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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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Canada: OPED: You Can't Make War On Organized Crime
National Post (Canada) Friday 27 Oct 2000 Pubdate: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 Source: National Post (Canada) Website: http://www.nationalpost.com/ Author: Filip Palda, a professor of economics at the Ecole nationale d'administration publique. YOU CAN'T MAKE WAR ON ORGANIZED CRIME In August, two gunmen wounded a Quebec criminal reporter. Since then, Quebec and Ottawa have vowed to crack down on organized crime with more policemen and harsher laws than now exist. As with most top-down solutions, this one is likely to fail. The experience Canadian gardeners have with squirrels shows why. No bulb is too deep for the eager claw, no bunch of grapes too high for the snickering snout of the creatures some call rats with good PR. Gardeners who set humane traps for their tormentors get no relief. Their frustration turns to apoplexy as they note that for every hissing eight-inch passenger they chauffeur to the woods in the trunk of their Volvos, two or three buck-tooth denizens appear, in the name of Medusa, to multiply ravage upon the gardener's White Rose dream. Bikers and Mafiosi are not as cuddly as squirrels, but crackdowns upon them have the same effect. In the United States, the FBI was surprised that putting well-heeled Mafiosi in prison opened the streets to ferocious gangs from Asia and Eastern Europe. These gangs had not yet learned a lesson the Mafia had taken a century to learn. In the words of Al Capone, violence is bad for business. The unfortunate consequences of gang-busting apply to all countries. People of the Congo who had long suffered the depredations of thieves in official garments, the so-called kleptocrats, discovered in 1998 that in exchanging Joseph Mobutu for Laurent Kabila, they lost a classy pickpocket to gain a brutish extortionist. Tito might have looked bad to Yugoslavs of the 1970s, but he was a gentleman in spectacles and powdered Whig compared with the armada of punks who have macerated the Balkans these past 10 years. University of Chicago historian William McNeill summed up the problem in his book Plagues and Peoples: homo homini lupus. Man is unto himself like a wolf. In the early days, men raided each other's fields and left a good deal of what CNN war commentators would call collateral damage. The raiders who came to dominate were the ones who did the least damage while taking from peasants. Government evolved as a peaceful monopoly of force from the chaos of competitive crime. We no longer live in terror of the arm-snapping racketeer, but give our money to the number-crunching taxman. Economist Gary Becker won a Nobel Prize in 1992 in part for showing how governments, be they dictatorships, democracies or criminal oligarchies, evolve to extort their revenues efficiently and to provide services for their exactions. Capone saw himself as a public servant and while satisfying Chicagoans' $100-million a year thirst for booze, managed to operate soup kitchens that fed 3,000, as well as to pay the salaries of half the Chicago police force. The evolutionary force that transforms criminals into governments should give our official leaders pause before cracking down on organized crime in Canada. Organized crime is the government of prostitution, drug-taking, and gambling. These governments serve needs that have been with us since the days of glaciers and wooly mammoth barbecues. By putting these industries outside the law, our elected leaders guarantee employment for juntas of strong men whose specialty is defiance of the state. By breaking up these juntas, we push crime back to its primitive condition of unmoderated violence. The best way to topple the dictatorships that organized criminals set up is not to make war with crime, but to invite criminals to compete by the rules of commerce that have taken our elected governments generations to perfect. Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has called for the legalization of drugs, as have some policemen, and a guild of prostitutes has petitioned The Hague to legalize their profession. These might be bottom-up solutions to consider in Canada's search for an answer to organized crime.
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