The NYT is certainly in decline. The recent Tom Cotton op ed got a lot of attention, but you can find many similar examples of sloppy reasoning. Yesterday, an op ed called for the abolition of police:
When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder.
No, that’s certainly not what they “envision”. Most people don’t envision a world as violent as our current one, they envision a world that’s 10 times more violent. Unless you understand the thinking of those on the other side, you won’t get anywhere.
I’m not saying the world would be 10 times more violent if the police were abolished; perhaps it would be no more violent than our current world. First we need to consider what would replace the police.
I suspect that where I live (Mission Viejo), the police would be replaced by private security companies. I’d sign up, and so would my affluent neighbors. You might argue that when people call for abolishing the police they also mean abolishing private police forces. But of course if you abolished the police then there’d be no one to enforce the abolition of private police forces. So that’s what we’d get in Mission Viejo.
What about in neighborhoods where people were too poor to pay for private security forces? In that case, I’d expect gangs to patrol neighborhoods and extort “protection money” from residents. Perhaps this already happens to some extent, but it would likely happen to a greater extent without a police force. Recall the theory that the first “governments” were roving groups of bandits that settled down to maximize revenue. Fortunately, America doesn’t have many neighborhoods that are that poor.
I suspect that the private security companies in Mission Viejo would contract with arbitration firms to take over the role of courts. In poorer areas, vigilante justice might become more common. I don’t expect private police to waste much time with a war on drugs, but who knows?
Some of you know more about anarchy than I do. Please let me know what I’ve missed.
PS. Some people worry about the current wave of political correctness. While PCism may be the wave of the future, stupidity is not. In the long run, the cream will rise to the top. In the long run, there’s no danger of the lunatics taking over the asylum. If the NYT completely collapses, then some other paper will take over as the authoritative source of information for intellectuals.