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Comment by pfannkuchen | Hacker News Reader

I find the crime part of black markets pretty interesting. When you are selling legal products, if someone rips you off the system will generally help you, and the police may use violence as part of helping you. When you are selling illegal products, the system won’t help you and you have to be your own police. The big difference is that police violence is not considered “crime” while your violence is, even if they are achieving similar goals.

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The difference is that with “your own illegal police” aka gangs, the ultimate destination for when someone “commits a crime” (aka whatever gangs would consider a crime) is a bit more grim. Your judge and jury are often just the nicknames of firearms that the “prosecutor” brought with them. And of course, the evidence standards are lacking significantly more, compared to the real legal system.

And sure, cops suck quite often. I am yet to see cops en masse shooting up those reported for ripping others off in one way or another. On the other hand, you have unfortunately very common “drug deal gone wrong” incidents that end in pretty deadly “illegal prosecution”.

Cops get plenty of opportunities to be judge, jury, and executioner. They’re a pox on free society.

Yeah obviously gangs are bad. I’m reasonably pro police. I just think it’s interesting at an abstract level. Like, the shapes of the two things are very, very similar if you squint hard enough, even though they are regarded as complete opposites. It is a kind of elegance.

Police violence is regulated and codified. It’s a monopoly, so there is little need to do a ‘race to the bottom’ between different police forces (for instance), as long as they can win against folks like criminals.

In a black market, violence is a competitive advantage in many cases. The most violent has the most ‘authority’ (can assert the most control), so in a competitive environment there are strong incentives to be the most violent. Too violent for other players to want to mess with.

It’s why cartels, warlords, etc. end up becoming so terrible.

Police operate by rule of law, and criminal organizations operate by rule of man.

Dr Obvious

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