I see that some people
have become a bit upset with how the police are conducting themselves
recently. They declare that the police need to be reminded that "they
work for us, not the other way around." This statement expresses an
utterly naive and untutored idea.
The police don't work for us,
if by "us" we mean you, me, and at least 95 percent of the rest of the
population. On the contrary: we work for
them, literally; we work to earn money and acquire wealth that they
take forcibly from us for their own support, either by taxation or by
outright confiscation (civil forfeiture). The cops don't work for us;
they never worked for us. They work now, as they have always worked, for
the government, which is to say, for the small part of the population
that has any nonnegligible control over the government at any level --
federal, state, or local. Certainly no more than 5 percent of the
population has any such control. More likely the percentage is 1 percent
or less of the population.
The cops themselves know damned
well whom they work for, and they know it's not "us." If it were us,
they would not be treating us as they are; nor would we tolerate such
treatment for even a moment.-Robert Higgs
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