Good Driving

Whether you’re a leftist who wants to defund the police or a right-winger mainly concerned with fostering law and order so citizens can get on with their lives, you probably agree it’s wise to minimize occasions that require interaction between police and non-police. I don’t mean you should turn a blind eye to assault or theft, but err in the direction of leaving people alone.

That’s one reason libertarians in particular are against sweeping, intrusive police operations unless they are absolutely necessary to prevent clear violations of bodily integrity or property. Make an exception—by, say, endorsing the War on Drugs—and you shouldn’t be surprised if the result is often the death of an innocent bystander in a late-night SWAT raid or street corner shootout with cops.

I’m not saying either the cops or the voters who like them wanted things to end up that way, but it goes with the territory, and it didn’t have to be that way. You could’ve opted for leaving non-violent drug-users alone, however unwise their life choices might be.

Similarly, anyone taking an issue as ambiguous as migration (it has pluses and minuses, may increase market activity but also welfare state activity, and like virtually everything else should presumably be left to individual choice and markets) and seizing upon it as an opportunity for amped-up policing should expect un-libertarian, ugly consequences.

The question is not whether a given specific police/citizen interaction, such as the one seen in the hotly contested video of an I.C.E. agent killing persistent, vehicle-driving protestor Renee Good, is one in which the government agent or the private citizen could have behaved differently (yes and yes, to be sure) but why anyone who wants society to avoid such incidents would favor a policy that makes them more likely.

It would be obtuse to say, “It wouldn’t be likely if people just obeyed the law and obeyed government agents!” Obviously, total obedience will diminish cops’ perceived need to use force (at least in short term, though in the long term the government may be emboldened to keep pressing for more inflammatory clashes between its agents and the general public). But that sort of thinking is a path to totalitarianism, not liberty.

Obedience to every whim of government or command of a government agent isn’t justice, just submission—often a pragmatic choice, to be sure, but not the “right” answer in the sense of corresponding to laws or morals as they should be in a society functioning well over the long haul.

Government, if it must exist at all, should have a light touch. Anyone who really wants to keep the peace must logically want the law to be as unobtrusive as possible. That idea should appeal to gentle hippies and conservative cowboys alike, though one wonders to what extent either of those archetypes still describes the left or right.

Libertarians, of all people, should recognize that letting a domestic army of masked, armored, armed, reportedly often arrogant and threatening order-imposers wander the land will produce confrontations and tragedies that might easily have been avoided—mainly by rethinking the underlying policy.

Anyone claiming to be both a libertarian and a reluctant border-enforcement advocate has some explaining to do, though I’m well aware that some libertarians, from many in the current Libertarian Party to Ron Paul himself, have made a measured and rational case for borders as a second-best but morally acceptable solution in a world of nations, invading armies, and welfare states.

Anyone claiming, by contrast, to be both an anarchist and full-on I.C.E. enthusiast, as a few in the orbit of the Libertarian Party appear to be—and as a few of the more belligerent Trump enthusiasts likely imagine themselves to be, with their jarringly selective deployment of Rothbard quotes and Thin Blue Line police boosterism—is deeply confused, possibly trolling, and in neither case making the world a better place. Knock it off before you kill more people.

Plenty of stupid people end up in disputes with cops, to be sure. But the U.S. will be awash in blood if we go looking to kill every idiot. The country might not even have much of a population left when all is said and done, and the aftermath will be grimmer than the eight-year-old boy lurking in some primitive part of your brain is now imagining, much as we all enjoyed the desolation in the Mad Max films.

Please recall, too, that an essential part of police training is already supposed to be de-escalating conflicts, yet you see what happens time and again once things get heated. Don’t put more officers in those situations. Don’t routinely put troops on American streets. Even open disobedience of good laws is not meant automatically to be a death-penalty offense. Sometimes a fatal interaction is unavoidable, but death should never be the preferred outcome in a given police/citizen interaction. If you think otherwise, you might just be a psychopath, hate to break it to you.

Whether cops or private citizens, we immobilize threats when we can, pursuing them at a later date on some occasions, killing only when absolutely necessary to prevent someone else being killed. Jaywalkers don’t get machine-gunned, and we don’t send in bomber planes every time someone commits mail fraud or, well, has drugs on a boat. There’s a highly valuable concept of “proportional response” regardless of which things you think should be illegal. You don’t firebomb a whole neighborhood because there’s one pickpocket there, not unless you’re insane.

Try to remove 100 million people from the U.S., as some Trumpers now suggest, and you’ll see no end of protestor rage—and disproportionate reprisals from needlessly overworked and often unqualified I.C.E. agents.

None of this was necessary. And if none of my reaction is getting through to you, just imagine the government in the near future deploying an army the size and ferocity of I.C.E. to enforce any one of the laws with which you disagree, including any one of the tens of thousands of petty economic regulations or, say, gun control. Second Amendment defenders, who I admire, have often made the simple, practical point that if you ever sent government agents door-to-door genuinely trying to confiscate every gun (as a few leftists would love to see happen), you would have not just a civil war on your hands but the complete degeneration of society into non-stop guerilla conflict.

If you think that sounds like a very bad outcome (and you should), you should also stop internal immigration enforcement efforts and, if you absolutely demand some compensating policy, let Trump go back to his comparably futile but somewhat less violent efforts to build a great big wall. Maybe it could be treated as openly symbolic this time and just bear some message like “Please stay away” or “Trump America.” That would be less embarrassing than bloodshed in the streets.

—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey