the community; (2) decentralize the police; and, (3) in response to the overwhelming body of scholarly literature which finds that the police have virtually no impact on crime, no matter their emphasis or role, provide a means to make citizens feel more comfortable about what has been a seemingly insoluable American dilemma.
> 
> *From the beginning American policing has been intimately tied not to the problem of crime, but to exigencies and demands of the American political-economy.* *From the anti-immigrant bashing of early police forces, to the strike breaking of the later 1800s, to the massive corruption of the early 20th century, through professionalism, Taylorization and now attempts at amelioration through community policing, the role of the police in the United States has been defined by economics and politics, not crime or crime control.* As we look to the 21st century, it now appears likely that a new emphasis on science and technology, particularly related to citizen surveillance; a new wave of militarization reflected in the spread of SWAT teams and other paramilitary squads; and a new emphasis on community pacification through community policing, are all *destined to replay the failures of history as the policies of the future.*

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## phill4paul

> Some police officers themselves opposed uniforms. They felt that uniforms would subject them to public ridicule and make them too easily identifiable to the majority of citizens who bore the brunt of police power, perhaps making them targets for mob violence.


http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...2-Names-Secret

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## phill4paul

> Early police officers began carrying firearms even when this was not department policy despite widespread public fear that this gave the police and the state too much power. Police departments formally armed their officers only after officers had informally armed themselves. The use of force to effect an arrest was as controversial in the 1830s and 1840s as it is today. Because the police were primarily engaged in enforcing public order laws against gambling and drunkenness, surveilling immigrants and freed slaves, and harassing labor organizers, public opinion favored restrictions on the use of force. But the value of armed, paramilitary presence, authorized to use, indeed deadly force, served the interests of local economic elites who had wanted organized police departments in the first place. The presence of a paramilitary force, occupying the streets, was regarded as essential because such "organizations intervened between the propertied elites and propertyless masses who were regarded as politically dangerous as a class" (Bordua and Reiss 1967).


http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...olice-Ferguson

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## phill4paul

> By the end of 19th century municipal police departments were firmly entrenched in the day-to-day political affairs of big-city political machines. Police provided services and assistance to political allies of the machine and harassed, arrested and interfered with the political activities of machine opponents.


http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...en-emails-show

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## phill4paul

> Commissions, while shedding light on the extent of corruption and serving to inform the public have little lasting impact on police practices. As external organizations they report, recommend and dissolve. The police department continues on as a bureaucratic entity resistant to both outside influence and reform.


http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...-the-city-795k

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## phill4paul

> By the mid-1960s police officers had responded with an aggressive and widespread police unionization campaign. Aided by court rulings more favorable to the organizing of public employees; fueled by resentment of the authoritarian organization of departments; and united in a common resistance to increasing charges of police brutality, corruption and other forms of misconduct, nearly every large-city police department had been unionized by the early 1970s. Police officers struck in New York City in 1971; in Baltimore in 1974 and in San Francisco in 1975. "Job actions" such as "blue flue" and work slowdowns (i.e. not writing tickets, making few arrests) were common in other cities.


http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...ice-department

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## phill4paul

I could go on and on. The simple fact is this....




> *From the beginning American policing has been intimately tied not to the problem of crime, but to exigencies and demands of the American political-economy.*


  Policing is political. It is as intimately political as....politics.

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## Anti Federalist

Because the police were primarily engaged in enforcing public order laws against gambling and drunkenness, surveilling immigrants and freed slaves, and harassing labor organizers, public opinion favored restrictions on the use of force. But the value of armed, paramilitary presence, authorized to use, indeed deadly force, served the interests of local economic elites who had wanted organized police departments in the first place.

*Because the police were primarily engaged in enforcing public order laws against gambling and drunkenness, surveilling immigrants and freed slaves, and harassing labor organizers, public opinion favored restrictions on the use of force. But the value of armed, paramilitary presence, authorized to use, indeed deadly force, served the interests of local economic elites who had wanted organized police departments in the first place.*

*Because the police were primarily engaged in enforcing public order laws against gambling and drunkenness, surveilling immigrants and freed slaves, and harassing labor organizers, public opinion favored restrictions on the use of force. But the value of armed, paramilitary presence, authorized to use, indeed deadly force, served the interests of local economic elites who had wanted organized police departments in the first place.*

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## Anti Federalist

This goes here:

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...=paddy+rollers

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## phill4paul

> This goes here:
> 
> http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...=paddy+rollers


  Indeed it does....




> In the Southern states the development of American policing followed a different path. The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the "Slave Patrol" (Platt 1982). The first formal slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704 (Reichel 1992). Slave patrols had three primary functions: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules. Following the Civil War, these vigilante-style organizations evolved in modern Southern police departments primarily as a means of controlling freed slaves who were now laborers working in an agricultural caste system, and enforcing "Jim Crow" segregation laws, designed to deny freed slaves equal rights and access to the political system.

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## phill4paul

> The modern police force not only provided an organized, centralized body of men (and they were all male) legally authorized to use force to maintain order, it also provided the illusion that this order was being maintained under the rule of law, not at the whim of those with economic power.


http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...73#post5792873

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## pcosmar

Police = control.
it is the very meaning of the word.
It is an authoritarian construct,, enforcers of control.
Police should simply not exist in a free society.
http://www.constitution.org/lrev/roots/cops.htm

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## Anti Federalist

bump

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## phill4paul

> bump


  The government's holy triumvirate, on both local, state and federal level, ...

  Legislature... they make the laws the cops enforce. 

  Executive...they ARE the cops.

  Judicial...they grant immunity to the legislature and executive.

  How is Policing in the United States NOT political?

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## Anti Federalist

> The government's holy triumvirate, on both local, state and federal level, ...
> 
>   Legislature... they make the laws the cops enforce. 
> 
>   Executive...they ARE the cops.
> 
>   Judicial...they grant immunity to the legislature and executive.
> 
>   How is Policing in the United States NOT political?


It is at the very root, it is the *nexus* of politics and the people.

Where the rubber meets the road.

Or rather, where the nightstick meets the side of your head.

Nothing could be *more* "political".

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## phill4paul

Bump for the reason for Fed. gov. fusion of state and local police....http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...80#post5811880

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## phill4paul

Bump for the sock puppets.

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## CCTelander

This is probably appropriate to link to here also:

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...ice-Protection

I bumped it as well.

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## Anti Federalist

Good bumpos, CC and Phill

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## Anti Federalist



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## devil21

Nice thread.  I like threads that get to the meat of the illness instead of dancing around the symptoms of it.  

Always worth a rewatch:

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## phill4paul

//

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## phill4paul

Bump.

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## fisharmor

It would be nice to get verification that someone outside the posters in this thread had actually read this material.

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## phill4paul

Bump

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## devil21

Police Departments are private, for profit corporations.  They are not government organizations.

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## tod evans

> Police Departments are private, for profit corporations.  They are not government organizations.


Actually they are both, with a splash of organized crime thrown in........

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## devil21

> Actually they are both, with a splash of organized crime thrown in........


I see no evidence that police departments are anything but private, for profit corporations.  Such has been confirmed directly to me by an experienced policy...err police officer.

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## phill4paul

> I see no evidence that police departments are anything but private, for profit corporations.  Such has been confirmed directly to me by an experienced policy...err police officer.


  They are government entities. Don't let yourself be fooled. I suppose you could say they are contracted mercenaries. That would be about right. But, they work exclusively for the government/corporatists.

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## tod evans

> I see no evidence that police departments are anything but private, for profit corporations.  Such has been confirmed directly to me by an experienced policy...err police officer.


Ask said kop where the funds his pay check is drawn from come from, ask about vehicles, weapons, communication, etc...

Then ask who rules the roost when the feds come to town.......

Does he enforce federal law?

In reality it's a hodgepodge but you can bet your ass that your life and your families lives are several notches below his 'brothers in blue'........

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## devil21

> They are government entities. Don't let yourself be fooled. I suppose you could say they are contracted mercenaries. That would be about right. But, they work exclusively for the government/corporatists.


There are no governments anymore, just corporate subsidiaries of the federal corporation, therefore there can be no government entities.  Only corporate entities.  I bet the city/town/county/state you live in is incorporated.

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## phill4paul

Bump for relevance....

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## pcosmar

Better or worse"

I will be observing the new administrations adventures.

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## phill4paul

> Better or worse"
> 
> I will be observing the new administrations adventures.


  I'm calling status quo or worse. I'm not seeing better as an option.

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## BV2

Foederati.

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## Anti Federalist

Bumpity bump

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## r3volution 3.0

So the author of the article cited in the OP is an anti-capitalist of some kind:




> Maintaining a stable and disciplined work force for the developing  system of factory production and ensuring a safe and tranquil community  for the conduct of commerce required an organized system of social  control. The developing profit-based system of production antagonized  social tensions in the community. Inequality was increasing rapidly; the  exploitation of workers through long hours, dangerous working  conditions, and low pay was endemic; and the dominance of local  governments by economic elites was creating political unrest. The  only effective political strategy available to exploited workers was  what economic elites referred to as "rioting," which was actually a  primitive form of what would become union strikes against employers  (Silver 1967). The modern police force not only provided an organized,  centralized body of men (and they were all male) legally authorized to  use force to maintain order, it also provided the illusion that this  order was being maintained under the rule of law, not at the whim of  those with economic power.


There are many aspects of policing about which one could legitimately complain.

...the defense of property against rioting unionists isn't one of them.

 @phill4paul you actually agree with this Marxoid analysis?

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## phill4paul

> So the author of the article cited in the OP is an anti-capitalist of some kind:
> 
> 
> 
> There are many aspects of policing about which one could legitimately complain.
> 
> ...the defense of property against rioting unionists isn't one of them.
> 
>  @phill4paul you actually agree with this Marxoid analysis?


    The take away to me is that these corporations shifted the cost of private security to the citizenry. It doesn't make me a SJW to point out that policing in the south has a direct correlation to "paddy rollers" i.e. slave patrols. 

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...l-Slave-Patrol

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## r3volution 3.0

> The take away to me is that these corporations shifted the cost of private security to the citizenry.


Whenever security costs are socialized (which is always, in every society, other than in a hypothetical anarcho-capitalist society), somebody's paying for somebody else's security, yes, though it's not entirely clear that big business is the beneficiary of this redistribution of wealth, since they also pay a great deal in taxes. Anyway, I have no problem with socialized security, since there's no real alternative (anarcho-capitalism being impossible in practice), and I don't much care how the costs/benefits break down on a class/individual level.

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## phill4paul

Bump.

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## Anti Federalist

Bump for Drake

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## phill4paul

Bump.

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