Public Safety as Private Security

Related to Tom's post about how NYC Mayor Bloomberg views the Wall Street protests, Yves Smith had an interesting post on how a recent donation to the NYC Police Foundation may also be influencing local police activity there. Hard to say for sure whether this is a form of "soft" corruption or influence there, it's not like police personnel would not be assigned to maintain order when there is going to be a demonstration like this one.

But this type of phenomenon or tendency is not new to western government. Looking at DeLong's blog he had a post that exposed similar activities going back 1,500 years. Excerpt:

In 542 AD the late Roman (early Byzantine?) Emperor Justinian I wrote to his Praetorian Prefect concerning the army--trained and equipped and paid for by the Roman State to control the barbarians and to "increase the state." Justinian was, Peter Sarris reports in his Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian, upset that:
certain individuals had been daring to draw away soldiers and foederati from their duties, occupying such troops entirely with their own private business....

But then as opposed to today, Justinian was at least competent enough to not surrender the authority of the civil government that he had obtained:

The emperor... prohibit[ed] such individuals from drawing to themselves or diverting troops... having them in their household... on their property or estates.... [A]ny individual who, after thirty days, continues to employ soldiers to meet his private needs and does not return them to their units will face confiscation of property... "and those soldiers and fioderati who remain in paramonar attendance upon them... will not only be deprived of their rank, but also undergo punishments up to and including capital punishment."

Now there is an Emperor who knew how to keep thing focused on the overall public purpose of the state (threaten death!). Delong continues:

Justinian is worried because what is going on in the country he rules is not legible to him. Soldiers--soldiers whom he has trained, equipped, and paid for--have been hired away from their frontier duties by the great landlords of the Empire and employed on their estates and in the areas they dominate as bully-boys.

So state trained and equipped soldiers were being pulled away from their state duties to act as "enforcers" of sorts for private interests here 1,500 years ago.

So this is an interesting historic parallel that DeLong identifies here, but of course any analysis by a Monetarist is never complete without the obligatory out of paradigm absurdities; DeLong writes:

All would be prosperous and pay their taxes [IN CURRENCY THAT MAGICALLY APPEARS IN CIRCULATION AND SOMEHOW ALSO HAS JUSTINIAN'S IMAGE ON IT ]. And the emperor would use the taxes [FOR THE ROMAN TREASURY WAS NOT ALLOWED TO RUN AN OVERDRAFT] to pay the soldiers [WHO MUST HAVE HAD SOME LARGE POCKETS TO CARRY AROUND ALL OF THAT CHANGE] who dealt with the Persians, the Huns, the Goths, and the Vandals [ALL THE WAY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF EUROPE SO THE COINS HAD TO BE FEDEXED OVER THERE SO HE COULD MAKE PAYROLL]; to fund the building of Hagia Sophia and other works of architecture in Constantinople; and to promote the true faith and extirpate heresy. If the countryside were legible to him, that is how things would be--slaves and citizens in their places, landlords and tenants in their mutually-beneficial contractual relationships, all prosperous and all paying their taxes [AFTER ALL EVERYBODY KNOWS IT'S 'TAXPAYER ON THE HOOK'!] to support the empire.

So here in our latest edition of "Monetarist Dogma of the Day" we see that DeLong believes that an Emperor who threatened his soldiers with cutting their heads off if they didn't get focused back on the mission of the state somehow did not have the authority to spend his own currency into circulation.