There Are Days When Commentary Seems Superfluous...

     ...because the news speaks for itself:

• The Hunter Biden emails have been verified as authentic.
• Businesses are boarding up pre-emptively.
• Oh, come on, now!
• The Times’s Op-Ed writers are ready for the rubber room.

     Gentle Reader, were I to pour the totality of my “future columns” links upon your weary eyes, you’d start wondering what country you woke up in this morning. However, the four linked above should suffice to indicate my frame of mind. It’s incredible that the Land of the Free should be in its current condition, but here we are. Worse, we have no one to blame but ourselves:

• We elected Joe Biden to the post from which he could sell American foreign policy.
• We failed to raise our children to respect law, public order, and property rights.
• We failed to help our communities to protect property rights.
• We kowtowed to far too many government meddlers.
• And may God forgive us: for years we bought the New York Times for its crossword puzzles!

     I know, I know. I can hear you muttering that “It wasn’t me! I didn’t do any of that!” Well, what did you do to prevent it? I can only answer for myself: not enough.

     That’s it for the gloomy intro. Now on to the gloomy analysis.

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     Let us ponder the rioting / looting phenomenon as a special case of the general problem the morally deficient face: how a prospective criminal arrives at the answer to the question “Can I get away with it?”

     When the value of “it” is “stealing this particular object,” all the following considerations play into the answer:

• Will I be seen?
• If I am seen, will those who see me make use of it?
• Am I being recorded?
• Will the police take an interest, and if so, how zealous will they be?
• Will others know who might betray me at a later date?

     The answers to those questions are heavily influenced by other contextual factors. In the case of the looting that currently afflicts several cities, the most important of them appears to be the number of other persons striving to do what the prospective thief is contemplating. If the number of looters is large compared to the number of persons ready, willing, and able to prevent the theft and / or enforce the law afterward, all the other factors seem to fade to insignificance.

     As Rose Wilder Lane noted in the Discovery of Freedom, the security of your property depends, more than anything else, on how those around you feel about private property. If they respect it, it will be secure – and its security will derive in large measure from others’ willingness to act against those who would take it from you.

     The police might be involved, but in the usual case only “after the fact.”

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     The looters are currently getting away with their looting because they heavily outnumber those who are ready, willing, and able to stop them. Moreover, they’re aware of that, and that it would not be the case in many other locales. So they’ve restricted their activities to those domains in which they can’t or won’t be impeded.

     This, too, is our fault. Private-citizen Americans were once as important to the enforcement of the law as the police, if not more so. That was especially the case concerning property crimes. But in our cities today, the Sergeant Schultz attitude is prevalent. Private citizens are massively disinclined to “get involved.” “It’s the police’s job,” they say.

     Why? It’s a separate study with several factors, including the use of the law to disarm urban residents. But the moral of the story is clear: should the ethic that defends private property weaken among the public, there will be more property crime, and it will go unpunished ever more often.

     As the AntiFa types have demonstrated, the same logic applies to assaults on persons. Which leads us to an overwhelming question:

Do you go about armed?

     As you can see, there are many reasons to indulge in more than a single drink, these nights.