re: Protests blowing up in Downtown Birmingham

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Benson relates a case study in government negligence where three female roommates were attacked in their apartment. Two girls upstairs made repeated calls to police while the third roommate was beaten and raped by several men. When her screams stopped the two roommates thought the police must have arrived. They went downstairs where for the next fourteen hours they too were raped, robbed, and beaten. Government courts absolved the police of any liability.

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Further, David Rasmussen and Bruce Benson's 1994 book, The Economic Anatomy of a Drug War shows that the modern drug war and all of its draconian policies actually increased property and violent crimes committed on the American public and made us less safe.

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You might be surprised to know, for example, that more disputes are resolved in private courts than in government courts, that there are more private security guards than police, and that private companies have built their own prisons without a government contract.

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Consider, for example, the widely held idea that drug use causes crime. Statistics show that in 35 cities monitored by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2000, at least 50 percent of adult men arrested for crimes tested positive for drugs. That’s enough to frighten the typical citizen into supporting the drug war. After all, who wants more crime? But Miron points out that those statistics don’t show that drug usage causes criminal behavior or that the arrestees were under the influence of drugs at the time of the crime. “The methodology used in these analyses would also demonstrate that consumption of fast food or wearing blue jeans causes criminal behavior,” Miron observes with appropriate sarcasm.

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