Although commonly used, Max Weber’s definition of the state—an entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a given geographical area—can mislead people into thinking that the state is the only or even the primary reason for security and order. This is illustrated in the trends in the nonstate provision of security, as revealed by my Google alert for the phrase “private police.” Lately, incidents of car and bike theft have led individuals to either organize themselves to prevent and respond to it or hire private security to do so.
One example is a gas station in Philadelphia (a city that has frequently been in the news lately due to growing crime problems, having set a new personal record for annual murders) that has hired security armed with rifles to protect patrons, mainly from car jackings, since motorists are especially vulnerable to attack while pumping gas.
One thing I found notable from a Fox News interview of the head of security Chief Andre Boyer (other than the fact that journalists at a “conservative” outlet are just as clueless as other journalists about what an AR15 is) is his response to a question about whether he and his agents will intervene when witnessing a crime in progress. Chief Boyer responds, “We have to. We have a contract to protect our clients and our clients’ assets.”
As I have noted previously, the fact that voluntarily hired security has a contractual obligation to provide services to the people who pay them is in stark contrast to government police. On multiple occasions, the US Supreme Court has opined that US citizens have no constitutional right to police protection and officers cannot be held legally liable for failing to protect them. You must pay them under penalty of law, but they are not required to provide anything in return.
Also noteworthy is a comment the interviewer makes that “the number one job of the government, whatever level, whether federal, state, local, is to keep their citizens safe. So, if you’re hiring an outside agency that’s a clear indicator that government is failing its people.” Regarding the first part of that statement, Judge Andrew Napolitano would strongly disagree: it is not the job of the government (if it is to have any job at all) to keep you safe but rather to keep you free.
Regarding the second part of that statement, the interviewer gives far too much credit to the government. To say categorically that any hiring of private security means the state is failing to do its job assumes godlike powers on the part of the state. As mentioned above, it is wrong to assume that the state’s threat of capturing and punishing lawbreakers is primarily responsible for the peace and orderliness we enjoy under normal circumstances. Perhaps since there are an estimated three to four people employed in private security for every government police officer, the Fox News interviewer would consider this proof that the government cannot do its number one job and is unfit to exist.
Car theft is not only a major issue in Philly but in Portland, Oregon, as well. Both cities are experiencing historic highs in crime. In response to the explosion of car theft in Portland, a Facebook group named “PDX Stolen Cars” was formed to crowdsource locating stolen vehicles. According to the founder of the Facebook group, Titan Crawford, “I had found a stolen car in my neighborhood. I knew it was stolen. I contacted the police and they said there’s not a whole lot we can do right now. So I was like, ‘Well see if I can do something.’”
Mr. Crawford has been disillusioned of the idea that the government is the ultimate protector of property rights: “It would be cool if the city could do this and I didn’t have to.” I imagine many people thought the same thing about government schools. Fortunately, an increasing number of parents are able to get some of their tax money back to send kids to a school of their choice. Instead of being taxed to pay for police services they don’t receive, perhaps some residents of Portland would be interested in “police choice.”
Burlington, Vermont, is having a similar experience with bike thefts, along with the Facebook groups created to deal with it because the government police are too busy. They are too busy to deal not only with bike thefts but property destruction, retail larceny, assaults by homeless people in parks, and open-air drug markets (financed by stolen bikes). And, as elsewhere, residents have found that they are on their own in dealing with these things.
One might point out that another common theme among these cities is the fact that their politicians all committed to “defunding the police” to some degree. This movement, while short-lived and ultimately overstated in how much budgets were cut, was successful in reducing police staffing and recruitment. Does the corresponding rise in crime and disorder indicate, then, that government police are crucial in maintaining order?
No. Rather, the lesson one should take from the “defund the police” experience (to the extent that one believes that it was a misguided, if not horrible, idea) is that it is an outcome that is only possible when policing is under political control. It was not a case of individuals deciding to abstain from buying when they no longer wanted a particular service.
The taxpayer-funded monopoly on policing became even less effective without leaving any more money in taxpayers’ pockets. Drawing another parallel with government schools, which closed without returning the taxpayers’ money, several cities cut police funding and staffing while keeping the money that taxpayers ostensibly paid for that purpose. It truly is only the government that can take your money, barely provide a service they’ve monopolized, and then insist on how necessary they are for the provision of that service.
Now, especially with the rise of the Soros-funded district attorneys, Americans are realizing that they are responsible for their own safety and security. This function, like the education of their children, cannot be outsourced to the government. The silver lining is that, as people build parallel institutions, the less dependent upon government they become and the more obvious the overstatement of the state’s necessity for order becomes. This is a necessary step for getting us on the road to rediscovery of an ethos of liberty and self-reliance.
About the Author
Tate Fegley is Chair of Business and Economics at Montreat College and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute.
Article cross-posted from Mises.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.