Anarchy On The Frontier

in anarchy •  8 years ago  (edited)

@LarkenRose made a comment on Facebook today that I wanted to expand upon:

"When I was growing up, I often watched the "Little House on the Prairie" television series, which was loosely based on the factual "Little House" books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. (Her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, wrote "Discovery of Freedom -- Man's Struggle Against Authority," which is brilliant.) In all the times I watched the show when I was young, and for years afterwards, it never occurred to me to wonder, "Wait, where is the government? Where are the cops?" There weren't any. It was an anarchist society, as was much of the American frontier, simply because the control freak parasites couldn't physically keep up with all the people migrating west. People cooperated, worked hard, and handled their own problems. Things went rather well until the damn "government" caught up. So that's a real-world example of "anarchy" that I don't think gets mentioned enough."


Being born in the early 80's to a "Born Again" Evangelical Protestant family, I am, by far, no stranger to Little House on the Prairie. Being from Missouri, I am no stranger to the history of the Frontier and the "Wild West". His comment really spoke to me. Until he brought it to my attention, I had never thought about how there was no sense of 'law and order' as we think of it today, that is to say, bureacracy, police, inspectors, et cetera. But now that I have thought of it, I can't think of any real moment in that show in which the community was 'saved' by the state. They always ended up helping each other out, solving their own problems, relying on themselves and those around them. No need to force anyone to do things a certain way. People lived their lives and when lives intersected, people navigated the interaction based on the foundations of respect, responsibility and independence.

But then, what can I say to the detractors that want to say I want a return to the "Wild West"? WIthout having yet read the article he mentions, my answer is simple. Yes. Because the Wild West is a far cry from what Hollywood and the masses envision. It was honestly no more and likely less violent than today. It was far less crime ridden, per capita. And it virtually had no real government, instead, it had communities comprised of individuals who came together to deal with community issues rather than appealing to some 'authority' that was never really there.

"BUT THE CRIMINALS! SHOWDOWNS IN THE STREETS!!!1!"
Mostly exagerrated. In their time, they were noteworthy and a 'big deal' but, compared to the incidents of modern times, they would barely make the Metro section of your newspapers. The criminals rarely lived past their 30's and almost always lived in the wilderness, not being welcome in most towns and having dead or alive 'bounties' on their heads, usually by ranches or entire towns. To be a criminal in that time was to die young and likely at the hands of an entire town for just about any injury committed, such as stealing a horse.

Compare that to today. This is the safest period in history for criminals. They rarely are caught. They have little threat of deadly force to be used against them for all but the 'greatest' of crimes. IF they are caught, they can escape on quibbled technicalities. If not, they rarely serve any significant fraction of their time and typically never become reformed. Today, if you commit the equivalent crime of stealing a horse, stealing a car, it's a very different set of odds and risks today than in the early and mid 1800's West of the Mississippi.

Old West:
You could easily be shot or hanged for stealing a horse, on the spot or perhaps after a trial that was usually conducted by the most 'trusted' and 'educated' person in the town. There was NO reprecussion for a person killing a known horse thief. They chose to be an 'outlaw' and to take from others rather than to earn on their own, no one had sympathy for them.
This alone was the single largest deterrent of crime on the Frontier and in the West. If you were a criminal, you had little legal 'protections'.

Today:
Most areas don't allow you to kill someone for stealing a car, even your own. Criminals, knowing this, are almost always going to steal cars in areas where people can't take it upon themselves to protect property. Even if you are 'allowed' to protect your property, you still have a specter of the threat of legal reprecussions for shooting a car thief. You can be sued, the shooting can be declared unjustified and you would face manslaughter charges or you might use 'excessive force' thus risking an assault charge or worse.
Chances are, if your car is stolen, you won't get it back, if you do, it will likely be in much worse condition than before. The revocery rate is about 46%.
And you can forget about the thief being caught. Most police don't want real crimes to deal with, those require work and risk. They go for the easy 'kills', warrants via traffic stops. There is little incentive to the justice system to spend the thousands of dollars necessary to chase down a car thief. Compared to the work to chase them down, hold them, try them and, ultimately, incarcerate them, the paltry fines they get to impose aren't worth it. Compare that to an insurance ticket or a seatbelt ticket which have little chance of any real police work or cost to the system once the ticket is issued. The solve rate for car thefts in many regions is less than 10%.

We're not even talking about sentencing and imposition of sentence yet.

Grand Theft Auto typically has a 5 year maximum sentence. Most courts have programs for 'first time offenders' in which they can get off scot free with no record. Those that are sentenced often have their sentence suspended with stringent probation. The rest rarely serve more than 60% of their time sentenced, ie, about 3 years. And that's provided they don't make an appeal and win it on a technicality or luck into a position in which they don't have the room and so they get kicked to a halfway house.

And the rehabilitiation rate? In general, nearly 60% are rearrested within a year of release. Nearly 70% within 3 years and more than 3/4's of released prisoners are rearrested within 5 years. Now, silly parole violations aside, there's little doubt that much of these repeat arrests are the results of continued criminal activity, likely in the same vein as the initial crimes.

So what does all this mean? Today, a criminal has little reason to fear being caught. First, it's unlikely and the victims are actively and passively deterred from seeking justice beyond filing a report. Second, when they are finally caught, they are, quite often, given a slap on the wrist. Third, the justice system has little incentive to waste resources on crimes that barely merit mention in any news outlet. Finally, when they do manage to get caught and do manage to be 'punished' the punishment is obviously so laughable that it does little to deter them from returning to their previous activities.


The West and the Frontier were both very romanticized, especially in the early 20th and that romance was reinvigorated in the 50's. With all the Westerns showing outlaws running from Marshals and 'lawdogs' serving justeice in the streets, it's no wonder we have this notion of a crime-riddled world where bullets flew more than words. The truth is an armed society is a polite society and when choosing crime means risking looking down the barrel of a revolver or having your neck stretched, choosing crime doesn't seem all that lucratice or viable.

So yes, I want a return to the Frontier and Old West. I want people to take personal responsibility for their own protection. I want people to deal with their and their neighbor's issues rather than rely on strangers to solve and deal with them with little incentive to care what the affected persons want or need. I want people to have a sense of self-reliance and responsibility and a sense of community that is fostered by not being dependent on 'authority' to deal with our communities' problems.

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Lol. In the wild west, people had to check their guns in with the sheriff before entering a city. That's a big reason why there was relatively little crime in cities.

Right, that's why most of your showdowns occurred in the 'cities' back then. Because their gun control measures worked. Most of your communities in the Frontier and the West didn't even have any real police. They might have appointed someone to walk around and deal with drunks and outsiders, but there was little in the way of any 'law' in those towns. Furthermore, most of the 'gun control' back then applied to those coming into town. Those who lived there had and often carried, openly, but, just like I don't let strangers come in my house armed, small communities didn't want outsiders to be as readily able to cause trouble. For the bigger towns and cities, they often discouraged carrying of any type for a number of reasons but most notably for 'appearances' in order to attract businesses and investors.

And even though we are ignoring the fact that I'm not really getting into the cities of the West like Dodge and Tombstone, we can go ahead and put this to rest fairly easily by pointing out that there is no corraborative evidence to show that those 'laws' contributed to the lack of crime.
Where only the law had guns, you will see a rise in criminal activity, armed and unarmed, as you need only escape a handful of men. But it was in the small towns where carrying was the norm that you saw many of your criminals dealt with and it was those towns that criminals typically avoided being in for more than a night or two unless they were traveling several men deep. Even then, they feared the posse over the Sherrifs far more than most want to admit.
No matter how you spin it, when you let communities take care of themselves, they do so and typically better than the state has ever managed.

I love the example because it shows how people went about designing their own towns or communities. There are hundreds of anecdotal answers to the "What if" posits by statists. Hell, the range wars are a perfect starting point for cautionary tales for community organizers. Dealing with power concentration--which happens whether or not government is part of the community--is easier because we have examples all over the West. The reactions of the settlers are also historical examples of hundreds of "if ;then" scenarios. When faced with native people who weren't happy about the invasion, some stayed and fought, some moved on, and some....called on the government to 'handle' the problem. Without government, the attempted genocide would not have happened. There would have been skirmishes, battles, and wars, but without the massive concentration of power (control of resources), they would have looked much different.