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Boston Manhunt: Victory for Private Citizens

Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

I expect that if I don't say something about this subject I will soon be the only regular blogger in the northeastern United States who hasn't.

My sympathies of course to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, the dead and the injured and the families of both. The death of someone as young as Martin Richard is always especially heartbreaking.

But you don't come here for the usual hearts and flowers dear reader. Let's see if we can say something not already said.  We can do so if we turn our attention to the manhunt, which began in earnest Thursday evening with another crime, the murder of a security officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Late Thursday evening, Sean Collier, responding to a disturbance, was shot and killed. That set off a wild 24-hour period that ended with one of Collier's murderers dead and the other in custody.

Perhaps this is something of a take-away. We're often told that government is necessary to keep people safe, otherwise we'd have chaos. But in the case of these dangerous criminals, they were first flushed out by a private security official, an employee of a private institution not a sovereign, who gave the last full measure of devotion to that end.

And, almost 24 hours later, it was another private individual who found the surviving member of the pair hiding in his boat.

In both cases, the sovereignty-based security officers simply responded to the initiatives of private individuals. Here is how Slate (no hothouse of anarchists) puts it -- with a critical and accurate bracketed addition of my own: "Police used a robot, flashbangs, and a thermal camera to [attempt to] apprehend second Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhat Tsarnaev on Friday night. as Boston police recounted in a press conference shortly afterward. But it was a citizen's alarming encounter with the suspect that proved to be the key in finding him."

Why were the statist officers ineffective? Because the sovereignty-based police were seeing like  sovereigns. In terms of boundaries. Firm lines on maps. as SLATE puts it a bit later.

"Tsarnaev had managed to elude police because he was slightly outside the search perimeter that law enforcement had set up."

OMG how sneaky! He was on the wrong side of an arbitrary line.

So it seems reasonable that enforcing the peace could be improved, not undermined, by privatization.

Anarcho-capitalism: catch the fever.
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