The federal lever was pulled hard and fast: troops on the ground in the capital, local policing powers swept into federal hands, FBI personnel deployed, and a numbers-armed campaign promised to pursue “every violent criminal” and to clear homeless encampments. The rhetoric claims it’s about safety; the reality is a dramatic expansion of coercive power over a city that possesses its own elected officials and its own institutions of accountability. This isn’t crime control; it’s constitutional surgery performed by the sword.

From a Hayekian lens, the attempt to orchestrate public safety from on high treats knowledge as a centralized resource when, in truth, it is dispersed everywhere across streets, neighborhoods, and private relationships. The price of central planning in complex social orders is the erosion of local adaptation and the misallocation of scarce human and material resources. Crime is a dynamic, local problem—patterns shift with time, territory, and the intimate details of daily life that only residents and local actors understand. A federal command-and-control blitz guarantees not efficiency but disruption: it disrupts the spontaneous order of civic life, corrodes community trust, and substitutes bureaucratic bravado for responsive policing. You don’t solve crime by turning every precinct into a fortress; you inoculate a city against liberty by making the use of force a normative instrument, not a last-resort, carefully bounded remedy.

Nozick’s account presses hard on the rights-question: what moral authority allows one person, or one government, to commandeer the policing of millions by fiat? The minimal state’s legitimate function is protection of individual rights, with power checked by voluntarism and accountability, not by presidential emergency orders that suspend jurisdiction, override elected mayors, and normalize militarized policing. When you deploy federal force to “keep local police under federal control,” you blur the distinction between defending rights and wielding power for political ends. Rights aren’t safeguarded by more coercion; they’re endangered by legitimizing coercion as a permanent solution to social problems. The homeless, the poor, the residents who fear the sight of armored units—these are not expendable populations to be managed by edicts from a distant capital. They are fellow individuals whose rights to liberty, due process, and quiet enjoyment of property are exactly what a rights-respecting order must protect, not violate.

Rand adds the moral compass: the end of safety never justifies the wholesale suspension of rights or the substitution of force for voluntary institutions. If security is the aim, the state’s proper instrument is to protect negative rights, not to popularize a theater of power. A crackdown framed as “cracking down on crime” is more than a policy choice; it’s a step toward a coercive environment in which the individual is constantly under suspicion, where homelessness becomes a problem to be cleared by bulldozers and arrests rather than a condition to be understood and resolved through voluntary resources, private initiative, and property-rights enforcement. The booted presence of federal agents in a city’s streets signals a normalization of surveillance and coercion as normal mechanisms of social management. Rand’s defense of individual dignity requires that we refuse to treat citizens as mere subjects of a grand rollback in liberty, and instead insist that any measure be evaluated by whether it respects every person’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not whether it yields a short-term, statist “solution” to a crime statistic.

The supposed objective—reducing violent crime, clearing encampments—reads as a justification for university-level experiments in coercion: expand the state’s monopoly on violence, centralize decision-making, and perform a show of force to demonstrate “order.” But Hayek would warn that this is the exact path toward a frictionless, top-down coercive mechanism that cannot anticipate the unintended consequences—alienation, civilian harm, escalation of confrontation, and the long-run erosion of civil liberties. Nozick would remind us that once the state treats rights as negotiable in the name of safety, it erodes the very bedrock upon which rights protection rests. Rand would insist that if you grant power to override local autonomy and to label dissent as merely “the price of safety,” you’ve surrendered the principle of individual sovereignty for a murky illusion of security.

What should be done, if liberty is the aim? Roll back the escalation, not accelerate it. Restore local control and demand real accountability: transparent policing standards, rigorous due process protections, independent oversight, and sunset clauses on extraordinary measures. But more profoundly, rethink the paradigm: reduce coercive interventions in favor of voluntary, market-tested, rights-respecting solutions. Strengthen property rights and neighborhood-level security through private and civil-society means—private security contractors operating under contract with property owners, arbitration and mediation services, charitable and religious organizations coordinating aid without weaponized authority, and nonviolent conflict-resolution mechanisms that align incentives toward de-escalation rather than mass coercion. If crime is the problem, the answer is not more guns and more federal commands; it’s better institutions for protecting rights, resolving disputes, and empowering individuals to organize their communities without fear of endless raids, checks, and seizures.

The passion here isn’t to minimize crime or to romanticize disorder; it’s to insist that liberty is the precondition to any genuine solution. When a government claims that power must be expanded in order to protect people from crime or homelessness, it betrays the very premise of a free society: that coercive force is the ultimate tool of social organization, and that once accepted, it inexorably expands. The antidote is simple and radical: restore limits, empower local voluntary institutions, defend individual rights against the encroachment of a centralized state, and abandon the myth that safety comes from more authority rather than from more freedom. If we want real order, we must choose it by honoring the rights of every person, not by coercively rearranging who polices whom.