Bern spent at least three years in a ghetto when she was in that gang growing up. And Bern hasn't exactly been protected from anything except for loud drunks who weren't even bothering her specifically. We've seen literally NO actual enemies in Marvallo.
We have a hint that Bern's memories of this place are 'dark', but that's not that specific.
Like I said. It's because the only time the comic shifts to Marvallo is in a rosy nostalgic flashback or when Bern's traversing the safety of upper class neighborhoods. There's a case to be made that Bern herself is an "enemy" considering she's in the process of mugging a healer in the name of justice. If the comic had taken place in Marvallo from the beginning, there would have surely been adversaries.
Why not? That's what happens everywhere else. Assuming the ghettoes are breeding grounds for the worst kind of people... wouldn't it spill over? Wouldn't there be stories of 'the twenty people murdered last week' or some other such gossip going on in the background?
The healer implied that being forced to heal is something that shouldn't happen in her neighborhood because of 'dues'. But no one has expressed any sort of fear or disgust for the ghettoes and what happens there, pity for those who live there, so on.
In short: The ghettoes don't sound so much like a hellscape of violence and awful, unthinkable deeds. They sound more like... the wrong side of the tracks, where you're likely to get mugged, or shot at if you piss off someone. Which, again, is a bit better than the monsters that Iscariot keeps pumping out.
It's more like the upper class in Marvallo is a lot like the upper class in real life. Rich people like a certain former post-Eisenhower Republican presidential candidate don't care about poor people. As long as what happens in the ghettos stays in the ghettos, why would they care? They've got Enforcers protecting them. The one time the ghettos were mentioned, though, it was with shock at Bern's use of violence. Which implies that the violent wrecking of business is commonplace, just not in "decent" neighborhoods.
As for the reason it wouldn't spill over is because the Enforcers are clearly good at their job. They'd have to be, otherwise people would stop paying them. That, and there's no reason thugs and gangs would seek to incite their wrath when they've got free reign to do whatever they please in the ghettos. Only an idiot would fuck up the chance to build a criminal enterprise in a lawless area filled with potential victims. And the vigilante gangs are the opposite. Polly's gang and such would have an interest in fighting other gangs to make sure the violence doesn't spread. Evil vs evil, so to speak. So it's probably a matter of the gangs being too busy killing each other to expand their territory. If you're a conspiracy theorist, there's even a chance that the Enforcers might have struck a deal with the ghetto thugs to stay out of their business if they stay out of the upper class neighborhoods. Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean everything's all bright and sunny. There's just far too much of Marvallo that we've never seen. Even so, one can draw conclusions from deductive reasoning and real life parallels.
Also, Iscariot doesn't pump out monsters. It's the Thin Man, who is, as far as we know, not in any way affiliated with the Iscariot government and has eluded capture solely because he's a big bad (who might even possess with an omniscient morality license) whose asskicking equals authority amongst his ranks. Or he's a magnificent chessmaster whose talent and intellect allow him to come out as the victor in any gambit roulette. Either way, it's not Iscariot's fault that there just happens to be a sorcerer who's really good at it. What could the Conclave possibly do against a villain even the main characters are powerless against? How would Marvallo fare any better if he were to set up shop there? How do you know that the Thin Man, the one behind most of the villains the party has faced, isn't actually The Great Benefactor, who's using the dues paid to him to fund his research into monster girls?
Clairen, was already a capable swordswoman, and an assassin (I believe?) before getting the Thin Man treatment. And it was a pretty tame treatment. You can't blame her on the Thin Man, she did that stuff all on her own.
Bloody Mary was created, but she was loose in that town for... a long time. The Phalanx 'protection' is pretty equal to Marvallo's in that regard. Spots get missed, but that doesn't reflect on the system as a whole. It just means you need more people to keep those spots from getting missed: Which is what Polly was saying.
And technically, the psychotic housewife killed him once and managed to get away with it for like... MONTHS. No one ever caught her, and authorities didn't seem to be chasing after her. The only reason she was stopped was because of the murder/suicide thing she did with her husband.
In Iscariot we've heard about, or directly seen: mass murderers, insanely powerful magical objects that may turn you INTO a mass murderer, people disappearing, various Thin Man subjects of increasing horror, and so on. We've seen and heard of none of that in Marvallo.
The protection in Marvollo is probably about the same in Iscariot. The same number of people sign up to be Enforcers, as sign up to be Phalanx/guards/security for Iscariot. The difference is that in Iscariot, there's some seriously scary stuff going on that doesn't seem to have a parallel in Marvallo.
The rest of your stuff was a bit too political for me to tackle.
Clairen would've been dead ten times over if she wasn't immune to attack from half the world's population. Or at least she wouldn't have had as much success as an assassin if her targets could fight back. This is obvious in Book 0, where the only reason she was able to get so far into the castle with ease was because of the Thin Man's anti-man tat job. The moment she came into contact with a competent fighter, who wasn't even a famous goddess amongst swordsmen or anything of the sort, her ass was thoroughly handed to her on a silver platter. What's more, Bern was handicapping herself by using a child's fighting style. Clairen got owned by kiddy games. Clearly, she was not as formidable as you make her out to be.
As for Mary, it was only three months. But let's be real. The entire Flipside world is filled with dangerous sorcerers. The problem is, the Phalanx differ from the Enforcers in that they don't abandon those in need. Unfortunately, like the Enforcers, the Phalanx aren't unlimited in number. Which is clearly why there's less protection and it takes longer. Protection is rationed and prioritized, but always equally distributed, even to small out of the way towns that don't even have a level 3 healer. But the problem is sure to be solved once the Phalanx get there, like Shepard's big damn hero moment pretty much made 10 chapters worth of conflict moot. Truly, Shepard is a badass.
The point is, it's not that the protection is "equal" or that spots get missed. Neither of those things is true. The Phalanx knew what was going on. Suspiria even rushed there without their consent, and her arrival was delayed by who knows how long due to the fact that she was traveling without portals. Still, it'd obviously take longer to organize the distribution of Phalanx forces than it would if they were solely focused on protecting the wealthy. If they were like the Enforcers, there wouldn't have even been any Phalanx in that small town. Not Suspiria, or her backup. The town would've been stuck at Mary's mercy, because even the heroes couldn't stop a nightmare fueled knight of cerebus. Suffice it to say, that town would've been doomed as fuck. Without Suspiria and Kin around to catch the tragedy ball, the heroes would've had their shit wrecked in any believable scenario. Bern would've been deader than dead, and the others would've soon followed unless they abandoned the townspeople. In that regard, Phalanx protection is just that much better than the Enforcers' pay-to-protect way of doing business.
As for Noventia, part of the reason she got away with it might've been the fact that Seraph was trying to be dead to everyone but his traveling companions. The guy's been killed once, and telling the authorities about Noventia would've just made him that much easier a target by broadcasting his location. I mean, the guy wanted to live to train his disciples, not get knifed in the middle of a city while everyone around him is powerless to stop it. What's more, a jerkass he may be, but he genuinely did seem to care for his wife up to a point, so much so that he didn't just dump her ass when she started getting bitchy. The only time he expressly wanted to harm her was when he was driven to do so out of desperation. Even when she appeared before him in public without an assassin, good guy Seraph was only concerned with preventing conflict. There's a case to be made that he's just too damn nice to want the Phalanx to kill her ass dead. Indeed, Seraph had a horrible case of nice guy syndrome. If he didn't still love Noventia to some degree, there's no reason he
wouldn't have set it up so that she was killed by the Phalanx. But seeing as he was the only witness to the crime, and he still had the hots for Noventia's god tier hairjobs, that would put the Phalanx completely out of the loop and incapable of knowing, or even acting upon, what happened. They're not omnipotent. As far as they knew, Seraph was dead, killed by an assassin that wasn't enough of a national threat to send a one man army to tear her shit up. And they were right. All it took was a single knight using a child's fighting style to do the assassin in. Not just her, but also the other female assassins from the beginning of Book 0.
It's more like assassins aren't so much dangerous, as they are so weak that any decent bodyguard or knight would be able to stop them if the person targeted actually sought help. Unfortunately, by virtue of them being assassins, the only witnesses to their crimes are too dead to point the finger at them. It's kind of a catch 22 in that their line of work is self-protecting. But at the same time, if they ever ran into trouble themselves, their lives would be forfeit. But then again, assassins and jealous wives are the least of the Phalanx' problems with guys in Infinity +1 bondage collars and scythe wielding cannibals running around killing everything around them. Omnicidal maniacs are a much more important issue than hired thugs.
As for seeing none of that in Marvallo, well, we've seen, like, 50+ chapters of Iscariot, and about 3 or 4 in Marvallo, and it's more of a Bern centered side story than a main plot. One that takes place in a peaceful upper class neighborhood protected by a badass banchou that nobody fucks with. I think you're mistaking Marvallo for a paradise based on "out of sight out of mind." It's like going outside and saying there aren't any terrorists because you don't see them. Or that 9/11 never happened because you've never heard of it, weren't in new york and don't know anyone affected by it. It's more like you're thinking in a bubble impervious to facts, logic and reality, and drawing conclusions from that without ever seeing more than just a single neighborhood in Marvallo. It's like saying Wall Street is America, and everywhere in America is exactly the same as it is. And even within the bubble the comic has created, the people are still scumbags. So what would scumbag Marvallians not bound by law be like? I'd wager they're as bad as Iscariotian criminals, if not worse, unless the author intends to break suspension of disbelief and paint Marvallo as a realistically unsustainable capitalist paradise where chaos and anarchy breed rainbows and sunshine. Suffice it to say, Afghanistan knows what not having a strong central government is like, and it's not buying any of that shit about everyone in lawless lands just getting along fine and dandy.
And...how the heck do you know how many people sign up to be Phalanx and Enforcers? We've seen far more Phalanx than Enforcers, so by your "BECAUSE I SEE IT" logic, isn't it actually the case that there are more Phalanx than Enforcers? You're setting up a logical fallacy based on false equivalence using everyone's general ignorance of Marvallo's ghettoes as proof of Marvallo's perfection. Your entire argument is based on things you don't or couldn't possibly know. It even runs counter to logic, deductive reasoning and reality itself.
Suffice it to say, if politics makes you squeamish, then you're probably not well versed enough in the realities of governing and economics to accurately analyze the unfortunate implications that stem from the way Marvallo's being run based on what happens in such situations in real life. I mean, we've seen what happens when poor people are herded into lawless lands. And they're not places you'd walk into with the cocksure assumption that somebody isn't going to mug the fuck out of you. In fact, it's a wonder if nobody's done that to you yet. Because you seem to have a skewed perception of the world being safer than it is, if you judge the safety of a place based on whether you can see criminals around. That's...a horribly inaccurate standard to go by. Mostly because you can't possibly know based on what you see. Judging an environment accurately requires a more nuanced approach, as opposed to your "one neighborhood" way of viewing an entire society.