Security

In the entire world, there is not a single establishment of the security industry that is not based on monopoly or on communism.  …  Political economy has disapproved equally of monopoly and communism in the various branches of human activity, wherever it has found them.  Is it not then strange and unreasonable that it accepts them in the security industry?

This option the consumer retains of being able to buy security wherever he pleases brings about a constant emulation among all the producers, each producer striving to maintain or augment his clientele with the attraction of cheapness or of faster, more complete and better justice.If, on the contrary, the consumer is not free to buy security wherever he pleases, you forthwith see open up a large profession dedicated to arbitrariness and bad management.  Justice becomes slow and costly, the police vexatious, individual liberty is no longer respected, the price of security is abusively inflated and inequitably apportioned, according to the power and influence of this or that class of consumers.  The protectors engage in bitter struggles to wrest customers from one another.  In a word, all the abuses inherent in monopoly or in communism crop up.

From that point, my universe went on crumbling; new cracks appeared all the time. I could see that the pleasant securities of childhood, all of those warm little human emotions, all of those trivial aims and purposes that we allow to rule our lives, were an illusion. We were like sheep munching grass, unaware that the butcher's lorry is already on its way. I got used to living with a deep, underlying feeling of uncertainty that no one around me seemed to share. It was rather like living on death row.