>> ...but from what I've seen the crime comes as a response to
>> busybodies trying to make life miserable for as many other people
>> as possible with as many laws and taxes as possible. Cities with
>> the most laws and taxes have the most crime... duh....or else that
>> city has cops on every street corner... martial law.
> I think [the examples of Hong Kong and Singapore] can be used against > your position. ingapore has to have one of the most rigid top-down > controlled environments in the world.
Actually, it makes the point exactly: low-crime areas either have little government interfering with people's rights (like Hong Kong, before Chinese ownership at least), or are dictatorial police states like Singapore (a great example that Democracy and a Police State are quite compatible).
Singapore is /not/ crime-free. What does it mean to be crime-free? Ask a typical citizen, and ey will say that ey wants to feel safe that ey can live eir life and go about eir normal business without fear of being accosted by thugs or murdered. You can't do that in Singapore. Every citizen of Singapore lives in fear that ey will be robbed, beaten, or killed: it's just that the thugs have badges. To say that a Singaporean need only obey the draconian laws to prevent such a fate is a lie: police there don't care about innocence, only about the image of Singapore. If they can beat a confession out of you or plant evidence to keep up that image, they will.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC