Whoever wants to know where a society stands need not read statistics. A walk through a supermarket in parts of California will do. The toothpaste sits behind security glass. The deodorant, the detergent, the razor: locked away like crown jewels. Whoever wishes to brush his teeth presses a button and waits for an employee with the key. No one perceives this as a scandal anymore. It has become everyday life — and precisely that is the scandal.

For each of those little glass cases is an instrument measuring something invisible: a society\'s trust in its own order. Where the glass grows thicker, the trust has grown thinner. And where retail chains close entire stores because guarding the shelves no longer pays, something has withdrawn that is harder to bring back than any merchandise: the certainty that rules apply.

All dispute over the tasks of the state ends at one point on which thinkers of every school have agreed: its first promise is protection. Protection of life, of limb, of what is honestly acquired. For that — and at first only for that — citizens pay taxes, surrender liberties, tolerate monopolies of force. A state that keeps this promise may get much else wrong and remain legitimate. A state that breaks it may get everything else right — it loses its ground.

What is remarkable about the present is how openly this breach is admitted in some places. Theft below certain value thresholds is de facto no longer prosecuted; police reports are received like weather reports; entire categories of offense are held to be socially explicable and therefore properly overlooked. Government thereby appears less and less as the agent of its citizens and more and more as their governess — a post-civic authority that preaches good conduct, allocates guilt and prescribes penance, while the plain craft of protecting is left undone.

The consequences are not borne by the affluent. Whoever lives in a secured neighborhood, orders online and has things delivered, encounters the decay at most as news. The bill is paid by the others: the pensioner whose corner drugstore closes, who now rides two buses to the next one — past shop windows boarded up with plywood. The kiosk owner who gives up after the third robbery, and with him forty years of a life\'s work. The employee on the late shift who no longer crosses the parking lot alone.

It belongs to the quiet cruelties of this crisis that it strikes the poorest twice: first the insecurity takes from them the stores, the pharmacies, the buses of their neighborhood — then they are reproached for living in a neighborhood without stores, pharmacies and buses. Insecurity is the most regressive of all taxes: the rich man buys himself free, with security service, alarm system and address. The poor man pays with his skin.

The decay does not come overnight. It comes in stages, and every stage has its own reassurance. At first the locked-up deodorant is a curiosity people joke about. Then clever commentators explain that perception is worse than reality and the statistics more nuanced than the citizen grasps. Then the incidents vanish from the news, because they are news no longer. And at the end stands silence: the customer presses the button at the security glass and no longer thinks anything of it.

This getting-used-to is more dangerous than any single theft. For order lives on expectations: where the small transgression remains without consequence, the next becomes more likely — the broken window nobody replaces invites the next stone. What once became famous as a policing theory is at its core the everyday wisdom of every apartment house: neglect is contagious — and so is care.

At the end of this chronicle stands no explosion but a slackening. The honest ask themselves why only they, of all people, keep paying. The merchants price the shrinkage into their goods — the next silent tax on the decent. And the young grow up assuming this is simply how things are. None of this appears in a crime statistic. All of it is its herald.

One often hears there is no money. That is true, and then again it is not. True is: many security agencies are depleted — too few people, aging equipment, too much paper. Experienced officers leave because their work earns them scorn from above and stones from below; recruits stay away because no one aspires to an office whose mission is talked to pieces. But true is also: the money that is lacking is spent lavishly elsewhere — on programs, commissioners and campaigns whose contribution to the citizens\' safety exhausts itself in glossy brochures.

And so the citizens give notice in their turn, quietly and in installments. Whoever can, moves away — to safer states, to freer parts of the world, to wherever taxes still buy a return. With the skilled goes the capital, with the capital the tax base, with the tax base the last means of paying for the protection whose absence set off the flight. It is a spiral, and it is already turning: today\'s able are tomorrow\'s departed, and behind remain those who cannot afford to leave — hostages of an order that no longer protects them but continues to lecture them.

Where public protection withdraws, no vacuum arises — a market arises. Private security services grow faster than some police forces; gated residential compounds, once an American curiosity, become a selling point; cameras, fences and apps replace what used to be the patrol. For those who can pay, this works astonishingly well. Precisely therein lies the problem.

For a society that privatizes its security sorts itself anew: here the islands of the guarded, there the open country of the rest. The public spirit that grows from shared safety — sitting in the same park, riding the same train, letting the children play on the same square — crumbles into zones. And at the edges of the zones something worse thrives: where the state no longer enforces the law, sooner or later those step forward who do it on their own — and vigilante justice is no justice, but its caricature.

We say this without scorn for those who protect themselves — who could blame them? We say it as a warning: the retreat of public protection makes society not freer but more feudal. In the end every lord of the manor has his wall again — and whoever has no manor stands in the rain as five hundred years ago.

It is among the great misunderstandings of our time to consider security a topic of the right and compassion a topic of the left. In truth, security is the most social of all questions. The night-watchman state, so readily mocked, watches first over those who cannot afford a watchman of their own. Every streetlamp that burns, every patrol that walks, every judgment that is rendered is redistribution in the best sense: from the strong to the weak, from the ruthless to the honest.

Toward the offender, too, the reliable order is the more merciful one: clear limits, drawn early, spare the great derailments and the great punishments. An authority that, out of misconceived mildness, lets the small things pass will harvest the great ones — and will then punish after all, later, harder, and at a point when there are already victims who never had to be. Nothing about this letting-happen is kind. It is neglect with a clear conscience.

The social-libertarian idea is sometimes misunderstood as wanting to weaken the state. The opposite is true: we want it strong where only it can be strong — and lean where it has lost its way. A state that shrugs at toothpaste theft but catalogues the opinions of its citizens has confused its tasks exactly. We want the reversal: full strength for protection and law, retreat from paternalism and the tending of opinions.

Concretely: security agencies that are equipped, trained and respected — and that remain accountable for it, for respect is no blank check. Courts that judge swiftly and predictably, for justice delayed is justice denied. Subsidiarity: municipalities, neighborhoods and citizens permitted to take responsibility for their surroundings instead of waiting on distant headquarters. And a politics that takes causes seriously without infantilizing offenders — for whoever denies a person responsibility denies him dignity in the same breath.

Our Success Accord places the protection of life, liberty and honest property at the beginning of the state\'s tasks, not at their end. Everything further — the unfolding of markets, the flourishing of civil society, the trust between strangers on which all cooperation lives — grows on this foundation or not at all. The utopia we have described in this paper, the good life in concord and confidence: it begins with a door one need not fear at night, and a store shelf without security glass.

We will be told this is nostalgia. We answer: it is normality — lived, measurable normality in those communities that take their first promise seriously. It is not security that is the exception in history, but its decay amid full prosperity. That decay is no force of nature. It is a choice. And what has been chosen can be un-chosen.

One can also regard the security crisis as a merchant would, and even then it remains a loss-making venture without precedent. The merchants\' shrinkage wanders into the prices: every honest customer pays for the theft of others at the register. Insurance premiums climb until the small shop can no longer afford the policy — the large corporation can, and so insecurity devours first the independents who carry every neighborhood. Where branches close, jobs fall away, tax revenues, apprenticeships; where streets go desolate, the values of the houses sink in which ordinary people have placed their savings.

Add to this what no balance sheet records: the hours parents spend walking their children because the way to school no longer seems safe; the walks the elderly no longer take; the festivals that no longer happen; the thousand small appointments of trust that make a city a city, quietly cancelled. Insecurity impoverishes a society twice over — in money and in public spirit — and both, as always, strike first those who have least.

It is therefore no contradiction but the same thought: whoever wants to save must protect. Every streetlamp, every patrol, every swift judgment costs less than its absence costs. No program in the world yields better returns than the plain, reliable, equal enforcement of the law.

One day, we hope, someone will unscrew the security cases again — not because the toothpaste has become worthless, but because the trust has returned. Such days do not come by themselves. They are earned: by citizens who demand protection instead of getting used to its absence; by offices that serve instead of lecturing; by an idea that does not play freedom and security against each other but understands that each carries the other.

This series has described three crises: the housing scarcity of the obstructors, the devaluation of ability, the retreat of protection. They share one root — an order that places the comfort of the settled above the rights of the striving — and one answer: the social-libertarian one. Whoever wishes to know it will find the ten points in our Program and the reasons here in the Observer. The crises are man-made. Therefore human beings can end them.

Think freely. Act justly. Cooperate meaningfully, and good will follow.