GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER
Is a Great American Killing Spree just getting started?
A principle of Austrian economics is that if people are paid to do something, they will do more of it. The obverse, as a general principle, is perhaps the basis for criminal law: If people are punished for something, they will do less of it. Of course, the logical obverse of that would be that if people feel an urge to do something, and if they are not punished for doing it, then they probably will do more of it.
If that is true, then America is in for not just a lot of crime in our near future, but a whole lot more murder than we have ever seen before. And it will not because of anything to do with gun control, or the death penalty, or even defunding the police. It will be because of a growing disinclination on the part of the
U.S. government to punish criminals in general and in particular an increasing refusal to even find murderers, let alone punish them. And this has been going on for a long time.
A 2021 article in The Economist titled “Getting Away with Murder: In America, Killers are Near as Likely to Go Free as to be Caught” reported that the percentage of homicides being solved in the U.S. has been falling steadily, and at current rates the reality is that most American killers will soon literally get away with murder. It was already true in St Louis, where only 47% of murderers were found. While in, “...Baltimore and Tampa, two out of every three murders fade into history without an arrest.”
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/06/11/getting-away-with-murder
But it was, without doubt, possible for the U.S. government to solve those murders, if had they wanted to. In 2020, the Netherlands, Sweden, and most of Britain police solved about 80% of murders. Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea solved more than 90%. In fact, in 1965, before the deluge of government regulation and the creation of thousands of new victimless crimes, almost 90% of murders were solved in America. And the reason for U.S. government regulators not solving the murders was not that there were too many murders to solve. The number of murders in the U.S. topped out in the early 1990s at about 10,000 per year, and by 2020 only about 20% of that number were committed. While the number of murders decreased, the percentage of murders solved also decreased.
But it isn't just murder, of course.
Government regulators decline to arrest and prosecute people for most or all shoplifting, burglary, car break-ins, looters, assault, and arson (at least if those latter three acts are committed by Leftists in BLM or Antifa — in many U.S. cities police stood by and watched as BLM and Antifa committed those non-crimes with impunity — in the numerous riots of 2020 and 2021 in Portland, OR, of the relatively few rioters arrested, more than 90% were freed and charges dropped almost immediately).
At this rate, recent calls to defund the police may be irrelevant; increasingly, the cops don't seem to be doing much anyway. At least not in enforcing traditional crimes, i.e. the kind with real victims. But there is another kind of "crime", of course.
In public appearances, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch likes to tell a story about that time he asked his law clerks to find out the total number of federal crimes in the statutes. And they came back with: Between 4,000 and 4,500. But then Gorsuch asked them to find out how many punishable federal crimes had been created by the unelected federal regulators in the Administrative State. And they came back with the answer that over 300,000 such federal crimes had been created by the time the people who count such laws had stopped counting.
What is the point in creating literally thousands of new federal crimes if the government does not plan to enforce the one we have always had?
When the Killer Goes Free, and You are the Criminal
By 2021, a stack of books has been written about how the deluge of new crimes has essentially criminalized being an American who ever leaves the house, including:
• One Nation Under Arrest: How Crazy Laws, Rogue Prosecutors, and Activist Judges Threaten Your Liberty edited by Paul Rosenzweig and Brian Walsh
• Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate and Alan Dershowitz
• How to Become a Federal Criminal: An Illustrated Handbook for the Aspiring Offender by Mike Chase
• Licensed to Lie by Sidney Powell
• Conviction Machine: Standing Up to Federal Prosecutorial Abuse by Harvey Silverglate and Sidney Powell
So Americans, if they want to, can read all about the synthetic crime wave being created from whole cloth by government regulators.
But here is the even crazier thing:
As tens of thousands of new victimless crimes are created wholesale by U.S. government regulators, and law enforcement increasingly pursues people who commit those crimes, government regulators let the people who commit real crimes, with real victims, go free and unpunished. As real crimes cease to be crimes at all.
— In many cities in 2021, shoplifting is de facto no longer a crime at all, and police won’t respond to the store when the victim calls them. Thieves walk out of stores with armloads of goods, and it is the store owner’s task to find some way to stop them, without himself being sued later for what actions he might take. Corporate headquarters command store employees not to interfere with thieves and fire workers who do not obey.
— Very few burglaries are investigated by police, who, if they are being honest, simply tell the victim that the stolen property will never be recovered and he or she should just call the insurance company, if he has insurance, instead of hoping for any action by government.
— Even though government regulators were secretly tracking cryptocurrency exchanges (as was revealed when the FBI quickly found the perpetrators of the Colonial Pipeline extortion in 2021 by tracing the Bitcoin transfers), up to that time criminals committing extortion by demanding ransom were not found, arrested, or convicted by the government regulators, who had had the ability to do so if they wished, but were too busy prosecuting people who committed the new victimless "crimes".
Meanwhile in the Annals of Real Crime 2021… The Covid Holocaust and the Real Criminals
-3.5 million dead, and the death toll still rising
-tens of $trillions in losses and costs
-more of our freedoms taken from us by lying government rulers
This is the Covid Holocaust. Certain people in China and the U.S. caused this. Criminals. Is it impossible now to punish anyone, except the Americans who protested our loss of freedom on January 6? You get the book thrown at you. You get months in jail, with bail refused, for the crime of putting your feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk.
Politicians and bureaucrats in the U.S. who paid for the virus lie about it to cover it up and create illegal lockdowns costing $trillions. They are the real criminals, it would seem. They are paid and empowered by the American people to enforce laws against theft, looting, assault, and murder and refuse to do so. But nothing will be done to punish the real criminals because they are above the law.
Many Americans know the truth very well, but they also understand that there seems to be nothing that can be done about it anymore. This comment was made by a reader to an article in the Wall Street Journal in 2021:
…the important thing is for government to take money from citizens…
Once upon a time, in a land that had a constitution, there lived a few good people who knew the difference between taxation for a laudable goal and taxation as a cover for theft and extortion . . .
That was long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away and we are left with politicians who proclaim that it is their birthright to steal all of your hard-earned money.
Mary Michael
How much money can American private-sector thieves really steal? Maybe the damage they do is infinitesimal compared to what the big-time organized criminals are getting away with. Maybe the worst criminals are the people who take $trillions in taxes and are given immense power to do the job of providing justice but instead create injustice.
