In discussions about society and the state, the topic of the “profitability” of violence constantly comes up. They say it’s so simple — you come, take everything you need from another person, and go on your way. You will definitely encounter this thesis if you discuss the state and its role in our lives. Many theories are based on it (often mutually exclusive ones), such as claims about the inevitability of the state’s spontaneous emergence, “out of the mud.” Meanwhile, the thesis itself is erroneous, whatever conclusions might be drawn from it.
It is clear that no activity is always more profitable than others. Everything depends on time, place, and many other factors. An ordinary law-abiding person earning a living by peaceful labor may well find themselves in conditions where they will take by force the last crust of bread from a child. These things happen. Therefore, the very formulation of the thesis “violence is always more profitable” is incorrect, at least in the word “always.” This also means that the question of the profitability of violence cannot be examined theoretically, and we cannot prove that the “profitability” of violence is a universal pattern. Interestingly, people who use this thesis as an argument usually do so within theoretical reasoning. The reason, apparently, is that everyone understands producing some good takes time and requires effort, but taking that good by force — as it were — requires no costs at all. So one can picture the scene: a peasant patiently growing a crop and a bandit who takes the entire harvest in one minute. There’s your theory. However, in nature there are no spherical fools in a vacuum from whom one can safely take the fruits of their hard labor. There are no rigid dependencies here, except those related to human activity in general — everything depends on circumstances and human choice. Today the bandit manages to do evil, tomorrow the peasant arms himself. And so on. However, logical conclusions usually convince no one, especially when it comes to belief (and here, it seems, that is exactly the case). So it would be useful to ask — how often in ordinary life do people choose to take what belongs to others by force? If people resort to it often, then it is, as a rule, profitable; if not — then not.
Of course, quantifying this is quite difficult; any study of this type claiming accuracy should immediately be thrown into the furnace. But one can evaluate it qualitatively — “a lot” — “a little,” “more” — “less.” Let’s take the city of Kyiv, which by conservative estimates has 3,000,000 inhabitants. Let’s assume that each inhabitant performs two acts of voluntary exchange per week (shopping at stores, and so on). I think this is a significantly underestimated assumption, but let’s go with it. Enterprises also engage in exchanges. There are 75,338 registered enterprises in Kyiv. It’s harder with them, since they are all very different — someone exists only on paper, while someone else runs around like a squirrel in a wheel. So let’s equate them to citizens and assume they also interact with each other on average twice a week. In this case, we are not talking about units of products bought and sold, but about units of interaction, and moreover not with the end customer, but with each other. That is, there are 3,075,338 exchange subjects in Kyiv in total, and each performs two acts of voluntary exchange per week according to our very conservative estimates, totaling 6,150,676 exchanges. Over 8 months — that is, over 32 weeks — all these people will carry out 196,821,632 acts of voluntary non-violent exchange. We can compare this with crime statistics for this period — that is, with the number of cases when people chose acts of violence. Over 8 months of the previous year, 51,553 crimes were committed. Again, let’s leave aside the accuracy of the classification (for example, who falls under the article “fraud”) and similar matters. Even if we assume that the police traditionally understate the statistics for serious crimes, this will not seriously affect our numbers. Even if there were not 53 murders, as the statistics say, but 530, and not 28 rapes, but 280, this would not change the order of magnitude. Now let’s perform a simple operation — compare these two figures. As we can see, people committed almost 4,000 times more acts of voluntary exchange than acts of violence. At the same time, it is clear that I underestimated the exchange figures, reasoning that “it definitely cannot be less than…,” whereas in reality this ratio would be even larger in favor of voluntary exchanges. Of course, people will tell me that this is precisely what proves the necessity of the state, which vigilantly watches and so on. It is easy to counter this by noting that we all know the price of vigilant surveillance and the state’s capacity for such surveillance. Where people really find it beneficial to engage in some activity, the state is powerless to prevent it. Let’s take the same “economic activity” as an example. Ordinary people, unlike entrepreneurs, are not yet forced to submit monthly reports to the police about their good behavior, regular inspections do not yet come to one’s home. That is, the “economic sphere” is controlled by the state far more strictly than the sphere of private relations, and yet, by optimistic estimates, up to 40% of the economy is in the shadows — people evade the care and control — and the reason for this is the profit they receive. If violence were really as profitable as is commonly believed, at least to the same degree as ordinary exchanges, crime rates would be orders of magnitude higher (and generally speaking, no “society” would exist, I would not be writing these lines, and we would be walking around in skins).
One can object even more simply. The absence of the state does not automatically mean a transition to a state of spherical fools in a vacuum, unjustly robbed by equally spherical all-powerful bandits. The absence of the state simply means that the forced monopoly on security services disappears. Instead of forcibly monopolistic police and courts, there will be private organizations dealing with security.
By the way, here one can again wonderfully discern causes and effects. If we compare robbery statistics (147 cases for the specified period) with taxation statistics (think for yourself how many acts of taxation occurred in Kyiv over 8 months of last year), then once more we can see who serves what purpose here and who is the cause and who is the effect. Let me remind you that criminal law classifies taxes as robbery. And as we can see, private unorganized robbery is, as it were, somewhat inferior to organized state robbery. And this is precisely the case when violence can be profitable. The only condition is that violence must be organized and legalized, and all resistance to it must be severely punished. Then — yes. Otherwise — no. In general, those who speak of the profitability of violence forget to look out the window. After all, even in books, robbers hide in awful dens in cities or live in dugouts in the forest, and this is not an exception but a rule. The fact that their business is considered profitable is the merit of state universal education, which instills this idea from early childhood and which teaches one to perceive propaganda, not reality. “Well yes,” says education — “you came and took, what could be simpler.” In such cases, I always remember the immortal words: “those who say ‘simpler than taking a candy from a child’ have never tried to take a candy from a child.” Try it.