The point of the impregnable walls and unforgable money card is to make sure we can always provide a list of suspects which certainly includes everyone who could have been present at the place and time specified, given the specified uncertainties. This can always be done in secure zones. Impregnable walls, unforgable money cards, location databases, and identity databases create secure zones. The perpetrator is bound to be on the list, whether or not there was any prior connection between the perpetrator and victim. This makes it possible to catch serial killers, and robbers who execute all witnesses.
Austria was the safest place, with 0.3 murders per 100,000, followed by Japan with 0.6 per 100,000, followed by West Germany, Denmark, Portugal and England. England had 1.2 murders per 100,000. Over the entire nation, we had twenty-one murders per 100,000, but some regions were much worse. Michigan had a murder rate of 232 young men murdered per 100,000. Detroit's rate was higher still, well over 300, a thousand times worse than the murder rate in Austria. That is indeed shocking, and has only gotten worse since 1987. Murder has become the number one occupational hazard for women, in part because of the number of convenience store clerks murdered by utterly sociopathic robbers, and in part due to berserk mass killers.
This difference did not exist before Prohibition. Those in favor of Prohibition had good intentions. They knew that domestic violence and traffic accidents usually had their beginnings in alcohol. Alcoholism was and is a dreadful disease, which consumes lives and families.
Unfortunately, passing a law against alcohol did not decrease alcohol consumption, alcoholism or domestic violence. It only created the economic base for a new source of violence and corruption, known today as the Mafia. We came to our senses and repealed Prohibition. Why haven't we been able to make the same connections and draw the same conclusions about the War-On-Drugs? The War-On-Drugs is persecution and tyranny by the majority over a minority only because they prefer different recreational drugs.
If we did legalize drugs, gambling and prostitution, if only in private, do the gangs disappear? Probably not, judging from the history of Prohibition. If the Bloods and the Crips slip into organized theft and extortion, as did the Mafia after the repeal of Prohibition, then we shall have to scrape the scum out the bottom of the barrel. Prosecute the sociopaths among them, those who have already killed or attempted murder, and deport the Mafia.
Then we could try to turn the Bloods and Crips into a force for community pride. Take away their guns and give them paint brushes. Have city-wide 'hood Olympics, where respect is earned in non-lethal ways, in which there are competitions in art and music, athletics and academics.
Legalizing drugs, gambling and prostitution would take away their economic base. But they may have another raison d'etre. Maybe the gangs can be turned into forces for good, defining local neighborhoods, giving them a sense of community, something notably lacking in Los Angeles. Turn gang graffiti into street art. Let them learn pride in their own community, not by violence, but by creating new businesses, helping the poor and disabled, and improving the neighborhood.
Consider the pioneer families. The men went out and chopped down trees and cleared fields and tried to grow a cash crop, like corn, which they mostly converted to corn liquor for sale at the river towns, where the commerce flowed down to New Orleans, and from there set sail to Europe or the Atlantic seaboard. The men did not always make a crop. Indian wars, floods, droughts, and plagues of locusts really happened to the pioneer families. Yet the men didn't starve, because the women and children always had a kitchen garden and orchard, a milk cow, some chickens and pigs. The women could always store enough potatoes, cabbages, apples, onions, pumpkins, winter squash and so forth in the root cellar to tide them over through the winter. And maybe a few heavily cured and smoked hams or sides of bacon hanging in the kitchen. If all else failed, one could get enough parched corn from neighbors to stay alive.
I have consistently emphasized the economic advantages of traditional marriage. Let us then consider divorce as a dissolution of a business partnership. When a business partnership is dissolved, no one expects one partner to support the other "in the manner to which they have become accustomed." On the contrary, each takes the assets they brought to the partnership, and shares equally all assets acquired during the partnership. There are no further dealings with the former partner. In particular, neither makes payments to the other.
The major assets acquired during a marriage are children. Sharing the custody of the children equally should happen automatically by law, without going to court, as long as both parents are capable of parenting. The cases that would wind up in court are those where one or both parents are alcoholic, abusive, mentally unstable, or bankrupt. In such cases, custody of the children might be awarded to one parent, or to grandparents, or even more distant relatives. But let us talk about the more normal case, where neither parent is defective. While one parent has the custody of a child, he or she supports it. Expect to pay for what you get and what you have. Alimony and child support are rules based on the ideal of socialism, which we know to be false. Alimony and child support payments are theft, since the one paying it receives nothing in return. It doesn't matter that the ex-husband can afford it. If that is a good reason, then it justifies every form of theft. Since alimony and child support decrees are coercively enforced, they become a form of oppression. There is no more oppressed minority in this country than divorced men. Contrary to the rule of reciprocity, they are forced by law to pay for what they cannot have.
Oppression breeds resistance. Resistance brings more oppression, in a tightening spiral. An oppressed and impoverished man, forced to pay for a woman he can't have, and children he can't see, often becomes bitter and angry. He stops paying. Then the government goes after him with garnishees and other legal instruments. He kidnaps the children and goes underground, taking cash jobs, living in trailers, constantly changing names and locations. Murder and suicide are often the ultimate outcome. This kind of domestic antagonism between ex-marital partners is one of the leading causes of violence in our society. Yet no such thing happens with ex-business partners.
Her chief emphasis is the necessity of "eyes on the street," for a safe urban environment. This is best achieved in a place something like Greenwich village in the 1960s, a neighborhood of row houses and walk-up apartment buildings, with businesses and residences being mixed together. If there is a sufficient variety of shops, restaurants, art galleries, pubs, offices, and 24 hour convenience stores, then there is traffic on the street at all hours. People feel safe walking on the street when there are other ordinary citizens on the street. No crime could go unnoticed. There are "eyes on the street" and local characters who take a proprietary interest in "their street." Problems can be headed off before they become tragedies.
The high-rise projects are dangerous because the corridors and stairways provide a hidden arena where juvenile delinquents may hide, out of sight from the dwellers or from roving police patrols on the streets outside. Also, high-rise apartments do not build any sense of neighborhood. There are no local characters keeping an eye on "their" street. Dwellers in projects have no proprietary interest in the vast empty spaces between buildings, which are "no-man's zones," or "free fire zones." And since they rent, rather than own, they don't even have a proprietary interest in their own apartment.
This is only the short list of reasons for violence in our society. The instability of families leaves many children unloved. The absence of a working justice system causes the build-up of free-floating rage. And we are the most heavily armed society in history. Surely the easy access to guns makes both suicide and murder a little too easy. And there is pornography, which I define as an artistic expression of a crime which tends to increase the actual incidence of that crime.
I propose 4 rules for public movies and TV: (1)no showing of the actual deed of murder or rape, (2)no murder of any of the "good guys," if we have gotten to know them, (3)no murder of any woman who is shown naked or semi-naked at some point in the play, (4)no plot line which suggest violence as a possible solution to a problem, (5)no play may incite violence or hatred. Videos sold or rented privately, but not advertised and not rented or sold in public stores are free from these restrictions.
Copyright © Thales 1999
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