So it turns out that Ferguson Mayor James Knowles, nominally a Democrat, is really a libertarian who was gung-ho to privatize as many law enforcement functions as he could to make “users” cover the cost of law enforcement.
Take the shocking “discovery” — actually years in the making — that Ferguson shifted many of its revenue burdens away from taxpayers and onto something the New Yorker described as the city’s “offender-funded” justice system, designed to “shift the financial burden of probation directly onto the probationers…. charging petty offenders — such as those with traffic debts — for a government service that was once free.”
Many decades ago, libertarian author Robert Poole, one of the leading brain bugs of libertarianism and one of the Koch brothers’ longest-serving lieutenants, proposed exactly this sort of system in his pioneering handbook on government privatization, “Cutting Back City Hall” published in 1980:
“Make the users (i.e., the criminals) pay the costs, wherever possible.”
Poole’s book is considered by many the first American policy handbook on mass government privatization. (Poole’s and Reason’s claims that he “coined” privatization have been challenged, most recently in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, which made the case that “privatization” was first coined and implemented in Nazi Germany in the mid-late 1930s.)
Poole’s writings in the mid-late 1970s for Reason magazine (which he edited) and the Reason Foundation (which he co-founded, both with the Kochs’ support) provided the neoliberal blueprintsfor Thatcherism, as recounted by one of her advisers and hagiographers:
“The intellectual case for ‘contracting out’ came from an American MIT-trained engineer turned policy wonk, Bob Poole, head of the Reason Foundation in Santa Barbara and author of a little book called ‘Cutting Back City Hall.’ In this book he explained how all you needed to run a city was a CEO, a lawyer to review contracts and a secretary. Everything — literally everything — could be outsourced and he littered his book with examples and figures….[Thatcher advisor Michael Forsyth] translated Poole’s work into an English context and, led by the Westminster City Council, ‘contracting out’ spread like a contagious disease throughout the country.”
The libertarian Reason magazine also came up with the “St. Louis Solution,” whereby St. Louis and their suburbs privatized streets as a way to keep black people from traveling through. Go read it, it’s quite enlightening.
