Any friend of Jeff’s is a friend of mine. Thanks for stopping by to comment, Jack.

You never cease to amaze.

Life in the Old West was never better nor grander than today. Consider going to the dentist without benefit of Novocaine then take a quick look at the tools of the trade. That would be enough to put me off right there, but it gets better. There is no penicillin, so if you stopped in at a ‘billiard room’ for a quick game of ‘billiards’ and came away with cupid’s measles, you could try mercury – the cure of the day – or you could just ignore the whole business and die a noisy death some years later when your nervous system failed. If you got a minor wound somehow, there are any number of infections that could kill you. Break a bone and you’d likely die of blood poisoning.

My great grandfather traveled the Old West successfully, but he was a very unusual man. He packed his revolver everywhere, and once killed an Indian who was climbing into his hotel room to rob and murder him. He watched an actual gun fight between two cowboys (they killed each other) and took target practice with the Dalton gang. When he came down with pneumonia he was able to cure it by inhaling a large quantity of salt.

My post was indeed a bit cavalier and simple-minded. I admit that the Old West probably wasn’t nearly as romantic or “grand” as it’s been portrayed in the movies. And the theft of land and the poverty it’s caused is something I’m particularly sensitive to. See my post at the right listed under “Representative Posts” and titled “Georgism as a Basis for Anarchic Order.”

Perhaps a better analogy for the point I was trying to make was Egypt as they were ousting Mubarek. No-government was better than Mubarek’s government. No-government would have been better than Stalin’s government. And, I strongly suspect, no-government would be better than our government. Even if no-government is attended by a certain measure of chaos.

But I think it’s important to recognize Albert Jay Nock’s distinction between “government” and the “State.” Pursuant to that distinction, the American Indians had government, and government is a good thing.

Neither the increased presence of law enforcement nor the increase in criminal laws is the only reason for the decline in homicide rates. I’m not certain that, even combined, they’re the main reason. But it does seem rather cavalier simply to declare that those dead bodies (even if most weren’t social desirables) are a reasonable price to pay for the lack of enforceable (and enforced) criminal law.

But was life in the Old West “better and grander” than it is today? You’ve got to be awfully selective in your vision and measurement to see it that way.

One example: The Western myth, where a man (almost never a woman) with a big of grit and a vision could make himself a millionaire suggests grander for him – though that myth (really a mythos) – ignores the fact that he stole the land to do it, fiercely oppressed those who’d previously held that land, driving those we let live into something like prison camps though we called them (and still do) “reservations.”

According to the Volokh Conspiracy post from which the “seven times” figure came, “an adult exposed to that rate [i.e. living in the Old West] for 45 years would have stood a 1 in 34 chance of being murdered.” Not that great, but not exactly a death sentence either, and perhaps a worthwhile risk to pay for freedom. As the first commenter on the post pointed out, one’s actual risk probably depended on whether one hung out playing poker in saloons or spent one’s time tending one’s farm. And theoretically, we could reduce today’s homicide rate even further by posting a cop on every corner.

Then again, I went to college with a guy who said that he wouldn’t mind being a slave in the middle ages just to know that something as beautiful as the Cathedral at Chartres was being built. I suspect he might not have felt that way if he were in fact a slave at the time, but I can’t really know.