THE CONTEMPOTARY USA IS MORE VIOLENT THAN THE WILD WEST

There are many historical examples of functioning anarchist or near anarchist societies. One of the most well known is that of Medieval Iceland. However, one of my favourites is that of the "Old West," that is the Western frontier in the USA. Its drawback compared to Iceland is that the Icelandic commonwealth lasted for 300 years, whilst the Old West was effectively anarchic for some 70 odd years. Its advantage of Iceland, however, is that it is more legitimately anarchic. The Icelandic commonwealth had, first of all, a limit on the number of courts there could be at a time, meaning that, whilst there was a competitive judiciary of sorts, there being competition between what courts there are, it was anti-competitive in the sense that there was no free entry to the industry for new competitors. Moreover, whilst Godi, those that have the right to set up a court, have an incentive to increase the number of the followers, and so an incentive to create pressure for the sorts of laws their followers want to live under, Iceland did not have a complete example of a "market for law." It had a legislature, made up of the Godi, reputedly the world's first parliament. So, Iceland had publicly produced law, enforced privately, under which disputes were settled in limitedly competitive courts.

The Old West, however, had privately produced law, private enforcement, and private dispute resolution. As Anderson and Hill wrote, in their classic article, "American Example of Anarcho-capitalism: The Not so Wild, Wild West,"

Although the early west was not completely anarchistic, we believe that government as a legitimate agency of coercion was absent for a long enough period to provide insights into the operation and viability of property rights in the absence of a formal state. The nature of contracts for the provision of 'public goods' and the evolution of western 'laws' for the period from 1830 to 1900 will provide the data for this case study.

The West during this time often is perceived as a place of great chaos, with little respect for property or life. Our research indicates that this was not the case; property rights were protected and civil order prevailed. Private agencies provided the necessary basis for an orderly society in which property was protected and conflicts were resolved. These agencies often did not qualify as governments because they did not have a legal monopoly on 'keeping order'. They soon discovered that 'warfare' was a costly way of resolving disputes and lower cost methods of settlement (arbitration, courts, etc.) resulted.

Moreover, this was successful: Society was largely peaceful with this anarchist arrangement. It was this fact that I emphasised in a debate on the plausability of anarchism, when I posted on Liberty Forum the following quote from Anderson and Hill. Anderson and Hill were pointing out the prevalence in film and literature of portrails of the Old West as violent:

Recently, however, more careful examinations of the conditions that existed cause one to doubt the accuracy of this perception. In his book, Frontier Violence: Another Look, W. Eugene Hollon stated that he believed 'that the Western frontier was a far more civilised, more peaceful, and safer place than American society is today.' The legend of the 'wild, wild west' lives on despite Robert Dykstra's finding that in five of the major cattle-towns (Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell) for the years from 1870 to 1885, only 45 homicides were reported - an average of 1.5 per-cattle trading season. In Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, 'nobody was killed in 1869 or 1870. In fact, nobody was killed until the advent of officers of the law, employed to prevent killings.' Only two towns, Ellsworth in 1873 and Dodge City in 1876, ever had five kilings in more than one year. Frank Prassel sates in his book subtitled A legacy of Law and Order,' that 'if any conclusion can be drawn from recent crime statistics, it must be that this last frontier left no significant heritage of offences against the person, relative to other sections of the country.' Moreover, even if crime rates were higher, it should be remembered that the preference for order can differ across time and people. To show that the West was more 'lawless' than our present day society tells one very little unless some measure of the 'demand for law and order' is available. 'While the frontier society may appear to have functioned with many violations of formal law, it sometimes more truly reflected community customs in conflict with superficial and at times alien standards.' The vigilance committees which sprang up in many of the mining towns of the West provide excellent examples of this conflict. In most instances these committees arose after civil government was organised. They proved that competition was useful in cases where government was ineffective, as in the case of San Francisco in the 1850s, or where government became the province of criminals who used the legal monopoly on coercion to further their own ends, as in Virginia City, Montana Territory in the 1860's. Even in these cases, however, violence was not the standard modus operandi. When the San Francisco vigilance committee was reconstituted in 1856, 'the group remained in action for three months, swelling its membership to more than eight thousand. During this period, San Francisco had only two murders, compared with more than a hundred in the six months before the committee was formed'.

A chap calling himself Anthem (and sporting an avatar of Tennyson) made the following response to my post:

Your one example of criminal law is badly flawed. 5 murders in one year out of a population of at most 1000 is like 7500 murders a year in a metropolitan area of 1.5 million people. I noticed your quote contained a throwaway line about "crime rates", and then continued on with a constructed fantasy that doesn't go into syndicate behavior. Relying on people to realize that conflict is less productive ignores those who use conflict purposefully to gain advantage. Until anarchists address this substantively, it remains a hollow theory.

I'm not sure what he meant by "syndicate behaviour," and the rest of the debate centred over his first sentence related to the figures I gave him. I actually responded by pointing out this was not a representation of my example:

Which example was that? The example I gave of the Old West was not in a population of one thousand, nor did it involve five murders a year. It was in five major cattle towns, Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City and Caldwell, and was 45 murders in fifteen years. That works out at three a year. Abilene was supposedly one of the wildest towns, and yet there was not a single murder in 1869 and 1870. It was only in two specific years, 1873 and 1876, that the murder rate went up to five a year - the average was lower.

Anthem's response was strange, since it seemed to ignore the fact that I was not talking about the population of one town but the combined populations of five towns:

OK, Dodge's population was 1200. Hardly worth quibbling about given that your author dismisses crime rates as a relative social construct.

As a sideline, I did ask Anthem what he meant by "relative social construct," and what he had against relative comparisons anyway, but he gave no coherent answer. He did, however, accuse me of "poor reasoning based on distortions of fact." I had to come back on that issue, by highlighting the fact that I was not talking about the population of one town but of five combined towns:

Like your previous statement, "Your one example of criminal law is badly flawed. 5 murders in one year out of a population of at most 1000 is like 7500 murders a year in a metropolitan area of 1.5 million people," which is a blatant distortion of the facts? The average murder rate in the five busiest cattle towns was closer to three a year, sometimes less than one, sometimes as much as five. Three, as a percentage of a population of 1200, is 0.25%. 0.25% of a metropolitan area of 1.5 million is 3750, which is almost half the figure you gave.

I closed the debate with this longer post:

I forgot another detail. The original quote from my source was,

The legend of the 'wild, wild west' lives on despite Robert Dykstra's finding that in five of the major cattle-towns (Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell) for the years from 1870 to 1885, only 45 homicides were reported - an average of 1.5 per-cattle trading season. In Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, 'nobody was killed in 1869 or 1870. In fact, nobody was killed until the advent of officers of the law, employed to prevent killings.' Only two towns, Ellsworth in 1873 and Dodge City in 1876, ever had five kilings in more than one year.

That's 45 murders in five towns, not in one, and over fifteen years. So when you said that "Dodge's population was 1200," I actually need the average population for fifteen years of all those cities. Dodge city did not have a stable population, since the west was undergoing mass immigration from the East, or course. From this source,

Population in 1870, 427; population in 1875, 813; increase in five years, 386; population in 1878, 2,160; increase in eight years, 1,733. Rural population, 1,512; city or town population, 648; per cent. of rural to city or town population, 70.

That is a massive rate of increase! Hard to work out an average population for that period. Note that my source says that five murders in one year was a high number in the later years covered by this, though. I think that the mean for those first eight years, though, works out close to your 1200 figure.

Now, assume that Dodge was much the same size as the other towns, that is 45 murders over fifteen years in a population five times the mean of Dodge's, which means 6,000. 45 murders over fifteen years is three a year, average. I think that means the average murder as percentage of the population is 0.05. That is less than the murder rate for contemporary Washington DC.

Anthem stopped posting on that thread. I got no, "Oh, OK; Jeese, I guess you are right," but I never expected one. I'm just content with the knowledge that I won. Oh, and the figures for the murder rates in modern US cities is here.