@topspin said in In other news today...:
Maybe some kind of mob system where you pay protection money for the things police/fire department/military protects you from, because it'd be a shame if something happened?
Mind you, prior to the late 19th century, that is precisely how firefighting companies worked in most places that had any (which was pretty much only major cities). Their 'services' did indeed include the shakedown, though it was usually more a case of them showing up at a fire and then 'renegotiating' their fee while the building burned before they did anything - fires were common enough that they hardly needed to make threats. They also were infamous for only putting out the buildings they were paid to.
They would even do the ambulance chaser thing of heading over to buildings they hadn't been hired to protect yet, waiting politely but very visibly on the street corner, and then graciously accept two or three times their usual negotiated rate (cash on the barrelhead) to help out a new customer. Often two or three different fire companies would show up at once. And start brawls outside over who would get the job.
This happened with private police departments as well; most municipal governments only had a county sheriff plus whoever they had as deputies (and they usually only deputized someone for a specific case), whose role wasn't so much protective law enforcement as it was hunting down known outlaws (as in, someone with an outstanding charge), wrangling prisoners, and enforcing court orders and evictions. Major cities would also have some kind of district or parish constabulary, but they weren't so much an organized police force as what would today be called a neighborhood watch; and walled cities sometimes had city guards, but they were focused on protecting the city from invasion, not criminal activity, and were more or less out of the picture by 1650 or so anyway.
General police departments only appeared around 1830 or so with the formation of the London Metropolitan Police department, (there had been an earlier Marine Police, which was the first real organized police force in the UK, but they only really covered the dockyards), and the parallel London City Police; the Bobbies and the Coppers were known for a serious rivalry, and like the firefighters, were known to throw down with each other over who got the honor of carrying out a big action.
Finally, it should be pointed out that, Constitutionally, the US national armed forces are supposed to be just an officers corps for organizing the actions of local militia; indeed, that's what the Second Amendment was really about. The whole nonsense about gun rights is a misreading of the article: what it really says is that every citizen is required to drill with a local militia, and that these militias (not the individuals, though in practice regulating the firearms of the time would be both impossible given the thin populations, and pointless given the limits of muskets of the time) would maintain a stock of arms for use in the case of an emergency.
To put it another way: The 2nd amendment mandates universal conscription, but forbid forming a standing permanent army!
Unfortunately, the framers were too subtle by half; for political reasons, they couldn't come out and say what it was for, any more than they could with the rest of the Bill of Rights, and they of course could predict the course of weapons technology over the next hundred years.
Needless to say, that idea, appealing as it is to many even today, didn't even make it to the War of 1812 intact, and was completely untenable when the US Civil War began. Even if it were workable before then, the rise of repeating rifles and automatic weapons, not to mention modern artillery, made the idea of defending a country with a militia, armed solely with what the conscripts could carry on foot, impossible.
Anyway... it is a long-standing argument of Libertarians that this could be done today, and that it would work better. As much as I sympathize with the desire to reduce government intervention in private affairs, I personally think that they have too rosy a picture of the actual behavior of such private protective firms - they fell out of favor for a reason. Nor do I think that the idea scales well - the biggest and hardest part of modern police, fire, and military operations is logistics and coordination, something which absolutely requires a top-down control structure.