Standard of Living – Madison, Wisconsin

Another individual, a man named Mark Gregory Johnson, died after the government-ran 911 emergency center in Madison, Wisconsin mishandled numerous calls for help and allowed this individual to be murdered.  This same government-ran 911 center mishandled a call for help from the cell phone of Brittany Zimmermann and allowed her to be murdered in April 2008, a mere seven-months earlier.  Why does the Dane County government allow its citizens to be murdered when they pay for emergency dispatch services via taxes?  I would like to let Murray Rothbard answer this question.  The following excerpt can be found in an excellent book I recommend titled, Anarchy and the Law.  This book contains a collection of anarcho-capitalist writings from many authors that talk about a free-market for law and justice.  This specific excerpt was taken from a chapter in Murray Rothbard’s book, For a New Liberty.

[…]there is a common fallacy[…]that the government must supply “police protection” as if police protection were a single, absolute entity, a fixed quantity of something which the government supplies to all.  But in actual fact there is no absolute commodity called “police protection” any more than there is an absolute single commodity called “food” or “shelter.” It is true that everyone pays taxes for a seemingly fixed quantity of protection, but this is a myth. In actual fact, there are almost infinite degrees of all sorts of protection. For any given person or business, the police can provide everything from a policeman on the beat who patrols once a night, to two policemen patrolling constantly on each block, to cruising patrol cars, to one or even several round-the-clock personal bodyguards. Furthermore, there are many other decisions the police must make, the complexity of which becomes evident as soon as we look beneath the veil of the myth of absolute “protection.” How shall the police allocate their funds which are, of course, always limited as are the funds of all other individuals, organizations, and agencies? How much shall the police invest in electronic equipment? fingerprinting equipment? detectives as against uniformed police? patrol cars as against foot police, etc.?

The point is that the government has no rational way to make these allocations. The government only knows that it has a limited budget. Its allocations of funds are then subject to the full play of politics, boondoggling, and bureaucratic inefficiency, with no indication at all as to whether the police department is serving the consumers in a way responsive to their desires or whether it is doing so efficiently. The situation would be different if police services were supplied on a free, competitive market. In that case, consumers would pay for whatever degree of protection they wish to purchase. The consumers who just want to see a policeman once in a while would pay less than those who want continuous patrolling, and far less than those who demand twenty-four-hour bodyguard service. On the free market, protection would be supplied in proportion and in whatever way that the consumers wish to pay for it. A drive for efficiency would be insured, as it always is on the market, by the compulsion to make profits and avoid losses, and thereby to keep costs low and to serve the highest demands of the consumers. Any police firm that suffers from gross inefficiency would soon go bankrupt and disappear.

I gathered two things from Rothbard’s writing:
1.    Government-ran entities are always subjected to bureaucratic bungling because there is no signal from the citizens as to what level of service is needed.  Citizens pay taxes to fund the 911 center, but they do not know how many of their individual tax dollars go to the emergency center.  Therefore, citizens cannot determine if they personally are paying too much or not enough for the level of service they want.  When I go to McDonalds, I know what they offer and at what price.  It is transparent and honest.  I may not be able to afford every item offered, but at least I know what I could get and at what cost to me.  This allows me to accurately calculate the correct level of funds I need to accumulate to acquire the services/goods I want to receive.
2.    The services offered by a private 911 emergency center would be optimal in number, efficient, and always accurate.  If not, they would be out of business.  No free-market 911 center would ever last past the first murder it allowed.  The other private 911 centers around the city that were trustworthy and accurate would pick up their customers and life would go on and be better with the faulty emergency center no longer in business.  Only in a region such as Dane County where the government-ran 911 center has a monopoly on 911 services do mishandled emergency calls result in more murder.  There is no way for this inaccurate and inefficient center to go out of business.  This is the hazard of government entities.

If Democrats really believe that monopolies are bad for consumers, why do they allow the government to have a monopoly on emergency dispatch services which continues to allow more brutality and death on its watch?  I suspect that Democrat and Republican politicians in Dane County are more interested in holding on to their faulty belief that only government can provide dispatch and protection services.  I suspect that Dane County politicians are not as interested in the protection of individuals as they are in maintaining these government institutions despite the fact that free-market dispatch and protection services would never allow such horrendous life-ending results.  Politicians here choose to hold on to barbaric myths instead of using reason.  Their god is government.  They are anti-intellectuals.  When will these monopolistic politicians allow personal democracy to take hold in Dane County and allow for the privatization of 911 services?  When will individuals have their choice of dispatch and protection services?  Apparently, some citizens may never live long enough to find out—due to the inherent failure of government.

Sources of information:

• article – “911 center staff still thin”, found in the Wisconsin State Journal print edition of Nov. 7, 2008
• article – “Dane County 911 center staff made errors, report says”, found on the WSJ website
• book – Anarchy and the Law, found at Mises.org bookstore
• book – For a New Liberty, found at Mises.org, viewable in full for free online, or in their bookstore

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