Jamie Whyte has written a comment piece in the FT entitled Precise Policing for the People of Snodbury. This advocates a market mechanism for getting the results out of the police force what is wanted, or at least a way of looking at what we want out of policing more clearly. The idea is that local communities set shopping list, not of what they want to buy, but what they want the police to prevent, together with some prices. So the diverse benefits of a police force are converted to single unit of account, currency. Private police services providers would then bid to provide policing and would receive, at the end of the year, what they bid less the cost of those offences that they failed to prevent. So serious offences, such as murders and rapes, would take a big chunk out of their income, minor ones, such as parking violations, smaller ones.
Jamie Whyte and Matin Wolfe have been advocating market solutions to political problems for years. Some ideas, go back many decades. Some countries actually implement them - in Singapore you have to bid for a certificate of entitlement to drive your car on the road. I know of no evidence that when these solutions are implemented they fail to work, yet no democratic government ever seems to consider them. I have never seen an article arguing against this kind of solution - although I have seen uncountable articles explaining why it is that conventional solutions require so much money and effort to be made to work. In many cases the more unsuccessful the policy - for example the structure of the CSA, or the New Deal, or the NHS - the more convinced politicians seem of the rightness of the existing approach of central, political micro-management.
Re-reading Jamie's piece I can see that the objection of politicians would be that his proposal would creative an incentive to reduce crime (a weighted average of all crime) to the exclusion of everything else. One images that under this scheme it would be a waste of time asking a policeman for the time, or for directions. Maybe this is the Achilles heel of the scheme. But digital watches are very cheap now, and so are satnav systems. Perhaps it would be a worthwhile trade-off. Surely we should have a debate about it.
Please accept my apologies for subjecting you to another post on this topic. I am well aware I have written this kind of entry many times. The entry is not rhetorical. I really want to know why serious, intelligent politicians have agreed, seemingly without discussion, that this kind of thing is a bad idea. Maybe I really have just missed something.
Jamie Whyte and Matin Wolfe have been advocating market solutions to political problems for years. Some ideas, go back many decades. Some countries actually implement them - in Singapore you have to bid for a certificate of entitlement to drive your car on the road. I know of no evidence that when these solutions are implemented they fail to work, yet no democratic government ever seems to consider them. I have never seen an article arguing against this kind of solution - although I have seen uncountable articles explaining why it is that conventional solutions require so much money and effort to be made to work. In many cases the more unsuccessful the policy - for example the structure of the CSA, or the New Deal, or the NHS - the more convinced politicians seem of the rightness of the existing approach of central, political micro-management.
Re-reading Jamie's piece I can see that the objection of politicians would be that his proposal would creative an incentive to reduce crime (a weighted average of all crime) to the exclusion of everything else. One images that under this scheme it would be a waste of time asking a policeman for the time, or for directions. Maybe this is the Achilles heel of the scheme. But digital watches are very cheap now, and so are satnav systems. Perhaps it would be a worthwhile trade-off. Surely we should have a debate about it.
Please accept my apologies for subjecting you to another post on this topic. I am well aware I have written this kind of entry many times. The entry is not rhetorical. I really want to know why serious, intelligent politicians have agreed, seemingly without discussion, that this kind of thing is a bad idea. Maybe I really have just missed something.
