Decriminalize Everything: The Case for Abolishing Crime

A thought experiment in anarchic antifragility

A few evenings ago walking home from the gym, I had a very dangerous idea (that would endanger those most deserving of danger) about how Western civilization could be saved and society could be made much more sound, sane, and just.

Like many of you, I've taken the red pill and had the unpleasant epiphany that many "first world" developed countries are beyond saving. I had concluded that the United States where I'm from, like the Titanic after its hull was ripped open by that iceberg is on an inevitable course to sink into darkness. I'd reached the conclusion that the only solution to preventing a truly dystopian future was the widespread implementation of human gene-editing technology. But, upon deeper contemplation, I think there may be a second option for saving civilization...

Decriminalize everything, even murder.

On its surface may sound totally absurd and heinous, but I'll explain why this would, long term, be a tremendous step forward for humanity or any civilized nation that decided to implement it.

The criminal justice and law enforcement agencies of both local and the federal government would be abolished. Judges, court systems, jails, and police forces would go away. Nothing would be illegal or punished by the state; you could sell crack cocaine in front of a high school, burn down a Chuck E. Cheese's pizzeria, rob an electronics store, or beat up an annoying tourist and steal their selfie stick with no legal repercussions - which may at first encounter sound like a horrific society to reside in. But after an initial period of turmoil, the threat of retributive violence would quickly moderate the most immoral of human impulses.

Everybody gets a license to kill

The crux of why this would work is that you could kill anyone, legally. If a guy sells drugs to your teenager, go put a Glock to the back of his head and pull the trigger. If a pedophile abuses your child in public school, go beat his brains out with a rusted pipe. A CEO of a company egregiously pollutes the environment or pushes a harmful pharmaceutical drug that kills, hire an assassin to take him out. While this would legalize all sorts of vile evil, it would also create the ultimate incentive to not do evil or engage in predation of your fellow citizens. All but the very most egregiously psychopathic in society would suddenly become extremely motivated to hold themselves to the very highest ethical and moral standards in all their dealings.

 This proposal would be especially beneficial and effective in the United States where there are more guns than people, owned by private individuals exercising their Second Amendment right to bear arms. These guns are concentrated in the hands of people who are right-wing, conservative, traditional, and Christian. But any civilized country where crime was abolished would quickly start looking a lot like the United States. Firearm ownership would become legal and unregulated, citizens would rush to purchase Walthers and AR-15s. Martial arts and self-defense classes would also become very popular.

You might be thinking...

If you want anarchy why don't you go live in Mogadishu, Somalia, or someplace like that!

Well, contrary to the stereotype Mogadishu is far from being an anarchic place, and clearly civilization really only has a chance of flowering in countries with an average IQ over 90.

Consider Switzerland, which is actually somewhat anarchic operating without a strong central government, this works because the average IQ there is 101. Nassim Taleb in Antifragile wrote about Switzerland...

...the most stable country in the world does not have a government. And it is not stable in spite of not having a government; it is stable because it does not have one.
It is not quite true that the Swiss do not have a government. What they do not have is a large central government, or what the common discourse describes as “the” government—what governs them is entirely bottom-up, municipal of sorts, regional entities called cantons, near-sovereign mini-states united in a confederation. There is plenty of volatility... 

 The state of anarchy would be copacetic to a nation of European-derived, culturally-Christian people. Anarchy in Malawi in East Africa would probably just make Malawi more... Malawicious.

The decriminalization of everything would address nearly every grievance of both conservatives and reasonable liberals.

The "taxation is theft" crowd should love this proposal because we tax livestock would suddenly be freed from our obligation to render unto Caesar. Most would refuse to pay taxes; which would shrink the government to a tiny size. State agencies would have to start acting a lot like for-profit companies, offering quality services at a decent value to the public. Private companies would begin competing with the state offering the services that a civil society needs; education of the youth, healthcare, police force, inspecting restaurants to make sure they weren't serving hamburgers infected with salmonella, maintenance of roads and infrastructure, etc. Over time this would result in almost total privatization of the government, as entrepreneurs and businesses provided cheaper, better services than those that the state provided.

A lot of police officers would be unemployed overnight but they would quickly find their talents in high demand by a booming private security industry. Initially, there would be a lot of fear of violence or theft, everybody would rush to hire private security. You might object...

But what if my private security robs me? They have the guns and know how to use them, I'd be helpless!

In Anarchy, you would see a Yelpification of almost every industry and business interaction. If you hired private security and they robbed you then you could give them a one-star review for all to see, which would hurt their business. Private security firms would quickly adopt an extremely rigorous process for filtering out all but the most upstanding of employees. Businesses and individuals would become extremely concerned with their reputation and being trustworthy.

 The abolition of crime would be tremendous for community cohesion. Everybody would suddenly become very interested in forming high-trust relationships with those who lived in physical proximity to them. In Bulgaria where I live, I'm impressed with the general cultural cohesion compared with my native, Denver, Colorado. I know almost all my neighbors, My wife and I stop to chat with them at the entrance to our apartment building almost every day. I can imagine how I and my neighbors would adapt to this anarchic state of things; if we didn't hire private security to protect our building we would assign rotating shifts guarding the building, keeping an eye out for dodgy characters snooping around the building at night. You might ask...

What if one of your neighbors decides to rob you (or does something worse?) Doesn't that threat destroy community cohesion?

Well, if your neighbor robbed you, you could go beat him up (or worse) so the threat of violent reprisal would dissuade almost everyone tempted to take advantage of this anarchic state. Also, anyone who violated their neighbors' trust could be thrown out on the street to fend for themselves. Social ostracization would become a life or death matter and communities would become very interested in the moral character and well-being of everyone.

Anarchy would result in a very serious honor culture.

Given the threat of violence and theft all businesses, especially small businesses would have to take protective measures. Initially, at least you would see a lot of bars on windows and bulletproof glass would sell like hotcakes. Which would certainly be expensive but a tremendous savings compared to what businesses pay in taxes currently.

This would result in a minarchist state or federal government whose primary duty would be the national military defense. Since the citizens would have no legal recourse against foreigners or foreign countries aggressing against them the state's responsibility would be a vigilant defense of the nation. You wouldn't have disruptive and destructive mass migration because foreigners would be deathly afraid of even entering the country. The little migration or tourism that the country received would be foreigners who would be extremely respectful of the country's people.

The dysgenic welfare state would go away almost overnight with the citizens relieved of the vampire of taxation on their necks. The wealth and the resources of the competent would no longer be redistributed to the less competent and their bastard children. This would have a slow but consistent eugenic effect on the population, every subsequent generation would be a little smarter and more competent than the previous. The opposite of our current societal crazy train hurtling toward a dystopian Idiocracy future.

What about feminism and cultural Marxism?

The geneticist, philosopher, and streamer extraordinaire J.-François Gariépy likes to joke that the solution to feminism is "alligators on the streets." How much destructive feminism would we have if there were lots of alligators roaming the streets snapping their scary alligator teeth at women? Not much, right? Women would desperately want to find a decent, strong man that could protect them from the scaly monsters and they would be a whole lot more interested in staying home and raising children. Anarchy would have a similar effect. I'd argue that it would result in actual positive feminism that empowered women to embrace their femininity and thrive. Competent women would still be free to pursue careers and succeed in the business world.

What about the communist factories (which is to say factories operated by, AND producing communists); universities and colleges?

They would have a tough time in anarchy. With no funding from the federal government, they would have to cut gender studies programs and directors of inclusion and diversity. With no federal government to guarantee student loans universities would have to become a lot leaner and almost exclusively focused on STEM and teaching professional skills to very serious students. College professors would think twice before they espoused disgusting postmodern ideas to the malleable minds of the youth. Consider Nassim Taleb's observations of higher education in Switzerland...

it is perhaps the most successful country in history, yet it has traditionally had a very low level of university education compared to the rest of the rich nations. Its system, even in banking during my days, was based on apprenticeship models, nearly vocational rather than the theoretical ones.

Would anarchy be good for families?

Well, divorce would be more legal than ever before but there would no longer be any family courts, legally mandated alimony, or child support payments removing the huge financial incentive for women to leave marriages. Divorce would become quite rare because there would be only downside to it. Women, afraid of the "alligators in the streets" would do nearly anything to reconcile differences with their husbands. Divorce would also be a worse deal for men because there would be a lot fewer promiscuous women in Anarchy. In modernity, there's very little incentive for men to marry because it is so easy to find a slutty woman who will sleep with you on the first or second date. In Anarchy, the natural order of women exchanging sex for commitment and protection would reassert itself. There would still be some promiscuity but women would be a whole lot more interested in using their youth and beauty to lock down a decent man and the demand would create supply; you would see a triumphant return of the nice guy "provider" male! Parents would become a lot more interested in the safety and well-being of their children. Very few parents would apathetically dump their children in daycare centers. Public schools would be largely privatized and homeschooling would become very popular. LGBTQ activists should love anarchy because they would get all the freedoms that they tell us they don't have in current society, but I suspect we would see a whole lot fewer gay marriages and Pride parades. Anarchy would be a significant reform to the modern state of utter degeneracy.

You might object...

But the rich and powerful could totally take advantage of all this anarchy! They would hire small armies of bodyguards, hide in secure compounds, and would be free to predate on society via their henchmen.

Yes, all sorts of political corruption, white-collar, or organized crime would also be decriminalized and unregulated in this anarchic society. But this would be regulated by crowdfunded assassination; let's say that you have a bad politician who is betraying the nation, corrupted by corporate bribery or globalist influence. Like in our society, he is going to be protected by bodyguards and security with guns. But, if he pisses off enough people an assassination bounty could be put on his head. Cryptocurrency e-commerce developers would create Indiegogo-style websites to crowdfund assassinations. If a politician or public figure was hated enough, eventually one of his security guards would choose to become a "hero" and a millionaire overnight by executing them. You might object...

So a Silicon Valley billionaire or South American dictator could just crowdfund taking out the President?

These crowdfunded assassinations would be rare because those doing the assassinations would be subject to the same threat of violence. If half the country loves a politician and half the country hates him the assassin who takes him out in exchange for a seven-figure payday is going to live the rest of his life in fear of reprisal. The assassin's own murder would also be legal. The same with the website developers creating the crowdfunding platforms, they would need to create very high-integrity, secure systems that would bar foreign interference or manipulation. Perhaps a donation to an assassination bounty escrow account would require a citizen's social security number or genetic verification of their citizenship. It wouldn't take very many of these assassinations before bad actors and psychopaths were dissuaded from entering public life and undertaking parasitic endeavors.

The birth pangs of utopia

Let's get realistic, the first year or two of an anarchic society would be pretty violent. Like young adults with the newfound freedom to drive a car, drink alcohol, or have sex; many would abuse their unprecedented new freedom.

There would be a lot of casual violence and petty crime before small-time criminals figured out that in anarchy, the wages of sin is death. A lot of naive citizens would have rude awakenings and painful learning experiences teaching them to take extreme ownership and responsibility for their own safety and affairs.

When the criminal justice system shuts down jails will be emptied and some dangerous, violent criminals will be let back out into society. Considering the risk they present, many of these ex-cons will just be killed off by vigilante gangs. The soon-to-be unemployed and vulnerable prison guards would probably take the preemptive measure of just executing the most violent and problematic of the incarcerated population. But some of them would get out and wreak havoc in society.

A currency crash and economic turmoil would almost certainly ensue. With no legal system, why would anyone make their mortgage payments to the banks? We would see a lot of banks go out of business, bank runs would occur and a lot of the predatory, rent-seeking elite banking class would be unemployed. The currency would crash and the nation would have to start using sound gold-backed currency or cryptocurrency. This would be terrible for the bottom half of the IQ curve of the population, but great for long-term thinkers who have savings in gold or cryptocurrency.

Economies can bounce back quickly from crashes and recessions if central bankers and government regulators allow the market to find equilibrium on its own. Especially if the nation adopted cryptocurrency or gold-back currency the economy would roar back to life in probably a year or two. Economies typically improve when politicians lower taxes and in an anarchic society, there would be almost no taxes. With the government out of business, there would be ample entrepreneurship opportunities to provide services like security, healthcare, maintenance of infrastructure, etc.

With nobody paying their mortgages, real estate prices (which are egregiously overinflated in many places!) would crash. But people do need places to live and work so rent prices would readjust with the rest of the economy. You might ask...

Who would pay their rent to their landlords if there were no legal repercussions or a way to evict?

The landlords would have to provide value justifying monthly rents. The landlords wouldn't be paying their mortgages to the banks anymore so they could afford to hire private security to protect their property and tenants. You might think...

So in the anarchic society, the rich and powerful could afford private security to safeguard them but everyone else would be subject to random, casual violence.

Not really, almost all rented property would be guarded by private security. The residents of all but the very cheapest apartments would be protected by men with guns.

You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet and bringing about anarchic utopia would entail some death. I said that anarchy would endanger those most deserving of danger; it would be especially bad for the least moral and most irresponsible in society. The eminent evolutionary psychologist Edward Dutton argues that the execution of evildoers is a tremendously positive civilizing force.

In contemplating anarchy we have to ask ourselves: Is saving civilization worth the deaths that will prevent the bottom 10% of the most impulsive, least responsible, and least moral of young men from passing their genes onto the next generation?

The business environment

Anarchy would force businesses to become much more efficient, there would be no legal enforcement of contracts between businesses. So businesses would have 100% skin in the game in their dealings. Corporations wouldn't engage in risky speculative dealings based upon enforcement of futures contracts. The stock market probably wouldn't totally go away but it would become a whole lot less exciting. Business deals would have to be done solely on the basis of trust and mutual interest. Could you get a company like Facebook, Google, or Standard Oil monopolizing an entire industry? Possibly. That would be allowed in anarchy but again if a business became too powerful and abusive its executives would become the target of assassinations, which would be a significant deterrent of the worst manifestations of capitalism.

The boom and bust business cycle would become a whole lot less stark. You wouldn't see banks needing to be bailed out because the federal government required them to loan money to high-risk borrowers. Businesses would no longer have implicit or explicit obligations to make "diversity hires". Businesses would be bereft of the bureaucratic swamp of meddling HR departments.

The tax-free and regulation-free business environment would attract a lot of foreign investment. You might say...

If there's no regulation of anything couldn't some greedy multinational corporation just move in and start cutting down all the trees in the national forests and ruining the environment?

Yes. But like anyone else in the anarchic society, they would face the risk of violence. If loggers started destroying the forest, it would become lumberjack hunting season! Corporations that destroyed the environment would be subject to constant, costly terrorism the same way the Maquis in France in World War Two undermined the logistical infrastructure of their Nazi occupiers. Foreign investments and business interests that weren't truly reciprocal and win-win would face violent public backlash. You might be thinking...

Oh great. So the country would end up being a tax haven like Ireland or the Netherlands where giant multinational corporations hid their cash.

It would be something of a tax haven, but the economic crash, bank failures, and adoption of sound currency would render many of the most parasitic of banking practices fruitless for predatory moneymen in slick suits. Banks that wanted to provide a tax haven to multinationals would have to hire a lot of private security to protect their offices, executives, and assets. Businesses that didn't provide value would not do well in this anarchic state. I would love to found an IT or software development firm in an anarchic state, after the currency crash the IT talent would certainly be cheaper than in a statist country, but with the significant tax savings, I could pay very fair, above-market rates for good talent.

Anarchy, long-term would result in a very high-integrity business environment. A high-trust commerce environment would be highly conducive to innovation and invention, but in a very human-centric way, you probably wouldn't see a huge rush to replace truck drivers with AI for example, which would create a bunch of public anger. The most competent engineers and scientists would go to work inventing things that helped people as opposed to becoming ensconced in the labyrinthine soviet maze of state-funded academia. The smartest computer engineers and programmers would create mind-blowing technology instead of going to work for the CIA, FBI, DARPA, or Goldman Sachs.

I talk quite a bit about vigilante gangs; these would also come with their own problems, these gangs would quickly become political and vie for power and influence. But the anarchic state of things would be a significant regulator of the concentration of power in the black-gloved hands of an emergent group. Like in any revolution, there would be friction between competing groups. But at the birth pangs stage, the national military comprised mostly of very disciplined moral men who took an oath to defend their people would still be in place which would mitigate the most tribal impulses of vigilantes. If you look at the 20th-century history of the Mafia, there was typically a lot of infighting and internecine conflict within the organized crime syndicates that prevented one person or organization from becoming monolithic or achieving a monopoly on violence.

What about the less fortunate?

You might now object...

I can see how anarchy would be good for the rich, the powerful, and even hardworking middle-class people but what about those who desperately need the state to take care of them? What about single mothers and old people who rely on their pensions?

They would be largely taken care of by private charity. High IQ, European-derived, culturally Christian people are extremely altruistic, often to a fault. Freed of the obligation of paying 30%, 40%, 50%, or more of their income to the government in taxes people would be very generous with their charitable giving. An anarchic society would become religious, as people would want to form higher trust relationships locally. As in the past, churches would take care of a lot of single or widowed mothers and elderly people who had trouble making ends meet.

From my article: Free Market “Universal Basic Income”

Free market charity out performs government welfare programs by a long shot. According to data from Health and Welfare Studies at the Cato Institute;
Only 30% of the funds that go into government entitlement programs end up in the hands of the needy or paying for their services. The rest is eaten up by bureaucrats salaries, fancy offices, along with requisite waste, fraud and abuse.
Compared to private charities who contribute 82% of all funds raised to the needy, the rest goes to fundraising efforts and administration.

In anarchy, you would occasionally have a sad story of an irresponsible single mother or an old jerk estranged from his family and community who ended up face down in a ditch but free of the burden of taxation, the voluntary charity would take care of the downtrodden while actually encouraging people to make much better life decisions.

Compared to what...

I'm sure you can come up with some downsides, susceptibility to abuse, unfairness, and bugs in my proposed anarchic society. There would be the occasional heinous, random bloody murder in the streets that would go unpunished. But really, considering all the upsides of anarchy, could it be worse than what we have now?

• Consider the egregious violent crime rates in Los Angeles, Chicago, and London.
• In Rotherham, England 1,400 children were abused by rape gangs while the police ignored the problem. Some argue that the sexual abuse happening on an "industrial scale" is being used as a subtle weapon of war upon the native British population victimizing as many as a million children.
• In once beautiful Paris, there have been 18 weeks of violent yellow vest riots. 89,000 police officers (thugs?) are deployed to prevent rioters from burning the city of lights to the ground.
• In Christchurch, New Zealand an "eco-fascist" walked into a mosque and slaughtered 50 Muslims.
• In Italy, a Senegalese immigrant bus driver nearly burned to death 50 children on a bus to get revenge on Europeans for not rescuing more African illegal immigrants trying to cross the Mediterranean.
• In the United States, we have (debatably?) an ongoing genocide of black babies with 900 abortions daily, totaling perhaps as many as 20 million aborted pregnancies. I take a nuanced view of abortion, if it happens within the first 8 weeks of pregnancy I don't regard that as murder. But how many of those 20 million abortions were of viable, healthy human fetuses well into their 2nd or 3rd trimester? Hitler himself would be impressed with the efficiency of our industrialized murder!
• In California and other sanctuary states and cities, illegal immigrants literally get away with murder.

Would anarchy with vigilante justice make these places more violent and lawless than things already are? I doubt it!

It's hard to deny that many places in the "first world" are not already in a state of violent anarchic tyranny. Could they transition to a state of positive anarchy?

Pragmatic implementation

At this point, you may be thinking...

Ok. Interesting thought experiment. I can see how anarchy might actually improve society BUT there's NO WAY it would ever actually happen.

The political left is increasingly dragging our countries in an anarchic, lawless direction. Leftists young and old are hell-bent on radical, revolutionary progress at any cost. Burning down civilization, doing away with everything old, traditional, or historical, and inverting the natural order of everything.

Political policy is growing increasingly absurd and disconnected from reality. A decade ago would you believe people would be imprisoned for teaching their pugs to Sieg heil or that politicians would seriously be considering paying every citizen a thousand dollars a month in Universal Basic Income? How absurd will things be in another ten years?

How easy would it be to convince the left that already hates the criminal justice system, considering it a racist relic of an evil colonial past, to just totally do away with "the system" entirely?

I think it would be quite easy. Could the electorate be convinced to simply vote for the abolition of the criminal justice system? Possibly. The political left thinks that the criminal justice system unfairly targets minorities. Right-wingers see it as corrupt and biased; a deep state hellbent on the perpetual growth of big government, metastasizing into a syndicate of authoritarian thugs that belong in the history books in the same section as the Nazi Gestapo and the Soviet KGB.

The way I see this playing out is that a leftist politician would enact a drastic criminal justice reform abolishing a significant part of the legal system; which would make it bureaucratically impossible for the system to prosecute dissidents or go after tax evaders. A crash of the economy and currency might occur and a widespread tax protest could be organized, the government would have to shut down more and more federal agencies because they simply couldn't pay their paper-pushing busybodies enough to show up for work. More and more policemen would start working as private security contractors on the side. It would not take long for a critical mass of the population to stop paying taxes starving the statist beast. At this point, hopefully, a wise political leader or a military general could admit that the federal government can no longer provide services to the nation, propose switching to sound currency, and invite the privatization of everything, thus ushering in a state of anarchy.

You might object...

That's pretty much what happened in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and what's happening now in Venezuela but it just produced more tyranny not less...

I think in almost every example of a disastrous transition into anarchy in recent history you were dealing with a lower-IQ population, that was unarmed and conditioned by decades of socialism to be entitled and irresponsible. If it happened in a high-IQ country with a strong Christian work ethic and sense of decency I bet it would go a lot differently.

Balkanization of the United States is becoming increasingly plausible; an emergent conservative nation in North America with a small, but culturally cohesive and libertarian-leaning population might simply decide at its inception to implement anarchy more or less as it is described here. They probably wouldn't call it anarchy (which is kind of a scary word); the political project would have to be rebranded as Individual Sovereignty, Antifragile Anarchy, Lean Libertarianism, or maybe Smart Democracy.

Would it be perfect? No. Would it be better than the degenerate statist, anarcho-tyranny of modernity? Definitely.

Any rational conservative person having read this article should be able to see how if they can survive a few years of turmoil an anarchic society will ultimately be a much more free, conservative, and moral place to raise a family.