no third solution

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Category Archives: World Politics

Piracy and Property Rights on the Somali Coast

April 14th, 2009

Pete Leeson, whose recent body of work focuses on pirates and piracy, argues that Somali state building isn’t the solution to piracy on the Indian Ocean. Instead, he suggests that the international community should try a game-plan entirely different than the commonplace “law-and-order” or “overwhelming force” approaches. Leeson suggests (and I tend to agree) that a lack of clearly defined property rights are a significant contributing factor to “about 90% of the world’s economic problems,” and that the piracy nuisance is “no exception” to that rule; the tragedy of the commons could be averted if people were allowed to own (and therefore had financial/economic incentive to preserve) these waters.  Unfortunately,

Rather than trying its hand at Somali state building,” Leeson argues, “the international community should try auctioning off Somali’s coastal waters.

Oh, Christ.  See, this is the sort of argument that gives free-market folks a bad name: The Somali state collapsed, and is now unable to protect or otherwise guard the interests of the once thriving Somali fishing industry. Therefore the international community should step in and sell the “rights” to the Somali coastline.

Sell it to whom?

Do the Somali fishermen have the financial wherewithal to outbid the Korean and Japanese commercial fishing industries at auction, for these “rights” — which they had at one point but the world simply stopped recognizing? Should they have to “purchase” these “rights” — which they had at one point, and the world simply stopped recognizing? This is pretty much a prescription for oceanic sharecropping.

Coase didn’t argue that where property rights are absent or poorly defined, they should just be invented willy-nilly.

On the contrary, The Problem of Social Cost argued essentially that there are indeed consequences to the delineation of property rights, and as such, it very much matters how they are established, defined and enforced.  The problem is not a lack of property rights, per se, but rather that the international community at large, simply ignored these rights (European nations, for example, have been dumping nuclear waste along the Somali coastline) as the Somali state collapsed.  Therefore, the solution is not to sell these usurped “rights” to the highest bidder, but to simply begin recognizing them, once again.

Czech P.M.: U.S. Recovery Plan is “Road to Hell”

March 26th, 2009

The other day I “tweeted” (wow, that sounds even stupider when I say it) about how I was becoming more enamored with the Czechs, especially dead-man-walking Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, who described the U.S. recovery plan put forth by the Obama administration as a “way to hell“.

The Gray Lady’s commentary is rather unsatisfactorily short on substance, and long on nonsense including a boilerplate description of what the EU presidency is, how its constituted, etc. I’m reasonably certain that Topolanek has good reasons, perhaps even sound economic arguments, behind his criticism of the White House’s economic stimulus, but you wouldn’t know it from the article. (And the newspapers wonder why their volumes are declining?)

Buried all the way at the bottom of the article was one scorn-worthy comment from a member of the E.U. Parliament:

Martin Schulz, leader of the socialist group in the European Parliament, said that the description of the Obama recovery plans as “the road to hell” was “not the level on which the E.U. ought to be operating with the United States.”

“You have not understood what the task of the E.U. presidency is,” Mr. Schulz told Mr. Topolanek.

Maybe, just maybe men like Topolanek see the current crisis from a unique vantage point. Maybe, we ought to give a little bit more credence to arguments put forth by individuals who lived under state-socialism for the bulk of their adult lives — and who have experienced first-hand what even modest amounts of liberalization can do for an economy. (I was in Prague in July of 2003, and with few exceptions, it was impossible to tell that the country had previously been behind the Iron Curtain.)

Treating every politically unorthodox idea or argument as prima facie wrong, is the worst sort of politicking, because it paves the path for totalitarianism.

Criticizing tried-and-failed ideas like the current “stimulus” plan is not to be tolerated. Collusion among the State elites is necessary to keep the charade alive; dissent will be punished, censured, or ridiculed at every opportunity.

End the War on Drugs

March 4th, 2009

Praising the drug war, Bret Stephens at the WSJ blames the bloodshed in the war on drugs (9,000 dead Mexicans in the last two years alone, and counting) on teh bad people.

It’s an old story. At bottom, the problem isn’t the drug cartels per se. Much less is it — and here I can sense the collective blood pressure of the Cato Institute rising — America’s drug laws.

The problem is Mexico’s record of corrupt, weak and incompetent governance, which has created the environment in which the cartels have hitherto operated with impunity. The same might be said about other countries in Latin America: These states did not become basket cases on account of the drug trade. It is the fact that they were basket cases to begin with that allowed the drug trade to flourish.

For serious? I’m reminded of the introduction to Matthie Kassovitz’ 1995 film, La Haine: C’est pas la chute, mais l’atterrissage. It’s not the fall that kills you, but the landing. It’s not the gunshot that kills you, but the rapid loss of blood. Running the red light didn’t cause the accident, it happened because the other car was in the intersection at the same time. I didn’t punch you in the face, your head got in the way of my fist. If you’re starting to get the point, Stephens has completely ignored the salient question: why are these regimes so corruptible?

The problem isn’t cartels. The problem isn’t drug laws. The problem is corrupt politicians. Kidding, right? This is just a tired rehashing of the old “if-only-the-right-people-were-in-power” cliché… Count me along with the folks at Cato, you dipshit. 

Politicians exercise their power, always and everywhere, by dealing in favors, and they deal in favors because they can exercise powers over the rest of us: quid pro quo. That’s all they’re capable of doing! Saying that “corrupt politicians” are to blame for drug war violence is simply not going far enough, it’s not examining the root cause. Even if American drug laws are not the proximate cause of the drug cartels’ impunity (an argument I’m more than willing to entertain), blaming the problem on “basketcase” governments is an intellectually lazy cop-out.

What if these governments were in-fact “basketcases” to begin with? The decades-old epic fail that we know as the war on drugs is certainly responsible for exacerbating the problems, escalating the violence, and further encouraging (by profitablity) the corruption of already-failed states. But Stephens, who is quick to blame government failure for the drug war violence, is equally quick to blame lack of government:

The Calderón government has vastly increased military and police budgets, but remains vastly outspent by the cartels.

Why can cartels outspend governments? Because there are monopoly profits to be made, and there are going to be monopoly profits as long as long as the substances are outlawed, as long as America continues to deny the rights of her own citizens, while sending Cowboy-wannabe testosterone junkies in the DEA to “stir up some violence” between rivals cartels south of the border. The profits are there for the taking, and as long as they are, the cartels will have enought money to continue fighting the war.

The war on drugs enables terrorism, and the only way to eliminate the war and all its violence, is to make violence unprofitable by freeing the market; remove the profit incentive by decriminalizing and/or legalizing ALL drugs, and consequently forcing the cartels to compete honestly. Stephens, on the other hand, falls back on the statist’s favorite solution to any problem: more power for the state (and more violence):

What Mexico urgently needs are stronger institutions of state, beginning with its army but also including the judiciary and the police.

If it looks like fascism, sounds like fascism, and smells like fascism…

H/T Radley

no third solution

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