Robert Higgs wrote “Crisis and Leviathan”, chronicling the growth of government power through crises. People who want government to grow have an interest in creating actual or perceived crises.
The debt ceiling is used as a crisis to shrink government. Regardless of your goals, if you want political change in our Western democratic culture a crisis is useful.
You’re arguing that the supposed decrease in crime is actually an artifact of decreased reporting to police and increased effectiveness in hospital trauma care?
I think that it likely that over the last decades overall crime rates went down. On the other hand some of the change in crime numbers we see is likely through other effects and whenever you have the debate about the subject you should be aware of those factors.
You should always be a bit skeptic that the numbers that you have actually describe reality fully.
Wouldn’t attempted murder rates go a long way toward clearing that up?
If you count crimes, counting murder rates has the advantage that if there’s a shot dead body, it’s quite obvious that a person was killed. There might be some issue with separating manslaughter from murder, but a dead body nearly always triggers procedures in the official bureaucracy.
The same is not true with attempted murder. In a community where the police isn’t trusted by the population some attempted murders won’t be reported. That’s why arguments such as the one linked in the OP are often made via the murder rate.
We do have another tool for determining the amount of crime: Victimization surveys.
But they also aren’t perfect.
The debt ceiling is used as a crisis to shrink government.
They’ve tried again and again and again. Government gotten smaller yet?
The debt ceiling itself is not a tactic of “crisis”. It is an attempt to put limits on government spending. Leaving it to a “crisis” is the successful tactic of those who would and have blown through it time and time again.
I believe the republicans are in full capitulation on this point. Maybe with both chambers of congress they’ll feel that they can control the narrative by putting a bill on the president’s desk for him to sign or not. But I doubt it.
but a dead body nearly always triggers procedures in the official bureaucracy. The same is not true with attempted murder.
Yeah, but I would think people are pretty motivated to report actual attempts to kill them.
You should always be a bit skeptic that the numbers that you have actually describe reality fully.
I certainly agree with that. Conscious of abstration, etc.
The debt ceiling is used as a crisis to shrink government. Regardless of your goals, if you want political change in our Western democratic culture a crisis is useful.
I think that it likely that over the last decades overall crime rates went down. On the other hand some of the change in crime numbers we see is likely through other effects and whenever you have the debate about the subject you should be aware of those factors.
You should always be a bit skeptic that the numbers that you have actually describe reality fully.
If you count crimes, counting murder rates has the advantage that if there’s a shot dead body, it’s quite obvious that a person was killed. There might be some issue with separating manslaughter from murder, but a dead body nearly always triggers procedures in the official bureaucracy.
The same is not true with attempted murder. In a community where the police isn’t trusted by the population some attempted murders won’t be reported. That’s why arguments such as the one linked in the OP are often made via the murder rate.
We do have another tool for determining the amount of crime: Victimization surveys. But they also aren’t perfect.
They’ve tried again and again and again. Government gotten smaller yet?
The debt ceiling itself is not a tactic of “crisis”. It is an attempt to put limits on government spending. Leaving it to a “crisis” is the successful tactic of those who would and have blown through it time and time again.
I believe the republicans are in full capitulation on this point. Maybe with both chambers of congress they’ll feel that they can control the narrative by putting a bill on the president’s desk for him to sign or not. But I doubt it.
Yeah, but I would think people are pretty motivated to report actual attempts to kill them.
I certainly agree with that. Conscious of abstration, etc.