Is having police a form of socialism?

[Goshin]

Wash's Stegosaurus: Yes. Yes, this is a fertile land, and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land, and we will call it... "This Land.".
Wash's Allosaurus: I think we should call it "your grave!".
Stegosaurus: Ah, curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!
Allosaurus: Har har har! Mine is an evil laugh! Now die!
[The Allosaurus attacks the Stegosaurus.]
Stegosaurus: Oh, no, God! Oh, dear God in heaven!

ROFL. Nah first thing I did was shoot all the allosaurs in the area...

 

[poweRob]

 

[MrNiceGuy]

I just saw a TV commercial with Mike Huckabee (a former POTUS candidate) for a book or something about fighting socialism for kids. One of the examples it had was defunding the police & this strikes me as odd, because I consider police to be a form of socialism.

The reason I consider police to be a form of socialism is because it takes law enforcement away from WE THE PEOPLE - a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and creates a monopoly out of it consisting of un-elected career professionals; it turns society into a prison, where police are the prison guards.

We didn't have police when US was founded, and we had law enforcement and courts, so I'm not interested in any nonsense claims that without police society would crumble. The way I see things happening, society is crumbing with and probably because of police.

One can only consider police to be a "form of socialism" if one does not know the first thing about what socialism is.

Before police, it wasn't that societies had no law enforcement. Other alternatives were county sheriffs who would pursue criminals and raise posse comitatus (men could be forced to participate). In medieval periods, the people in a village would respond to a crime by "raising a hue and cry" and having the villagers light their torches and carry their pitchforks. In some places, tithings were created, where 10 men were designated as tithes which policed itself, when one committed an offence the other 9 would be in charge of chasing him down. There were county coroners from the 13th century on , and appointed constables.

It's not as if things were better back then. Standards of proof were not the same, and often people were just basically lynched because they were strangers or looked guilty.

But, that's an entirely different issue than whether police are "form of socialism." They aren't. Government is not socialism and capitalism doesn't mean "lack of government." When you have criminal laws, any means of enforcing the law is called "policing." You could have it be a county sheriff who raises a posse to pursue criminals if you want, and they are then doing the "policing." Instead, we he have states, counties, and cities create police forces to standardize enforcement and policing so we try to get something closer to fairness than we did when the villagers raised a hue and cry and chased down whomever they throught was guilty and decided guilty by "trial by ordeal" and "trial by combat." LOL

 

[MrNiceGuy]

This kind of idiocy needs to stop. Nobody says a ****ing library is "socialism." It does not vest the means of production of books and other reading material in the State. Socialism is when the means of production is owned or controlled chiefly by the State. A library is a place where books are lent out and returned. It isn't socialis.

And, the ****ing post office charges customers money to mail letters and packages. How the hell is that socialism?

The ****ing nutballs on the left love to trot this crap out too. They LOVE to say "oh, yeah, like socialism is so bad -- say goodbye to your fire department, road construction, police and libraries, then!" Christ...

 

[Gatsby]

What's the point of labeling every government service "socialism"? Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are socialists under this definition, which basically renders the word meaningless. The only purpose that I can see for such an all-inclusive label is the motte-and-bailey fallacy.

The motte: "We should have police."
The bailey: "We should seize the banks and nationalize industry."

 

[KevinKohler]

Are they publicly funded?

If yes, then yes, at its most basic, police, or at least, the funding of such, is a form of socialism.

 

[KevinKohler]

I just saw a TV commercial with Mike Huckabee (a former POTUS candidate) for a book or something about fighting socialism for kids. One of the examples it had was defunding the police & this strikes me as odd, because I consider police to be a form of socialism.

The reason I consider police to be a form of socialism is because it takes law enforcement away from WE THE PEOPLE - a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and creates a monopoly out of it consisting of un-elected career professionals; it turns society into a prison, where police are the prison guards.

We didn't have police when US was founded, and we had law enforcement and courts, so I'm not interested in any nonsense claims that without police society would crumble. The way I see things happening, society is crumbing with and probably because of police.

Don't conflate job function with funding mechanism.

 

[Lethargic Aptitude]

I just saw a TV commercial with Mike Huckabee (a former POTUS candidate) for a book or something about fighting socialism for kids. One of the examples it had was defunding the police & this strikes me as odd, because I consider police to be a form of socialism.

The reason I consider police to be a form of socialism is because it takes law enforcement away from WE THE PEOPLE - a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and creates a monopoly out of it consisting of un-elected career professionals; it turns society into a prison, where police are the prison guards.

We didn't have police when US was founded, and we had law enforcement and courts, so I'm not interested in any nonsense claims that without police society would crumble. The way I see things happening, society is crumbing with and probably because of police.

Originalism is stupid; slavery would be the goal then.

 

[Antiwar]

I just saw a TV commercial with Mike Huckabee (a former POTUS candidate) for a book or something about fighting socialism for kids.

Mike Huckabee is trying to fight every formal economy? All of them are a combination of two main socioeconomic systems, capitalism and socialism.

One of the examples it had was defunding the police & this strikes me as odd, because I consider police to be a form of socialism.

Yes, policing is a form of socialism in that it is paid for through taxation, and everyone is supposed to get services whether they paid taxes or not.

The reason I consider police to be a form of socialism is because it takes law enforcement away from WE THE PEOPLE - a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and creates a monopoly out of it consisting of un-elected career professionals; it turns society into a prison, where police are the prison guards.

That's not a form of socialism. There's not much democracy in policing, except for voting for sheriffs, DAs, and such. If it's anything related to socialism, the overall domination mindset is antisocial-ism. It's an antisocial way to deal with society's problems. America does have police state characteristics, domestically and internationally.

We didn't have police when US was founded, and we had law enforcement and courts, so I'm not interested in any nonsense claims that without police society would crumble. The way I see things happening, society is crumbing with and probably because of police.

That's a legitimate point. That's one point that's made within many points of 'defund the police.'

 

[iguanaman]

I just saw a TV commercial with Mike Huckabee (a former POTUS candidate) for a book or something about fighting socialism for kids. One of the examples it had was defunding the police & this strikes me as odd, because I consider police to be a form of socialism.

The reason I consider police to be a form of socialism is because it takes law enforcement away from WE THE PEOPLE - a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and creates a monopoly out of it consisting of un-elected career professionals; it turns society into a prison, where police are the prison guards.

We didn't have police when US was founded, and we had law enforcement and courts, so I'm not interested in any nonsense claims that without police society would crumble. The way I see things happening, society is crumbing with and probably because of police.

Not the police but the military is a pure socialist entity with all the foibles and pitfalls that entails.

 

[code1211]

Here's the real catch: Without government there wouldn't be a society to crumble.

The analogy of holding a bird comes to mind. Grip it too tightly and you crush it. Grip it too loosely and it flies away.

The balance of government authority between crushing freedoms and letting them slip away is the balance we need to strive to maintain.

Our police are intended to restrain the bad guys so the good guys and the regular folks can live with freedom in safety.

When the police state restrictions constrict and constrain the good guys and the regular folks but allow the bad guys to roam free, we have a problem. Perhaps many problems.

Good policing is nothing more than getting the bad guys gone from society to allow the regular folks be free to contribute to society.

 

[code1211]

Nope, otherwise we would have open borders, no enforcement of interstate or international commerce regulations and federal tax evasion on an even larger scale.

I was responding to a poster who seemed to be addressing police as we normally see them.

What you introduce here is not the province of the "cop on the beat" sort of policing.

Perhaps I missed his point.

 

[neil]

No. Socialism is government ownership or control of the means of production.

I'm confused, here. You're saying "no" but your explanation proves that the answer is yes, since police departments are both owned and controlled by the government. Am I missing something, here?

Laws would be useless without an enforcement mechanism - resulting in mob rule or total anarchy.

Yes & this doesn't dispute anything I posted.

BTW, you are wrong about not having police (law enforcement personnel) when the US was founded.

Police: History - Early Policing In Colonial America

law.jrank.org

I disagree:

The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”​

(Source: https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/)

My position as a libertarian is that when it comes to how government functions, there needs to be equilibrium between the individual and the collective - neither one is put before the other.

What socialism does is it puts the collective before the individual, and what anarchism does is it puts the individual before the collective.

I don't necessarily object to something for the collective good provided it absolutely never, ever puts the collective before the individual. When police forces are being used to confiscate arms - which is in complete contradiction to the 2nd Amendment, for civil asset forfeiture, to arrest individuals for victimless "crimes" such as individuals using recreational substances in the privacy of their home & prostitution, to summarily execute individuals - which is in complete contradiction to the 5th Amendment, etc., then that's when police forces become nothing more than a dangerous, destructive, counterproductive, oppressive terrorist organization; this in itself doesn't serve the collective good.[/u]

 

[neil]

Police, as you reference police here, are entities of State and Local Governments.

The US constitution leaves this and many other functions of government to the various states and to the People.

People throughout history have determined that laws without enforcement are only words. Democrats seem incapable of understanding that which history teaches and promote the idea that not enforcing laws is a good thing.

Oddly delusional.

I think you might be able to make a strong case for not maintaining a police enforcement agency at the Federal Level.

Ok I guess, but this thread isn't about not enforcing laws at all. I'm always for enforcing constitutional laws in such a way that it is of the people, by the people, and for the people, so any sort of notion that this thread is about not enforcing laws at all is not a true premise.

 

[neil]

Nope, otherwise we would have open borders, no enforcement of interstate or international commerce regulations and federal tax evasion on an even larger scale.

This is an assertion for a consequence of not maintaining a police enforcement agency at the Federal Level, not an argument for why it's not true or wrong.

 

[ttwtt78640]

I'm confused, here. You're saying "no" but your explanation proves that the answer is yes, since police departments are both owned and controlled by the government. Am I missing something, here?

Yes - what do LEO’s produce?

Yes & this doesn't dispute anything I posted.

It certainly does, because while some sort of private security (or even a citizen or informal watchman force) can try to stop someone from doing something by force, they have no powers to levy fines or impose any other legal penalties. They also lack any means (other than by collecting bounties) to get paid for their public services.

I disagree:

The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”​

(Source: https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/)

My position as a libertarian is that when it comes to how government functions, there needs to be equilibrium between the individual and the collective - neither one is put before the other.

What socialism does is it puts the collective before the individual, and what anarchism does is it puts the individual before the collective.

I don't necessarily object to something for the collective good provided it absolutely never, ever[/i] puts the collective before the individual. When police forces are being used to confiscate arms - which is in complete contradiction to the 2nd Amendment, for civil asset forfeiture, to arrest individuals for victimless "crimes" such as individuals using recreational substances in the privacy of their home & prostitution, to summarily execute individuals - which is in complete contradiction to the 5th Amendment, etc., then that's when police forces become nothing more than a dangerous, destructive, counterproductive, oppressive terrorist organization; this in itself doesn't serve the collective good.

You seem to have answered your own questions and/or have addressed your own concerns. Since LEO‘s mission is to provide for the public good and to enforce public laws, it makes complete sense to have them become public employees. Relying on unpaid watchmen proved to be inadequate and privately paid security forces couldn’t care less about any criminal acts not impacting their private employers.

 

[neil]

Actually you didn't.

LOL you're wrong, because you're not correctly parsing the sentence; the request is indeed for citation of a socialist magazine or prominent socialist political figure which is promoting the police. The request was addressed to me, but I have no interest or intention of fulfilling this request because it appears to be an implied false choice fallacy - it seems to falsely insinuate that my sources must be from a cherry-picked set of references, otherwise it isn't true.

 

[neil]

Well, yes and no.

A good test, from a libertarian perspective, regarding whether a given task should be done by government, is as follows: is it an essential task? will it be done *better* by government, or not done at all if gov doesn't do it?

I disagree that all of these would be tests from a libertarian perspective, because there are some essential tasks that should only be done by government (e.g. legislation & official record-keeping of deeds), and there are other essential tasks that are best left to the free market (e.g. growing food, building houses, designing cars).

An example of something I consider to be better done by government - in a manner of speaking - is keeping the roads and highways public, but generally speaking I don't think anything is done better by government. In practice, the idea of keeping the roads and highways public is that they're still built by private construction companies using machinery, equipment, and supplies built and produced by private companies.

One of the problems I see with socialism is that it scales up very poorly. At a very local level socialism can work fairly well. There's something called Dunbar's number (which I understand is somewhere around 150 people), and this number is a threshold to where I think socialism can work well; a socialist community of 150 or fewer people works well, but a socialist nation consisting of 150 thousand (or more) people doesn't do well. I'm willing to accept that a socialist community of a few thousand can still do fairly ok, for the sake of the argument regarding the roads & highway system.

If you look at how the roads & highway system is "socialized", you'll see that it's a mixture of local roads being managed locally, longer and larger routes being managed at the county or state level, and the interstate highway system being managed at the state level (including multiple state cooperation with roads connecting between states) with some federal funding.

The reason I think it's better for roads and highways to be public, and to exaggerate to make a point, imagine having to stop at a toll booth in front of every single home & imagine every single home owner having to operate a toll booth. That's not feasible & it's far more economically efficient to have a road & highway system that's more or less centralized the way it is now and funded with taxes.

I'm also opposed to making roads private, because that creates the dilemma of everyone being at the mercy of their neighbors by potentially becoming prisoners on their own property, especially if your neighbor don't like you or get angry with you. I think people ought to be able to move around and travel without needing permission from some private owner of the road they depend on for access to different places.

If people want to call that socialism, that's fine I don't really care at all, but I'm also not opposed to additional roads (or methods of transportation such as what Musk's Hyperloop is intended to be) that are privately owned.

 

[neil]

Defense, for example, meets that test.

I also disagree with this, because this can be achieved by people keeping and bearing arms, and less expensively too, because taxes wouldn't need to go towards funding a "socialized" military. I'll refer to the military as "socialized", but at least it's basically in the US Constitution; there are some issues I have with the way the US military exists in terms of far exceeding what the US Constitution authorizes, but for now I'll leave that for some other time.

Police, well sorta. Our modern version of policing is quite problematic in many ways, obviously. I have advocated for many years that we need major reform from the foundation up.

But doing without police entirely... from a practical standpoint that isn't such a good idea. While I do think communities should be much more involved in keeping the peace and so forth, there are good reasons for having a professional police force.

That seems reasonable, but my point of contention is primarily that it consists of career, unelected professionals. A sheriff, for example, is elected (at least here in Virginia, anyways).

Areas without such tended to either devolve into strong-man-rule or vigilantes. The problem with vigilantes is they tend not to adhere to due process, reasonable evidence standards, and so on. Look up San Franciso and read about the "Vigilance committees" and what a mess that was.

As I've stated in previous posts, this thread isn't about not having any law enforcement at all.

If police weren't being constantly called out to deal with every little fracas and argument, pushed by politicians to enforce every petty law and minor statute, we might be able to reduce and streamline the police force... but a lot of policing has become "revenue enhancement" or worse.

It's sort of a double-edged sword I suppose, but I actually think amount of revenue as a function of crime or law violations can be valid. If no one parked illegally, then no one would be receiving parking tickets meaning no funding for parking enforcement, but if no one is parking illegally, then there's no need for parking enforcement since no one's parking illegally. If drivers are parking illegally everywhere, then there's plenty of need for parking enforcement, and with all the revenue collected from parking violations, there's plenty of funding for parking enforcement. This is literally the same as supply and demand and practically the same as a free market system.

I think even ticket quotas aren't necessarily bad as long as that quota threshold is legitimately based on traffic violation rates, over a period of time, and traffic violation citations are legitimate. If quotas are being used to make sure traffic enforcement are doing their job then that's ok, but if there's something corrupt going on with that, then that needs to be dealt with; this technically would be an example of one of the problems with central planning or command and control.

Standards and training need to be higher. Peels' Principles would be a good place to start reforming.

But inherently socialist? Not really, imho.

If by this you mean having an elected sheriff in charge of law enforcement is not socialist, then I would agree.

 

[neil]

1. You should probably look up the definition of "socialism". That last time I looked, there wasn't a private police industry.

I didn't say anything about private police industry & I'm not going to elaborate on this, other than to say this is basically a straw-man, without getting a reasonable explanation for how the private police industry is relevant.

I'm basically talking about elected public servants as opposed to un-elected career professionals being in charge of law enforcement; that's different from a private police industry.

2. We did have police in colonial days...they just went by a different title, like Sheriff. But they then, like today, were law enforcement and they were controlled by the government and the courts.

THE EARLY DAYS OF AMERICAN LAW ENFORCEMENT - Jefferson County Sheriff's Foundation

The Watch More than 350 years ago, America’s first known system of law enforcement was established in Boston. As soon… Read More

www.jeffersoncountysheriffsfoundation.org

Policing Colonial America

Many European law enforcement institutions were transplanted in the colonies. The county sheriff The most important law enforcement official in colonial Amer

www.cliffsnotes.com

So...the correct answer to your poll is, of course, no.

We still have sheriffs & it's more than just different titles.

 

[Ren]

I just saw a TV commercial with Mike Huckabee (a former POTUS candidate) for a book or something about fighting socialism for kids. One of the examples it had was defunding the police & this strikes me as odd, because I consider police to be a form of socialism.

The reason I consider police to be a form of socialism is because it takes law enforcement away from WE THE PEOPLE - a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and creates a monopoly out of it consisting of un-elected career professionals; it turns society into a prison, where police are the prison guards.

We didn't have police when US was founded, and we had law enforcement and courts, so I'm not interested in any nonsense claims that without police society would crumble. The way I see things happening, society is crumbing with and probably because of police.

Because police are the ones distributing drugs, managing prostitution and blowing the traditional family concept to smithereens, right?

 

[neil]

One can only consider police to be a "form of socialism" if one does not know the first thing about what socialism is.

If you say so, but this isn't an argument.

Before police, it wasn't that societies had no law enforcement.

This agrees with what I asserted in the OP.

Other alternatives were county sheriffs who would pursue criminals and raise posse comitatus (men could be forced to participate). In medieval periods, the people in a village would respond to a crime by "raising a hue and cry" and having the villagers light their torches and carry their pitchforks. In some places, tithings were created, where 10 men were designated as tithes which policed itself, when one committed an offence the other 9 would be in charge of chasing him down. There were county coroners from the 13th century on , and appointed constables.

It's not as if things were better back then. Standards of proof were not the same, and often people were just basically lynched because they were strangers or looked guilty.

But, that's an entirely different issue than whether police are "form of socialism." They aren't. Government is not socialism and capitalism doesn't mean "lack of government." When you have criminal laws, any means of enforcing the law is called "policing." You could have it be a county sheriff who raises a posse to pursue criminals if you want, and they are then doing the "policing." Instead, we he have states, counties, and cities create police forces to standardize enforcement and policing so we try to get something closer to fairness than we did when the villagers raised a hue and cry and chased down whomever they throught was guilty and decided guilty by "trial by ordeal" and "trial by combat." LOL

It's not that government is or isn't socialism, it's about how society is being governed.

Yes, policing can & does have a rather broad meaning beyond just un-elected career professionals being in charge of law enforcement, but I did contextualize in the OP.

 

[ttwtt78640]

I didn't say anything about private police industry & I'm not going to elaborate on this, other than to say this is basically a straw-man, without getting a reasonable explanation for how the private police industry is relevant.

I'm basically talking about elected public servants as opposed to un-elected career professionals being in charge of law enforcement; that's different from a private police industry.

Whether the government officials in charge of X industry, department or program are elected or appointed makes no difference as to whether it is government owned or controlled.

We still have sheriffs & it's more than just different titles.

You seem to be asserting that if the head of a law enforcement organization is elected (rather than simply appointed by another elected official) then it is no longer ‘socialist’. Using that ‘logic’ (definition?), if we elected the head of national medical care (adopted a UHC or single-payer system) then a federal government takeover of 1/6 of the US economy (all medical care providers) would not be socialism.

 

[Peter]

I'd like to see someone try and run a country without any police.
I have a feeling it wouldn't end well.

 

[StillBallin75]

Lmfao when you're so wrong, you're actually right.

1) Welcome comrade, to what the pro-abolitionist leftists have been saying about the police all along.

2) You have a sorely lacking understanding of socialism so you said something extra stupid, but you arrived at the right conclusion.