Policing is the Most Important Job in the World

Take a moment to engage in a thought experiment. 

Imagine a world without medical doctors. Hospitals do not exist, medical parks are never built, the Band-Aid corporation is one of the largest companies on earth due to our lack of other options for dealing with wounds. Life expectancies are around ~40 years instead of the current 80, and many people have odd deformities and limps and untreated chronic conditions that reduce both the length and the quality of their lives. 

This isn’t great! But, society goes on. People continue to go to work, eat at restaurants, buy and sell goods, and go to their children’s baseball games. But be careful, sweetie!

Now, imagine a world without police. 

There are no police department buildings or jails, no people walking around in blue uniforms with a bunch of stuff clipped to their belt. If someone robs you, nobody will help, and if someone kills you, all your family can do is mourn. Gun manufacturers are now the largest companies in the world, as every person keeps two pieces on them at all times to deal with the daily onslaught of violence on the streets and pouring through into their homes. Businesses do not exist, as defending a building against thieves is virtually impossible, and any person with skills is regularly forced at gunpoint to provide services for free.

I submit to you that a society without police is significantly worse than a society without doctors, because in such a society we cannot have doctors, we cannot have shops, we cannot have restaurants, we cannot have anything. 

This radical result - that it is easier to imagine a world without physicians than a world without police - exposes some of the social arrangements that underlie everything about our world. The rights of individuals to life and property are safeguarded by law enforcement. Upon these rights, everything you see around you is built. Without these guarantees, nobody wants to leave their home, nobody wants to live near another person, nobody wants to invest in equipment or other property needed for a business. Without police, the most we can hope for is a sparsely populated and rural continent where people rarely see their neighbors and you occasionally come upon a farmhouse to find all the inhabitants murdered.

This is why policing is the most important job in the world. Without it, the entire edifice of civilization collapses. If you care about serving humanity, there is nothing you can be doing with your life that is more important than law enforcement. And this is why Abel builds for police.