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Any cogent discussion of crime must begin by casting aside the obfuscations of criminologists and social scientists who habitually lump together all types of crime. But while most people can be made to wax indignant against fraud or against such abstract “crimes” as insider trading, or even become outraged at employees taking pencils from their employer, these “white-collar crimes” do not terrify them because they do not violate the physical integrity of the person or the home of the victim. The latter crimes are the ones that terrify and destroy the security of the average person and wreck social peace. We might call these malign forms “crimes of violence,” except that we should also put in the same category home burglary, which technically does not use weapons but inflicts the same sense of personal violation as more directly violent crimes. Let us then call them “street crimes,” which would include crimes of violence on urban streets or sidewalks, and also the home burglaries in suburban or rural areas.

Economists have added their own special forms of fallacy and misdirection to the problem of crime. To most economists, led by Chicago School economist Gary Becker, crime is a business like any other, and the criminal, like any businessman or investor, engages in a rational cost-benefit calculation in deciding whether or not to commit a crime. He compares the expected monetary benefit from the crime, with the expected costs of getting caught and the type of punishment probably received, all costs and benefits duly discounted by the rate of interest. This sort of analysis may well be applicable to business-type crimes, such as committed by organized groups of jewel thieves, bank robbers, or counterfeiters, or to the sort of mafioso activities immortalized in The Godfather. But these business-type crimes don’t terrify, and they do not qualify in our definition of street crime as street assaults, rapes, muggings, shootings, as well as home burglaries. To apply monetary cost-benefit analysis to street criminals in the Becker manner is so divorced from reality as to verge upon absurdity.

Take, for example, the latest fashion in street crime, rampant in Detroit, which in so many ways has blazed the path in this field and now spread to other urban areas: the drive-by shooting. A driver pulls up alongside his victims, opens fire, and then zooms off. How in the world can this practice be encompassed by Chicagoite monetary cost-benefit analysis? More and more, it has become clear that much or all such street crime is done not for the money but for psychic benefits. One young lad, when asked why he killed someone at random in a driveby shooting, replied: “I just felt like killing someone.” Some years ago, they would have replied “for kicks,” but it seems that anomie has replaced a sense of joy among young muggers and murderers.

One reason why standard economics has gone so far astray is that, ever since Adam Smith, economists have routinely assumed that people are exactly the same as every other, with the same values, norms, and preferences, and that they only act differently because of different institutional indictments or constraints. Combine this egalitarian legacy of the Enlightenment with Benthamite utilitarianism, and it becomes clear why economists’ analyses and policy conclusions have so often tended to be far off the mark and even counterproductive.

From its mathematical calculations, the Beckerite remedy for crime is to make punishment not so much more severe as more probable: to increase the certainty of getting caught and punished. Apart from the fact that the Beckerites have come out with precious few practical suggestions on how this increased certainty can be accomplished, there is more askew here. For the Beckerites ignore one of the important contributions of Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School of economics: that individuals all differ in their values, habits, and preferences, and that a crucial aspect of that variety is what Austrians call their “rates of time preference.”

Working independently of the Austrian tradition, the political scientist Edward C. Banfield—in his delightfully cool, bitter, and hardheaded The Unheavenly City (1970), and the later edition, The Unheavenly City Revisited (1974)—put his finger on a key to the nature of the street criminal: a very high rate of time preference for the present over the future; in other words, a very short time horizon. The street criminal places a high value on present, instant gratification: whether it be from money stolen, from rape, or from the sheer “kicks” of beating or killing another human being. He commits these acts not because punishment is uncertain, but because punishment is sometime in the future, and he simply doesn’t care about the future. In a later article applying his analysis to street crime. Professor Banfield put the case well: “The threat of punishment at the hands of the law is unlikely to deter the present-oriented person. The gains that he expects from his illegal act are very near to the present, whereas the punishment that he would suffer—in the unlikely event of his being both caught and punished—lies in a future too distant for him to take into account.” Banfield goes on to add that “for the normal person” there are other stronger deterrents to crime than the legal penalty, such as disgrace, loss of job, hardship for wife and children if he goes to prison. These deterrents do not exist, however, for the present-oriented person. Everyone in his circle naturally gets “in trouble” with the police from time to time. He has no steady job anyway, and he contributes little or nothing to the support of his wife and kids, who, Banfield adds, “may well be better off without him.” Banfield makes it clear that the high-time preference person’s lack of a steady job is not due to lack of “employment opportunities,” but because this sort of person has no intention of subjecting himself to the discipline of engaging in full-time steady work.

In his trenchant analysis Banfield consciously harks back to the great political philosophers of the West, particularly Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. In Leviathan, Hobbes pointed out that there would be no need for government if everyone obeyed the dictates of reason and natural law, for then there would be social peace. But instead, government is required because of people acting on “their perverse desire of present profit.” Hume writes about government being made necessary because “men are not able radically to cure, either in themselves or others, that narrowness of soul which makes them prefer the present to the remote.”

It is all too clear that in recent decades, government in the United States has lost its reason, its being, since the hightime preference street criminals have increasingly been allowed to run riot. We are being plunged, at an accelerating rate, into the sort of horrible criminal anarchy that no libertarian or “anarcho-capitalist” would countenance for one moment. What, then, can be done?

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It was amusing to watch the emergence of this debate on the US-China stage. The Chinese were understandably unwilling to be blamed for the emergence of a virus in which they had no part, and thus reacted strongly to accusations the virus originated in a Wuhan lab. The Americans proved to be even more terrified at the possibility of scientific proof that the virus escaped from one of their bio-labs, and resorted to the only weapon they had which was to turn up the volume on blaming China. There were two main reasons for this state of affairs:[1] The US was the only country known to contain all the varieties that were being spread worldwide.[2] The US is the only nation in the world known to have repeatedly used biological weapons on other countries, beginning with North Korea and never ceasing. Of even more damning consequence is the known locations of about 400 American bio-weapons labs spread throughout the world, to say nothing of the pathetically-lax institution at Fort Detrick.[1][2][3]

Moreover, Trump recently claimed he could kill the entire population of Afghanistan within days. “Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone and this is not using nuclear. It would be over in – literally, in 10 days.” Biological weapons would seem the only alternative. Hemorrhagic Fever and Hantavirus worked for the US in North Korea; perhaps also Afghanistan.[4][5][6] Mr. Trump later denied intention to carry out his threat, but let’s dispense with the fiction of the US having no biological weapons and that Fort Detrick and the 400 foreign labs are performing only benevolent “peace medicine” functions. If it were China with the above history and SARS, MERS, AIDS, EBOLA, bird flu, swine flu, and COVID-19 first erupted in the US, the Americans would claim this as 100% proof that China was responsible. It cannot be a surprise that much of the world today is naturally tending to lay these outbreaks at America’s doorstep.

But returning to our topic of man-made COVID-19 or COVID-20, it seems everyone has been a little too eager to dismiss the possibility (or probability) of these viruses having a (human) helping hand.

Dr. Mae-Wan Ho of the Institute for Science in Society cites a Journal of Virology report (Feb 2000)[7] that described a method for inducing desired mutations into coronavirus to create new viruses. “Manipulating viral genomes is now routine, and it is easy to create new viruses that jump host species in the laboratory in the course of apparently legitimate experiments in genetic engineering. It is not even necessary to intentionally create lethal viruses, if one so wishes. It is actually much faster and much more effective to let random recombination and mutation take place in the test tube. Using a technique called ‘molecular breeding’, millions of recombinants can be generated in a matter of minutes. These can be screened for improved function in the case of enzymes, or increased virulence, in the case of viruses and bacteria. In other words, geneticists can now greatly speed up evolution in the laboratory to create viruses and bacteria that never existed in all the billions of years of evolution on earth.”[8] It wasn’t widely publicised, but Dr. Ho called for a full investigation into the possible genetic engineering and dissemination of the SARS virus.[9]

Then another article in which the author explained that scientists eager to dispel the notion of an artificial origin, do so by pointing out that these new coronaviruses didn’t reflect their computer simulations, the author stating, “To put it simply, the authors are saying that SARS-CoV-2 was not deliberately engineered because if it were, it would have been designed differently.” However, the London-based molecular geneticist Dr Michael Antoniou commented that this line of reasoning fails to take into account that there are a number of laboratory-based systems that can select for high affinity RBD variants that are able to take into account the complex environment of a living organism. “So the fact that COVID-19 didn’t have the same RBD amino acid sequence as the one that the computer program predicted in no way rules out the possibility that it was genetically engineered.”[10]

The article further states that “[The] authors of the Nature Medicine article seem to assume that the only way to genetically engineer a virus is to take an already known virus and then engineer it to have the new properties you want. On this premise, they looked for evidence of an already known virus that could have been used in the engineering of SARS-CoV-2. Since they failed to find that evidence, they stated, “Genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone.” But Dr Antoniou told us that while the authors did indeed show that SARS-CoV-2 was unlikely to have been built by deliberate genetic engineering from a previously used virus backbone, that’s not the only way of constructing a virus. A well-known alternative process that could have been used has the cumbersome name of “directed iterative evolutionary selection process”. In this case, it would involve using genetic engineering to generate a large number of randomly mutated versions of the SARS-CoV spike protein receptor binding domain (RBD), which would then be selected for strong binding to the ACE2 receptor and consequently high infectivity of human cells.

“This selection can be done either with purified proteins or, better still, with a mixture of whole coronavirus (CoV) preparations and human cells in tissue culture. This preparation of phage, displaying on its surface a “library” of CoV spike protein variants, is then added to human cells under laboratory culture conditions in order to select for those that bind to the ACE2 receptor. This process is repeated under more and more stringent binding conditions until CoV spike protein variants with a high binding affinity are isolated. Once any of the above selection procedures for high affinity interaction of SARS-CoV spike protein with ACE2 has been completed, then whole infectious CoV with these properties can be manufactured. Such a directed iterative evolutionary selection process is a frequently used method in laboratory research.”

There is, incidentally, another possible way that COVID-19 could have been developed in a laboratory, but in this case without using genetic engineering. This was pointed out by Nikolai Petrovsky, a researcher at the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University in South Australia. Petrovsky says that coronaviruses can be cultured in lab dishes with cells that have the human ACE2 receptor. Over time, the virus will gain adaptations that let it efficiently bind to those receptors. Along the way, that virus would pick up random genetic mutations that pop up but don’t do anything noticeable. “The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus. Because the mutations are acquired randomly by selection, there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention.”

Notes

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/virus-biological-us-army-weapons-fort-detrick-leak-ebola-anthrax-smallpox-ricin-a9042641.html

[2] https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/02/gary-d-barnett/the-u-s-is-the-world-leader-of-bio-weapons-research-production-and-use-against-mankind/

[3] https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-military-bio-labs-in-ukraine-production-of-bio-weapons-and-disease-causing-agents/5605307

[4] https://www.globalresearch.ca/did-trump-tacitly-threaten-use-biological-weapons/5687936

[5] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-24/why-did-donald-trump-say-he-could-kill-10-million-afghans/11342794

[6] https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/08/21/604070/US-President-Donald-Trump-Afghanistan-war-win-without-nuclear-weapons

[7] http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/10627550

[8] https://www.i-sis.org.uk/SAGE.php

[9] m.w.ho@i-sis.org.uk

[10] https://gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/19383-where-did-the-covid-19-virus-come-from

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.