? These comments about not understanding the nature of policing are so bizarre it's hard to understand the pop psychology in effect here. I think either young

? These comments about not understanding the nature of policing are so bizarre it's hard to understand the pop psychology in effect here. I think either young people, or a certain kind of person, for some reason develops an odd intuition for what people are, how people behave, what civilization actually is. Most people behave fairly well, largely because we're socialized strongly into that. But the moment that the rules are lifted - literally that moment - then 5% of us take advantage of that and that's all it takes for chaos. If the government announced 'no policing' then most banks and stores would be robbed immediately. At least 20% of would just 'go with the chaos' seeing 'free stuff to be had, sucker to wait around' and anything not protected would be looted. There would be violent standoffs between people hired to protect stuff and people wanting to steal. That chaos would descend very quickly into regular social life, people hurting each other out of revenge, vendetta, traffic rage etc.. The 'psychopaths' violence would very quickly escalate way outside their circles. We have the social experiment already, in 1969 Montreal (generally very peaceful, very few guns etc.) went on strike and within hours the city was in chaos. Here is Stephen Pinker's personal recollection as he was a young idealistic man then: “As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin’s anarchism. I laughed off my parents’ argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a.m. on October 7, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 am, the first bank was robbed. By noon, most of the downtown stores were closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).” [1] If one takes a moment to think about it, it's so obvious though, what's 'interesting' about it is why people would think the result would be too far away from this one way or another. Anyhow: there are tons of regulations at every level of banking, and that's why you don't see financial fraud on every corner. [1] Pinker, Steven (2003). The Blank Slate. Penguin Books. p. 285. ISBN 0-14-200334-4.