Thinking Normatively About Private Security

Abstract

institutional conceptions, like political democracy, the market economy, and a free civil society, have a single natural and necessary institutional expression.' (id., p. 7.) 12 id., p. 138. 13 M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (1983) 119-20. 14 See, for example, J. Logan, Private Prisons: Pros and Cons (1990). 15 For a sympathetic overview, see N. Barry, On Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism (1986). I say 'more or less related' because as Barry points out (pp. 2-3) many economic liberals defend their propositions on grounds merely of allocative efficiency (and thus implicitly within utilitarianism), rather than seeking explicitly to locate themselves within a normative philosophical framework. 16 For a succinct statement of this position, see J. Buchanan, 'From Private Preferences to Public Philosophy: The Development of Public Choice' in The Economics of Politics, eds. J. Buchanan et al. (1978). 17 It is commonplace within this literature to assert that no 'third way' exists between market (capitalism) and state (socialism). Because both are seen as inadequate, inefficient tools if utilized only partially, 'the result will be worse than if either system had been relied upon consistently.' F. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944) 31. 18 A. Seldon, Capitalism (1990) 99. 19 M. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962) 91. 20 These terms were originally formulated by Albert Hirschman in his Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970), though he would I suspect take exception to the ways in which they have been deployed by free market economists. 21 Seldon, op. cit., n. 18, p. 106. Economic liberals generally take an ambivalent bordering on hostile view of (representative) democracy (they have no interest in any other form it might take), peppering their writings with assaults on its practical deficiencies, and resorting to terms such as 'intimidation' and 'manipulation' to describe processes of democratic persuasion. Hayek, for instance, was reluctant to elevate popular sovereignty to the status of principle, believing that it should be judged according to its results (and dispensed with if it threatened the spontaneous liberal order). As he puts it: 'Democracy ... is not an ultimate or absolute value and must be judged by what it will achieve. It is probably the best method for achieving certain ends, but not an end in itself.' F. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960) 106. Seldon takes great pleasure in recasting Abraham Lincoln's famous defence of popular sovereignty in the following terms: 'Government of the busy, by the bossy, for the bully', Seldon, id., p. 111. 22 Though it is a trope of (some) economic liberal writing to recognize that markets are fallible (they disadvantage those who have 'too few pennies', as Seldon quaintly puts it), surprisingly little of their energies are given over to exploring such imperfections or to thinking through how they might be overcome. 23 B. Benson, The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State (1990) 245. 24 Hirschman, op. cit., n. 20, p. 21. 25 Seldon, op. cit., n. 18, p. 105. 26 See, for instance, the discussion in Seldon (id., ch. 8) where he prefers to speak of goods with 'unavoidably collective functions'. 27 R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974). 28 D. Pyle, Cutting the Costs of Crime: The Economics of Crime and Criminal Justice (1995). 29 id., p. 54. 30 id., p. 61. 31 id. Critics of the commodification of security (and other public services) argue that allowing the wealthy to purchase their own provision residualizes the remaining public service by (among other things) weakening the willingness of those who have 'opted-out' to fund it through general taxation. Economic liberals take the opposite view contending that the competitive threat encourages public services to improve their performance and thereby win back customers. One can't help feeling that this response rather neglects the way in which goods such as private education, health, and security are in liberal democracies such