The government protects us from crime?

Anyone who knows me knows that one of my most abiding passions is the advocacy of "civil society", which is basically an advocacy for what is at least a very different direction in "government" and at its most is an advocacy for an end to the concept of "nation-state" as it has been practiced over the last couple of centuries. This is not the post to go into the detail of all of that, but part of the intellectual process of that advocacy is an honest analysis of our *current* system as part of the process of comparing alternatives and the current system on even ground.

Detractors of my ideas are dedicated to the notion of finding flaws, of finding ways in which the resulting society would be less than perfect. I'm perfectly ok with that: that's part of a rational process of evaluation. What I find very *irrational* is that those same people are unwilling to honestly assess and see the flaws of the *current* system. My contention isn't that the alternatives I'd like to consider and ultimately advocate are "perfect", just that they are *better* than what we have, in large part because what we have now does not, frankly, set the bar very high.

In that line, I find the following datapoint interesting. Supposedly, one of the "failures" of my advocated systems is that they are "weak" on law and order (because most of my suggestions involve much smaller and less powerful governments than what we currently see in the world). The implication is that the current system is particularly strong on law and order, that the government protects us from criminals and other bad doers.

But does it really do a very good job at that? Or have we just become habituated to its failures to the point where we don't notice them? I've read in many places - and largely been convinced by - the notion that in fact, our police force does not actually *protect* us from criminals at all. For the most part, police don't *stop* crimes; they catch criminals after the fact. Is that really "protecting" us from criminals?

I was privy to a particularly poignant (to me, at least) illustration of this notion the other day, associated with etail giant Ebay: out of 15,000 Ebay employees, a full 3,000, or 20%, work in their anti-fraud department. Think about that for a second: fraud is a *crime*, and those that commit fraud are criminals. Isn't it the government's job to protect us from criminals? Then why does Ebay need to hire 3,000 people to *protect themselves* from criminals? This isn't a handful of security guards, this is an enormous overhead on a company. There's basically *no* expectation that the government is going to help prevent this fraud. The police force have basically just said "you're on your own".

The list of failures of the current form of government (and I'll comment mostly on American government since that's what I know best, but the American system isn't different enough from other major western countries - and many eastern countries are worse - to really distinguish. My comment, IOW, are not limited to America) is something that I want to capture here over time, and this sure seems like an interesting place to start.