On Wed, 24 Oct 2001, Tim May wrote:
Federalizing or socializing the costs of security is like federalizing or socializing flood insurance: it takes the efficiencies of the market away and creates distortions.
A bare one objection to comprehensive market based security: a market needs private property, and other civil rights, in order to function efficiently, as predicted. Protection is what guarantees those rights. If you place protection on the market, you no longer have a guarantee that the market itself can function as originally intended. Cf. piracy (in its original form) -- an evolutionary system like pure market economy (anarcho-capitalism) will likely settle in a state with parasitic activity present. It is not clear that this stable state (you would call it a Schelling point) would not include a major proportion of rights violating commerce (like mafia protection rackets and the like). Hence it is not clear that it indeed guarantees maximum economic efficiency; it might be just a local maximum. The above, of course, has very little to do with Tim's analysis of private security of the airline industry. But it does have a lot of relevance to placing *all* of the normal police activity in the private sector. If I'm not wrong, Tim's essay is part of precisely such an agenda. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2