I've long said that I would be satisfied with minarchism, but I believe in the power of universal human self-interest and therefore in anarcho-capitalism.I would be fine with government courts and police and such, so long as they didn't actually have a coercive monopoly on their services and people could say "you suck" and move over to a private alternative.Having a massive monopoly on violence means you have a structure just sitting their waiting to be co-opted by whichever ideology happens to have a majority at the time. If enough muslims kept immigrating into europe and having 9-children families and teaching Sharia law, in a generation or two you suddenly have a "moral majority" and under collectivist/statist doctrine they can just "swap" the whole system over to Sharia and nobody has any say in the matter.Personal crime might be down, but I would argue that crime has a lot more to do with poverty and a human's ability to defend him/herself. Again, I go back to guns. The market provided a man or woman with ability to stand up against multiple assailants with this tool, which is a natural deterrent to crime (see switzerland, with its 90-something-percent household gun ownership, and lowest violent/property crime rates in western civilization). But the bigger issue is poverty. If people have the opportunity to pursue self-interest in a profitable manner, they aren't going to pursue crime (because it's dangerous/high risk) over an honest profit. For a good primer on US history, I would recommend checking out Thomas Woods, a Harvard PhD historian and Austrian economics. His book "33 questions about American History" is excellent. All of his books are excellent, truth be told, and his sourcing of facts is pretty much unparalleled in his history and economic papers and books.If we look at crime now there are some distinct categories we can place things in to. General sadism is still pretty flat, and has increased in most western countries since major gun bans came into effect (things like rape, most of which aren't even reported). Drug crimes and all of the associated crime (I think something like 30-40% of violent crime is drug related in the US, and a similar amount for property theft) are up as enforcement becomes more and more draconian. It is the economics of prohibition that turn people into 100% habit-focused addicts. The production cost on cocaine is dirt cheap, and that's still with production being illegal. Mark up is tens of thousands of percent by the time it hits the ounce-buying dealer. Not to mention that while private-interaction violence drops off (I credit this to capitalism providing better outlets for self-interest, versus state coercion), the 20th century saw more mass murder and collectivist "cleansing", along with eugenics and a hundred million sacrifices to Molech, than any other century prior. These were state atrocities, not individual or group actions.An example of how the economics of statist policies/collectivist morality affect crime: A regular cocaine habit takes something like $50,000 - $70,000 to sustain in the US. The high end of that is almost double what the average US worker makes pre-tax. Celebrities, a great many of whom are cocaine addicts, can sustain this habit and one generally doesn't even know they are addicted. An average person must focus all of their time and energy on acquiring the resources to keep the addiction sated. And because an "honest job" hardly covers the costs or falls very short. violent crime or prostitution or becoming a seller, etc. are the only ways to sustain this for a large percentage of users. Imagine if free markets were allowed to provide something like cocaine, at $2.00 per gram and extremely high purity, coffee-shop style, completely unregulated. Any addict could be a 100% functional member of society that would only have to devote a small part of their life to feeding this habit, the same as someone addicted to caffeine might.