The argument that you only have a 0.5–2% chance of being arrested is not really accurate. If you're not a gang member, don't have gang tattoos, or are not associated with gangs, then your probability of being arrested would be around 0.01% or less. The El Salvadoran Bryan Caplan would not have gang tattoos or be associated with the criminal underworld. For law-abiding people, this hardly, if at all, affects them negatively.
Your point regarding the slow creep of state power and corruption is a fair one, and in the long term, they should be moving towards stronger institutions that can carry out fair trials while maintaining harsh punishments.
I think people underestimate just how different the criminal underclass is to ordinary people and what a menace they are to society if not properly controlled.
The problem is the shifting goal post issue (not sure if that's the right term) to keep the program going / people employed once you meet your metric ala the current GLBT movement, feminism, etc, "we won but we need to pay our bills so rather then close shop, let's focus on new trivial issues".
Your criminal justice system is geared to a certain level of criminality, enforcement, etc, once they "win", doesn't just downsize and lay people off, they simply find, or invent, more criminals to keep all those supporting employees and facilities open. It's a giant rot you see in the US, and I'd daresay, many first world nations. Crime sells and gets votes, it's in no one's interest to win, hence we don't, but the publics but they are so ignorant and scarred on the matter that consistently vote against their own interests on this.
Yep, thats a significant flaw in the argument, they’re not putting random people there, they’re putting people there who have an extrwmely likelyhood of being criminals/violent criminals. Besides, its obvious that not all the prisoners are gonna be there for life, this is a transitory situation designed to dissuade gangs from continuing their activities. Many of them will be freed if they show they can be useful members of society, eventually.
At some point in the near future the gang leaders will presumably realize that having easily identifiable tattoos to signal gang membership is no longer a viable option and figure out some other, less visible way to set apart members (like maybe gang colors that it is possible to change out of if you are running from the cops). At that point, the risk of innocents being arrested will presumably go up. Bukele got "lucky" in that the gangs chose such an obvious and legible way to mark their members (presumably previous law enforcement regimes were so weak that gangsters could get away with having visible tattoos).
The point of the tattoos is that everyone can see them and they are hard to remove. This ensures that the members can’t abandon their loyalty to the gang having made such a credible signal. Any attempt to achieve a similar objective would need similar criteria.
It's not just about the tattoos. If you're a gangmember, even if you don't have tattoos, there's gonna be a lot of really obvious signs you're a member, whether it's by your friends, family, and associates, or by a profile of your personal and economic activity, and also your demographic information, such as sex, age, and even race. The same is true of Islamists, for whom getting tattoos is frowned upon, but whom nonetheless are easy enough to identify by similar profiling measures.
There's always tradeoffs. Making it harder to convict criminals makes it harder to both punish the innocent --and-- the guilty. But the more damage the guilty cause, the less concern there'll be from the general populous about anything other than how a stop can be put to the guilty. Indeed, all of Latinoamerica is an indictment of the idea that leniency towards criminality is anything but a state-sanctioned subsidy towards criminality. Outside of Cuba (which doesn't really deserve credit, ob account of being a state that's --run-- by criminals as opposed to being a state with a serious crime problem, but which even in their case has benefitted from actually having some teeth to their criminal punishment), the laws in most of the region have been a joke for a long time: no death penalty, no life sentences, and comically short terms even in the event you can get a conviction.
The BLM-ification of criminal justice has also done equal damage to the US. Felonious crime has skyrocketed in tandem with the success of the movement, because its advocates are relentlessly pro-crime, which itself has been an endemic problem of civil-rights movements since well before the 21st Century. Thoughtful people should have no patience for such bullshittery as this.
“I think people underestimate just how different the criminal underclass is to ordinary people and what a menace they are to society if not properly controlled.”
Only the life-long wealthy don't realise this. Ordinary people themselves are very well aware of how different criminals are to the rest of us. The policies of a truly democratic polity would look a lot more like those of Bukele's government than like those of the Biden regime.
This is true, but this is where the veil of ignorance comes in. These gang members may be awful people, but in the utilitarian calculus (and in the language of human rights) their welfare is no less important than anyone else's. So to judge whether the society is fair you must put to one side the question of "would *I* be sent to jail without trial?"; it makes no difference whether it's happening to you or to someone else.
The US should abolish all "recreational" drug laws and trash the DEA and its state and local equivalents. That would decrease crime globally as profits would greatly drop. And decrease greatly bloated govt power. Bukele's dangerous utilitarianism would not be needed.
Drug crime wasn't even a big part of crime in El Salvador. It was mostly straightforward extortion rackets.
Libertarians greatly overestimate the role of drugs in crime. The tattooed men in those photos WANT to engage in a violent tournament for dominance. If drugs were not available to fight over they would turn to something else, including in the end just violently shaking people down.
Evidence for Salvador drug crime/crime? You evade presenting a standard for acceptable drug crime/crime. Most US federal prisoners are drug criminals. Many parts of many US cities are dangerous because addicts steal for black market prices. Courts are slow because of many drug trials. Security is expensive. Corruption of the justice system. Contempt for law. Enourages more statism.
Based on my conversations with Salvadoreans (I was there in March 2022 actually), forumposter123 is right. It was mostly extortion rackets.
It was shocking to see how much it distorted markets, to the point where large areas of San Salvador didn't have any small shops (the usual Latin American bodeguitas/boliches/almacenes).
According to insightcrime.org: "The Barrio 18 spread south into Central America and Mexico mainly as a function of a change to US immigration policies in the mid-1990s, which increased the number of criminal charges for which any foreign-born resident could be deported to their country of origin.
The new policy was applied aggressively to gangs in California, where many gang members were not US citizens. The deportations led to a sudden influx of Barrio 18 and other gang members in Central America and Mexico, bringing with it violence and crime.".
But many other poor nations dont have a big extortion problem. Of course, the elephant in the room is the anti-individual rights US drug laws. You describe its indirect effects.
I disagree immensely on this one because what drugs afford is the corrupting influence the money provides. Yes organized crime has been running extortion rackets world wide time immemorial but they tend to be that, organized, effective, stable, and safe to the point it basically becomes another tax and it remains that way because it's in everyone's interest. Young men wanting to engage violent dominance is everywhere, they simply get regulated to intergang warfare over rights to tax certain neighborhoods, sports, video games, become police, or join the military. Ecuadorian men aren't magically unique in this respect.
Drug money though, because of its amount and illegality which means it can't count of legal protection, breaks this system for the majority of these guys who really, at the end of the day, just want a social club that provides them some sort of validation.
They don't need to abolish all recreational drug laws.
The current laws around nicotine and alcohol might not be optimal, but they also don't seem to breed all that much violent crime.
Prohibition (of alcohol) in the US gets a bad reputation. But there are dry counties today, and they don't seem to have too much trouble?
I posit that a big problem is handling drug policies at the federal level.
So, yes, perhaps you are right in a sense: the US, as in the Union, should abolish all drug laws, and leave the matter to the municipalities and counties. Or as the highest acceptable level perhaps to the states.
So people who want to produce, trade or consume drugs could just move to the next town over; and people who'd rather not deal with any of this wouldn't have to.
(There's one law I would support on the federal level: a registry that you can put yourself on to ban yourself from buying drugs.
You can start the process to get off the registry at any point in time, but it takes, say, one year and you can cancel the unbanning at any time.
Singapore has a similar registry for people who want to keep themselves from gambling. Though I'm typical Singaporean fashion you can also get your family members on the register; the hurdles are a bit higher though.)
You don't have to look to Singapore; a number of US states also have registries like this for gambling. I'd actually like to see more ideas like this: the option to be legally held to a higher standard regarding vice.
Louisiana and maybe another state or two have the option to have your marriage be a "covenant marriage" that makes divorce more difficult. Which strikes me as an excellent idea, whether or not you're religious, but almost no one chooses it. Some say it's because it's unpopular and people don't want any added obstacles to divorce, but I wonder if it's because they just don't know about it. I haven't heard any testimony from ordinary people living in these states who said, "Here's why we didn't choose covenant marriage."
Well, I'm looking to Singapore because that's closer to me than those exotic and foreign American states in the Far West of the world.
The idea of a covenant marriage is very interesting! (Though I hope it would be kept a secret whether you had one or not, so people can make their choices instead of being driven by social desirability pressures? But I'm not sure. Perhaps social pressures are good here?
In the abstract I'm definitely happy that some part of the world is experimenting with this!)
Mans independent mind is his basic method of survival. Man needs govt in society to protect individual rights to protect the independence of the mind from the initiation of force.
As a compromise with drug law supporters, I have begun to propose that we legalize the sale of all drugs, to make the supply safer, but make the use of certain recreational drugs without a prescription illegal. This would be to reduce the collateral damage from drug use, including spouse abuse and child abuse and street crime. That way if someone calls the police because a drugged guy is behaving badly, the police can arrest and jail him and it is an easier conviction.
I would say that they could then force him into treatment but from the evidence that I've seen forced treatment doesn't work., in the future it might work and so we should keep it as an option.
Man is not a brute animal surviving or dying in the moment. Man needs principles which connect past, present and future for long-range planning and thus a better possibility of survival. Compromising with rational principles compromises mans life in the long run, regardless of short-range benefits.
Mans basic method of survival is his free will, focused, reasoning mind. It requires freedom from force. In society, this freedom requires a moral justification for freedom of action, ie, rights, including the right to property. Thus the need for govt to protect rights, individual rights. Govt is a gun in your face demanding obedience or death. Thus the need for constitutionally limited govt, limited to rights. The danger from govt is vastly more than from criminals,as history clearly shows. Every violation of rights encourages more violations. Govt is not a psychologist or nurse. Its a policeman, warrior and court system. Anything more is a danger.
Don't stop there. After legalizing all drugs, allow volunteer addicts to "live in*" state-sponsored Substance Dependency Communes where the most potent narcotics are provided free of charge. But no excursions off campus, no smuggling, no bartering. Just let the junkie fire burn itself out.
Govt must be limited to the protection of individual rights. Helping self-destructive people live their lives is not a proper state function. Pro-reason schools would greatly decrease the intellectual disintegration caused by Progressive education that causes psychological disintegration
Junkies gonna junk. I think government could protect its citizens by segregating the hopelessly addicted, with their associated destructive behavior, from the general population. YMMV
There is no Original Sin. Man is not naturally destructive. Man chooses reason or evasion.
You evade the historical destructiveness of govt power,vastly more than criminals. Platos philosopher-king is one of the bloodiest ideas in history. Govt must be limited to protecting individual rights or it will become their violator. Addicts want to be left alone and with vastly lowered drug prices from extending property rights to drugs, they would have no need to steal. Further, the respect for mans mind which is rights, should be extended to education. Children need to learn adult thinking. In the US, Progressive education, since 1920, has decreasingly taught children to think like adults. Our elections are now almost empty of rational principles or of any principles. Our politics is increasingly short range,intellectually trapped in each moments crisis and with more govt as the short-range solution. This Pragmatism is also the basis of Progressive education. Its creator, John Dewey, explicitly rejected knowledge and advocated society as the purpose of education.
Bryan, I feel like I shouldn't have to explain this to someone as generally anti-statist as you, but this is awfully shortsighted.
The big danger here is not that some innocent young tattooed guys might get caught up in the anti-gang sweeps. The big danger is that if Bukele can tell the police "go round up all the young tattooed guys, don't worry about due process," then he can also tell them "go round up all the journalists who write articles critical of the government, don't worry about due process." And then, among many other problems, his political incentive to actually keep crime low is gone, because if crime goes back up, the people who might protest against that are going to be in jail, or keep silent for fear of jail. Authoritarian leaders suppress dissent like this under the guise of crime prevention all the time, so this isn't some speculative hypothetical.
You’ve obviously never heard of anarcho-tyranny. We just lived through mass riots being led by politicians who simultaneously orders everyone to engage in mass house arrest.
A government can simultaneously let criminals run amok and use state power to terrorize whoever they want. Letting criminals do as they please is no guarantee of freedom for the innocent, in fact it’s a sign of government using power arbitrarily.
In fact not enforcing the law is a way for governments to use indirect force against enemies while claiming not to do so.
Sorry, murderers and street shitters running wild is not guaranteeing anyone’s rights.
Not all authoritarians are alike. There's a world of difference between those who genuinely want to run a functioning, modern state (like Lee Kuan Yew, Chiang Kai Shek, Ngo Dinh Diem, Mustafa Kemal, Muhammad Reza, and hopefully Bukele), and psychopathic terrorists with unlimited lust for power and demented visions of glory, bound by no rules aside from doing whatever they believe they can get away with (like Putin,* Rodríguez de Francia, the Ayatollahs, Hitler, Chávez, and every Marxist-Leninist dictator ever). The former is compatible with a rules-based international order; the latter can never be.
* Don't let the revisionists fool you. We've known Putin was a terrorist since September of 1999.
I guess it helped that Singapore is so small; so reality checks came very quickly and couldn't be avoided.
For eg Russia, there's enough size and oil wealth, that Putin only has to face reality when he loses a war he started.
(I think LKY had better intentions than Putin. And he was also more competent. But I am saying that the closer contact with reality helped keep LKY honest.)
I think it would strengthen Caplan's argument to point out that the gang members are effectively an army in uniform, and as such are enemy combatants. It's a grey area to be sure, but things in El Salvador seem to be pretty far from usual criminal situations and closer to civil war or warlord led banditry.
This logic seems applicable to Bryan's interest in open borders.
If Bryan is OK with the government of El Salvador imprisoning large numbers of their own citizens without due process, then how could you possibly defend allowing the same people to enter the USA?
So a minimum reasonable standard for immigration rules to the USA is - if we don't like your tattoos, you can't come in? Extend that to any other sorts of profiling about who is desirable and who isn't and you are very quickly a long way from anything like open borders, and a lot closer to what I think most people intuitively prefer as their immigration policy, which is relatively small numbers, highly selected for the most skilled and most compatible with existing society.
I won't pretend to be an expert on El; Salvador's situation... but I feel certain that a lot of criticism from liberals and the NGO crowd are based on THEIR comfortable lives and elite statuses. It's easy to lecture poorer countries who are fighting for their lives.
At times in the 20th century there used to be a lot of turf wars between gangs in cities in the US. They fought over who could vend drugs in the streets.
You don't see nearly as much of that anymore partially thanks to mobile phones. Drug vendors don't have to hawk their wares on street corners anymore, so they are harder for gangs to police. So territorial control became almost meaningless.
I suspect a similar dynamic might be at play with prostitution, too?
It's a shame that territoial control apparently still makes a huge difference in the countries along the supply chains for various drugs.
I wonder what, if any, technological changes might influence this in the future? As a sociological change, perhaps Latin American just legalising (and taxing) the production of drugs for export would help?
I specifically mention for export, they don't have to legalise drugs domestically. (Even though many people will see that as hypocrisy.)
Well written and though I don't fault your logic or rationalization here and simply disagree with the morality of it, I wanted to call out to things:
"At least for violent crimes, you probably think that First World criminal justice systems are comfortably above this cutoff. ". The key word there which I think you underplayed and most will miss is "violent". We got a lot of non-violent criminals, including actual innocents, doing life, or effectively so, to the point I'd say the US probably has the lowest cutoff in the world and that is a giant problem. The criminal narrative is fueled about violent offenders but what most people fail to grasp is prison, and the courts, are overwhelming filled with non-violent criminals many of whom are serving decades to life. For example here in Hawaii you have people doing five years for littering.
As for your guilt by criminal association thing, I'm simply never going to support that until it's uniformly applied. Get back to me next time, and it will be a first, when an entire US municipal police department is charged under RICO, or your theory, and everyone down to the janitor is jailed after a single cop, maybe two to prove a pattern, is found to have committed a violent crime on, or off, duty. After all the same logic would apply to them, it's an organization whose members routinely engage in violent criminal behavior whose intent is to extort and terrorize the local community.
"We got a lot of non-violent criminals, including actual innocents, doing life"
We don't.
There is a myth in libertarian circles that there is a huge number of "non-violent drug offenders" in prison, but there really aren't. Anyone who looks into this knows it's a myth.
I didn't say anything about DRUGS, that's the second time now you inserted that adjective over the months we have conversed, I said non-violent.
I can't speak to your locale but in Hawaii 40% of incarcerated people are there on technical violations of probation/parole with the remaining 45% having committed non-violent crimes leaving a whooping 15% of violence offenders whom have committed such heinously violent crimes such as contempt of cop,. I got a friend that did three year's for terroristically threatening a cop for simply drunkenly telling the cop he's was going to beat his ass if he tried to arrest him for public intoxication. Got another friend that did six months for the violent crime of knocking a cops hand off her breasts while he was trying to sexually assault her (cop a feel) during a DUI arrest.
That some sentences are unjust (your example re the cop copping a feel)? No doubt. That sentences for some class of offenders some of the time are too long? Maybe, and certainly a reasonable thesis on your part.
But even if we fully accepted your premise of 40% being jailed for “technical” violations of probation/parole (I personally don’t accept that it’s anywhere near that high), tell us again what the 45% are in jail for that are “non-violent” crimes? Do you, e.g., consider a felon in possession of a gun a non- violent crime? Do you consider armed robbery where the person didn’t actually use the weapon non-violent? Do you consider the driver in an armed robbery non-violent?
Do you think *repeat* DUI offenses are non-violent crimes? (Personally, I probably wouldn’t consider first offense a violent crime unless they are off the charts drunk. But 3rd, 4th, 5th… hell yeah)
I do have sympathy for your female friend, assuming the story is true. I do NOT have any sympathy for the friend who threatened to beat the police officer. That is indeed a violent crime. YOU wanna be a cop in a community where that threat during the act of an arrest is NOT a serious crime?
This is the term of Bukele that will really see what I think of him.
It's clear he's way better than the previous situation which was basically rule by gangs and there wasn't much rule of law either.
All of that said, the big this will be how can create lasting institutions that let him pass power onto the next person in charge. That's going to be the real hard part, if he can't pull that off, my guess will be bad decisions will compound over time and things won't be great in the long run. Singapore is the exception, not the rule.
You set up a dilemma between locking tons of people up for life (or 50 years) without trial vs continuing to live with pre-Bukele violence levels. But if you imprisoned the suspects for 15-20 years, long enough for them to experience “male menopause “ , that would probably do the trick. Still insanely draconian but it changes some of the utilitarian or quasi-utilitarian calculations you present.
Ok, I can’t tell if you are completely serious or not, or are just inartful in your wording.
All/most victims of murder are AS BAD as those that do the murdering? That is absurd.
That many of the victims are about as bad? A good chance, sure.
That a large majority of the victims are also far-from-model-citizens (though not necessarily murderers)? Ok, there I’ll agree with you.
But words mean things. “ the victims of murder are far and away as bad as those that do the murdering” is a ridiculous assumption. Stuff like that actually makes leftist crapola sound reasonable by comparison.
I like this. Clear moral reasoning with appeals to clear moral principles. Utilitarianism is nerds trying to mathematize philosophy. The welfare of the people is the highest law.
I hope to visit El Salvador this year or next. Never would have considered it before.
I see patients from El Salvador and they talk about how happy their families are to walk streets safely.
Are we "free" if we cannot walk down a street at 9 pm. I agree that the threat of totalitarianism is present. I would risk the Bukele tyranny over the gang's violent veto of normal life.
I won't pretend to be an expert on El; Salvador's situation... but I feel certain that a lot of criticism from liberals and the NGO crowd are based on THEIR comfortable lives and elite statuses. It's easy to lecture poorer countries who are fighting for their lives.
I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion, but you got there in a rigorous and surprising way, so I'm going to be thinking about it a while. Which is another way to say, great article!
I won't pretend to be an expert on El; Salvador's situation... but I feel certain that a lot of criticism from liberals and the NGO crowd are based on THEIR comfortable lives and elite statuses. It's easy to lecture poorer countries who are fighting for their lives.
The argument that you only have a 0.5–2% chance of being arrested is not really accurate. If you're not a gang member, don't have gang tattoos, or are not associated with gangs, then your probability of being arrested would be around 0.01% or less. The El Salvadoran Bryan Caplan would not have gang tattoos or be associated with the criminal underworld. For law-abiding people, this hardly, if at all, affects them negatively.
Your point regarding the slow creep of state power and corruption is a fair one, and in the long term, they should be moving towards stronger institutions that can carry out fair trials while maintaining harsh punishments.
I think people underestimate just how different the criminal underclass is to ordinary people and what a menace they are to society if not properly controlled.
The problem is the shifting goal post issue (not sure if that's the right term) to keep the program going / people employed once you meet your metric ala the current GLBT movement, feminism, etc, "we won but we need to pay our bills so rather then close shop, let's focus on new trivial issues".
Your criminal justice system is geared to a certain level of criminality, enforcement, etc, once they "win", doesn't just downsize and lay people off, they simply find, or invent, more criminals to keep all those supporting employees and facilities open. It's a giant rot you see in the US, and I'd daresay, many first world nations. Crime sells and gets votes, it's in no one's interest to win, hence we don't, but the publics but they are so ignorant and scarred on the matter that consistently vote against their own interests on this.
Yep, thats a significant flaw in the argument, they’re not putting random people there, they’re putting people there who have an extrwmely likelyhood of being criminals/violent criminals. Besides, its obvious that not all the prisoners are gonna be there for life, this is a transitory situation designed to dissuade gangs from continuing their activities. Many of them will be freed if they show they can be useful members of society, eventually.
At some point in the near future the gang leaders will presumably realize that having easily identifiable tattoos to signal gang membership is no longer a viable option and figure out some other, less visible way to set apart members (like maybe gang colors that it is possible to change out of if you are running from the cops). At that point, the risk of innocents being arrested will presumably go up. Bukele got "lucky" in that the gangs chose such an obvious and legible way to mark their members (presumably previous law enforcement regimes were so weak that gangsters could get away with having visible tattoos).
The point of the tattoos is that everyone can see them and they are hard to remove. This ensures that the members can’t abandon their loyalty to the gang having made such a credible signal. Any attempt to achieve a similar objective would need similar criteria.
It's not just about the tattoos. If you're a gangmember, even if you don't have tattoos, there's gonna be a lot of really obvious signs you're a member, whether it's by your friends, family, and associates, or by a profile of your personal and economic activity, and also your demographic information, such as sex, age, and even race. The same is true of Islamists, for whom getting tattoos is frowned upon, but whom nonetheless are easy enough to identify by similar profiling measures.
There's always tradeoffs. Making it harder to convict criminals makes it harder to both punish the innocent --and-- the guilty. But the more damage the guilty cause, the less concern there'll be from the general populous about anything other than how a stop can be put to the guilty. Indeed, all of Latinoamerica is an indictment of the idea that leniency towards criminality is anything but a state-sanctioned subsidy towards criminality. Outside of Cuba (which doesn't really deserve credit, ob account of being a state that's --run-- by criminals as opposed to being a state with a serious crime problem, but which even in their case has benefitted from actually having some teeth to their criminal punishment), the laws in most of the region have been a joke for a long time: no death penalty, no life sentences, and comically short terms even in the event you can get a conviction.
The BLM-ification of criminal justice has also done equal damage to the US. Felonious crime has skyrocketed in tandem with the success of the movement, because its advocates are relentlessly pro-crime, which itself has been an endemic problem of civil-rights movements since well before the 21st Century. Thoughtful people should have no patience for such bullshittery as this.
“I think people underestimate just how different the criminal underclass is to ordinary people and what a menace they are to society if not properly controlled.”
Only the life-long wealthy don't realise this. Ordinary people themselves are very well aware of how different criminals are to the rest of us. The policies of a truly democratic polity would look a lot more like those of Bukele's government than like those of the Biden regime.
This is true, but this is where the veil of ignorance comes in. These gang members may be awful people, but in the utilitarian calculus (and in the language of human rights) their welfare is no less important than anyone else's. So to judge whether the society is fair you must put to one side the question of "would *I* be sent to jail without trial?"; it makes no difference whether it's happening to you or to someone else.
The US should abolish all "recreational" drug laws and trash the DEA and its state and local equivalents. That would decrease crime globally as profits would greatly drop. And decrease greatly bloated govt power. Bukele's dangerous utilitarianism would not be needed.
Drug crime wasn't even a big part of crime in El Salvador. It was mostly straightforward extortion rackets.
Libertarians greatly overestimate the role of drugs in crime. The tattooed men in those photos WANT to engage in a violent tournament for dominance. If drugs were not available to fight over they would turn to something else, including in the end just violently shaking people down.
Evidence for Salvador drug crime/crime? You evade presenting a standard for acceptable drug crime/crime. Most US federal prisoners are drug criminals. Many parts of many US cities are dangerous because addicts steal for black market prices. Courts are slow because of many drug trials. Security is expensive. Corruption of the justice system. Contempt for law. Enourages more statism.
Based on my conversations with Salvadoreans (I was there in March 2022 actually), forumposter123 is right. It was mostly extortion rackets.
It was shocking to see how much it distorted markets, to the point where large areas of San Salvador didn't have any small shops (the usual Latin American bodeguitas/boliches/almacenes).
What caused such an unusual amount of extortion?
According to insightcrime.org: "The Barrio 18 spread south into Central America and Mexico mainly as a function of a change to US immigration policies in the mid-1990s, which increased the number of criminal charges for which any foreign-born resident could be deported to their country of origin.
The new policy was applied aggressively to gangs in California, where many gang members were not US citizens. The deportations led to a sudden influx of Barrio 18 and other gang members in Central America and Mexico, bringing with it violence and crime.".
Other gangs appear to have the same origin. About why they "chose" extortion as their business, I don't see what other options they had in the 1990s. (https://insightcrime.org/el-salvador-organized-crime-news/barrio-18-profile/)
But many other poor nations dont have a big extortion problem. Of course, the elephant in the room is the anti-individual rights US drug laws. You describe its indirect effects.
I disagree immensely on this one because what drugs afford is the corrupting influence the money provides. Yes organized crime has been running extortion rackets world wide time immemorial but they tend to be that, organized, effective, stable, and safe to the point it basically becomes another tax and it remains that way because it's in everyone's interest. Young men wanting to engage violent dominance is everywhere, they simply get regulated to intergang warfare over rights to tax certain neighborhoods, sports, video games, become police, or join the military. Ecuadorian men aren't magically unique in this respect.
Drug money though, because of its amount and illegality which means it can't count of legal protection, breaks this system for the majority of these guys who really, at the end of the day, just want a social club that provides them some sort of validation.
They don't need to abolish all recreational drug laws.
The current laws around nicotine and alcohol might not be optimal, but they also don't seem to breed all that much violent crime.
Prohibition (of alcohol) in the US gets a bad reputation. But there are dry counties today, and they don't seem to have too much trouble?
I posit that a big problem is handling drug policies at the federal level.
So, yes, perhaps you are right in a sense: the US, as in the Union, should abolish all drug laws, and leave the matter to the municipalities and counties. Or as the highest acceptable level perhaps to the states.
So people who want to produce, trade or consume drugs could just move to the next town over; and people who'd rather not deal with any of this wouldn't have to.
(There's one law I would support on the federal level: a registry that you can put yourself on to ban yourself from buying drugs.
You can start the process to get off the registry at any point in time, but it takes, say, one year and you can cancel the unbanning at any time.
Singapore has a similar registry for people who want to keep themselves from gambling. Though I'm typical Singaporean fashion you can also get your family members on the register; the hurdles are a bit higher though.)
You don't have to look to Singapore; a number of US states also have registries like this for gambling. I'd actually like to see more ideas like this: the option to be legally held to a higher standard regarding vice.
Louisiana and maybe another state or two have the option to have your marriage be a "covenant marriage" that makes divorce more difficult. Which strikes me as an excellent idea, whether or not you're religious, but almost no one chooses it. Some say it's because it's unpopular and people don't want any added obstacles to divorce, but I wonder if it's because they just don't know about it. I haven't heard any testimony from ordinary people living in these states who said, "Here's why we didn't choose covenant marriage."
Well, I'm looking to Singapore because that's closer to me than those exotic and foreign American states in the Far West of the world.
The idea of a covenant marriage is very interesting! (Though I hope it would be kept a secret whether you had one or not, so people can make their choices instead of being driven by social desirability pressures? But I'm not sure. Perhaps social pressures are good here?
In the abstract I'm definitely happy that some part of the world is experimenting with this!)
Mans independent mind is his basic method of survival. Man needs govt in society to protect individual rights to protect the independence of the mind from the initiation of force.
Did you reply to the wrong comment?
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As a compromise with drug law supporters, I have begun to propose that we legalize the sale of all drugs, to make the supply safer, but make the use of certain recreational drugs without a prescription illegal. This would be to reduce the collateral damage from drug use, including spouse abuse and child abuse and street crime. That way if someone calls the police because a drugged guy is behaving badly, the police can arrest and jail him and it is an easier conviction.
I would say that they could then force him into treatment but from the evidence that I've seen forced treatment doesn't work., in the future it might work and so we should keep it as an option.
Man is not a brute animal surviving or dying in the moment. Man needs principles which connect past, present and future for long-range planning and thus a better possibility of survival. Compromising with rational principles compromises mans life in the long run, regardless of short-range benefits.
Mans basic method of survival is his free will, focused, reasoning mind. It requires freedom from force. In society, this freedom requires a moral justification for freedom of action, ie, rights, including the right to property. Thus the need for govt to protect rights, individual rights. Govt is a gun in your face demanding obedience or death. Thus the need for constitutionally limited govt, limited to rights. The danger from govt is vastly more than from criminals,as history clearly shows. Every violation of rights encourages more violations. Govt is not a psychologist or nurse. Its a policeman, warrior and court system. Anything more is a danger.
Mans Rights-Ayn Rand
Nature Of Govt-Ayn Rand
Yaron Brook Show
Don't stop there. After legalizing all drugs, allow volunteer addicts to "live in*" state-sponsored Substance Dependency Communes where the most potent narcotics are provided free of charge. But no excursions off campus, no smuggling, no bartering. Just let the junkie fire burn itself out.
*"be confined to"
Govt must be limited to the protection of individual rights. Helping self-destructive people live their lives is not a proper state function. Pro-reason schools would greatly decrease the intellectual disintegration caused by Progressive education that causes psychological disintegration
Junkies gonna junk. I think government could protect its citizens by segregating the hopelessly addicted, with their associated destructive behavior, from the general population. YMMV
There is no Original Sin. Man is not naturally destructive. Man chooses reason or evasion.
You evade the historical destructiveness of govt power,vastly more than criminals. Platos philosopher-king is one of the bloodiest ideas in history. Govt must be limited to protecting individual rights or it will become their violator. Addicts want to be left alone and with vastly lowered drug prices from extending property rights to drugs, they would have no need to steal. Further, the respect for mans mind which is rights, should be extended to education. Children need to learn adult thinking. In the US, Progressive education, since 1920, has decreasingly taught children to think like adults. Our elections are now almost empty of rational principles or of any principles. Our politics is increasingly short range,intellectually trapped in each moments crisis and with more govt as the short-range solution. This Pragmatism is also the basis of Progressive education. Its creator, John Dewey, explicitly rejected knowledge and advocated society as the purpose of education.
Bryan, I feel like I shouldn't have to explain this to someone as generally anti-statist as you, but this is awfully shortsighted.
The big danger here is not that some innocent young tattooed guys might get caught up in the anti-gang sweeps. The big danger is that if Bukele can tell the police "go round up all the young tattooed guys, don't worry about due process," then he can also tell them "go round up all the journalists who write articles critical of the government, don't worry about due process." And then, among many other problems, his political incentive to actually keep crime low is gone, because if crime goes back up, the people who might protest against that are going to be in jail, or keep silent for fear of jail. Authoritarian leaders suppress dissent like this under the guise of crime prevention all the time, so this isn't some speculative hypothetical.
You’ve obviously never heard of anarcho-tyranny. We just lived through mass riots being led by politicians who simultaneously orders everyone to engage in mass house arrest.
A government can simultaneously let criminals run amok and use state power to terrorize whoever they want. Letting criminals do as they please is no guarantee of freedom for the innocent, in fact it’s a sign of government using power arbitrarily.
In fact not enforcing the law is a way for governments to use indirect force against enemies while claiming not to do so.
Sorry, murderers and street shitters running wild is not guaranteeing anyone’s rights.
Not all authoritarians are alike. There's a world of difference between those who genuinely want to run a functioning, modern state (like Lee Kuan Yew, Chiang Kai Shek, Ngo Dinh Diem, Mustafa Kemal, Muhammad Reza, and hopefully Bukele), and psychopathic terrorists with unlimited lust for power and demented visions of glory, bound by no rules aside from doing whatever they believe they can get away with (like Putin,* Rodríguez de Francia, the Ayatollahs, Hitler, Chávez, and every Marxist-Leninist dictator ever). The former is compatible with a rules-based international order; the latter can never be.
* Don't let the revisionists fool you. We've known Putin was a terrorist since September of 1999.
I guess it helped that Singapore is so small; so reality checks came very quickly and couldn't be avoided.
For eg Russia, there's enough size and oil wealth, that Putin only has to face reality when he loses a war he started.
(I think LKY had better intentions than Putin. And he was also more competent. But I am saying that the closer contact with reality helped keep LKY honest.)
I think it would strengthen Caplan's argument to point out that the gang members are effectively an army in uniform, and as such are enemy combatants. It's a grey area to be sure, but things in El Salvador seem to be pretty far from usual criminal situations and closer to civil war or warlord led banditry.
This logic seems applicable to Bryan's interest in open borders.
If Bryan is OK with the government of El Salvador imprisoning large numbers of their own citizens without due process, then how could you possibly defend allowing the same people to enter the USA?
So a minimum reasonable standard for immigration rules to the USA is - if we don't like your tattoos, you can't come in? Extend that to any other sorts of profiling about who is desirable and who isn't and you are very quickly a long way from anything like open borders, and a lot closer to what I think most people intuitively prefer as their immigration policy, which is relatively small numbers, highly selected for the most skilled and most compatible with existing society.
Be interested to hear Bryan’s response. That aside, I have a Salvadoran immigrant friend who’s so happy with Bukele’s crime clampdown.
I won't pretend to be an expert on El; Salvador's situation... but I feel certain that a lot of criticism from liberals and the NGO crowd are based on THEIR comfortable lives and elite statuses. It's easy to lecture poorer countries who are fighting for their lives.
Law and order is the basis for all civilization... civil rights are a wonderful luxury that can only exist AFTER law and order has been established... https://open.substack.com/pub/jmpolemic/p/bukeles-rebuke?r=1neg52&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
An interesting aside:
At times in the 20th century there used to be a lot of turf wars between gangs in cities in the US. They fought over who could vend drugs in the streets.
You don't see nearly as much of that anymore partially thanks to mobile phones. Drug vendors don't have to hawk their wares on street corners anymore, so they are harder for gangs to police. So territorial control became almost meaningless.
I suspect a similar dynamic might be at play with prostitution, too?
It's a shame that territoial control apparently still makes a huge difference in the countries along the supply chains for various drugs.
I wonder what, if any, technological changes might influence this in the future? As a sociological change, perhaps Latin American just legalising (and taxing) the production of drugs for export would help?
I specifically mention for export, they don't have to legalise drugs domestically. (Even though many people will see that as hypocrisy.)
Well written and though I don't fault your logic or rationalization here and simply disagree with the morality of it, I wanted to call out to things:
"At least for violent crimes, you probably think that First World criminal justice systems are comfortably above this cutoff. ". The key word there which I think you underplayed and most will miss is "violent". We got a lot of non-violent criminals, including actual innocents, doing life, or effectively so, to the point I'd say the US probably has the lowest cutoff in the world and that is a giant problem. The criminal narrative is fueled about violent offenders but what most people fail to grasp is prison, and the courts, are overwhelming filled with non-violent criminals many of whom are serving decades to life. For example here in Hawaii you have people doing five years for littering.
As for your guilt by criminal association thing, I'm simply never going to support that until it's uniformly applied. Get back to me next time, and it will be a first, when an entire US municipal police department is charged under RICO, or your theory, and everyone down to the janitor is jailed after a single cop, maybe two to prove a pattern, is found to have committed a violent crime on, or off, duty. After all the same logic would apply to them, it's an organization whose members routinely engage in violent criminal behavior whose intent is to extort and terrorize the local community.
"We got a lot of non-violent criminals, including actual innocents, doing life"
We don't.
There is a myth in libertarian circles that there is a huge number of "non-violent drug offenders" in prison, but there really aren't. Anyone who looks into this knows it's a myth.
I didn't say anything about DRUGS, that's the second time now you inserted that adjective over the months we have conversed, I said non-violent.
I can't speak to your locale but in Hawaii 40% of incarcerated people are there on technical violations of probation/parole with the remaining 45% having committed non-violent crimes leaving a whooping 15% of violence offenders whom have committed such heinously violent crimes such as contempt of cop,. I got a friend that did three year's for terroristically threatening a cop for simply drunkenly telling the cop he's was going to beat his ass if he tried to arrest him for public intoxication. Got another friend that did six months for the violent crime of knocking a cops hand off her breasts while he was trying to sexually assault her (cop a feel) during a DUI arrest.
Bro. Get some new friends who aren't criminal underclass.
That some sentences are unjust (your example re the cop copping a feel)? No doubt. That sentences for some class of offenders some of the time are too long? Maybe, and certainly a reasonable thesis on your part.
But even if we fully accepted your premise of 40% being jailed for “technical” violations of probation/parole (I personally don’t accept that it’s anywhere near that high), tell us again what the 45% are in jail for that are “non-violent” crimes? Do you, e.g., consider a felon in possession of a gun a non- violent crime? Do you consider armed robbery where the person didn’t actually use the weapon non-violent? Do you consider the driver in an armed robbery non-violent?
Do you think *repeat* DUI offenses are non-violent crimes? (Personally, I probably wouldn’t consider first offense a violent crime unless they are off the charts drunk. But 3rd, 4th, 5th… hell yeah)
I do have sympathy for your female friend, assuming the story is true. I do NOT have any sympathy for the friend who threatened to beat the police officer. That is indeed a violent crime. YOU wanna be a cop in a community where that threat during the act of an arrest is NOT a serious crime?
Right but you miss at the cost of maybe two million dollars over his lifetime. You are spiting your face here.
This is the term of Bukele that will really see what I think of him.
It's clear he's way better than the previous situation which was basically rule by gangs and there wasn't much rule of law either.
All of that said, the big this will be how can create lasting institutions that let him pass power onto the next person in charge. That's going to be the real hard part, if he can't pull that off, my guess will be bad decisions will compound over time and things won't be great in the long run. Singapore is the exception, not the rule.
You set up a dilemma between locking tons of people up for life (or 50 years) without trial vs continuing to live with pre-Bukele violence levels. But if you imprisoned the suspects for 15-20 years, long enough for them to experience “male menopause “ , that would probably do the trick. Still insanely draconian but it changes some of the utilitarian or quasi-utilitarian calculations you present.
I've always assumed that the victims of murder are far and away as bad as those that do the murdering.
Ok, I can’t tell if you are completely serious or not, or are just inartful in your wording.
All/most victims of murder are AS BAD as those that do the murdering? That is absurd.
That many of the victims are about as bad? A good chance, sure.
That a large majority of the victims are also far-from-model-citizens (though not necessarily murderers)? Ok, there I’ll agree with you.
But words mean things. “ the victims of murder are far and away as bad as those that do the murdering” is a ridiculous assumption. Stuff like that actually makes leftist crapola sound reasonable by comparison.
I like this. Clear moral reasoning with appeals to clear moral principles. Utilitarianism is nerds trying to mathematize philosophy. The welfare of the people is the highest law.
I hope to visit El Salvador this year or next. Never would have considered it before.
I see patients from El Salvador and they talk about how happy their families are to walk streets safely.
Are we "free" if we cannot walk down a street at 9 pm. I agree that the threat of totalitarianism is present. I would risk the Bukele tyranny over the gang's violent veto of normal life.
I won't pretend to be an expert on El; Salvador's situation... but I feel certain that a lot of criticism from liberals and the NGO crowd are based on THEIR comfortable lives and elite statuses. It's easy to lecture poorer countries who are fighting for their lives.
Law and order is the basis for all civilization... civil rights are a wonderful luxury that can only exist AFTER law and order has been established... https://open.substack.com/pub/jmpolemic/p/bukeles-rebuke?r=1neg52&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion, but you got there in a rigorous and surprising way, so I'm going to be thinking about it a while. Which is another way to say, great article!
I won't pretend to be an expert on El; Salvador's situation... but I feel certain that a lot of criticism from liberals and the NGO crowd are based on THEIR comfortable lives and elite statuses. It's easy to lecture poorer countries who are fighting for their lives.
Law and order is the basis for all civilization... civil rights are a wonderful luxury that can only exist AFTER law and order has been established... https://open.substack.com/pub/jmpolemic/p/bukeles-rebuke?r=1neg52&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true