This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 16, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The calls to defund police hold a great deal of appeal to libertarians.

After all, it's police that run the war on drugs and no money should be spent fighting it.

For many on the left, however, the deal appears to be more of a package, move money out of police budgets and into social programs.

Jonathan Blanks is a visiting fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.

We talked about how defunding the police might work, as it did in Camden, New Jersey, and what it would

mean for public safety and relations between individuals and government.

It is a weird situation to be someone who identifies himself as a libertarian, seeing a lot of people who, for the most part, are left-wingers saying defund the police.

To what extent do you suspect my inclination about what that means and their inclination about what that means.

What's the difference there as far as you see it?

From a libertarian perspective to fund or a boss of police looks something like okay well we're going to have a

private security force and that they will be responsible for being the

neutral observer between two people who conflict, right?

It's the idea of community coming together and saying,

this is how we're going to handle it, and it's a private security force.

The popular defund the police movement on the left is very much of the

socialist mold. They want to take the money that is going into a police department

right now and and redistribute it into the community to take care of all the problems that the police are tackling right now, whether it's mental health issues, drug abuse, domestic violence, whatever.

Any of those things need to be,

the money has to be taken directly

out of the police departments and put into programs

...