Crime in the Market Society

To say that we are losing the war on crime is a cruel understatement. Today we are a nation reeling from rates of violent crime that in many places outstrip anything we have seen before in our history. The basic outline of this American tragedy is easy to sketch.

According to recent data from the U.S. Public Health Service, a young American male, aged fifteen to twenty-four, is seventy-three times more likely to die of deliberate homicide than his counterpart in Austria, forty-four tim...