Watch the Somali pirates and the process of state creation

Sunday, January 24, 2016

That’s not exactly a terribly flattering picture up above there but it is a typical one of the process of state creation. Yes, this is how polities are born: men with guns enforcing it. as the newspaper says:

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Somali pirates who raked in millions of dollars in ship hijackings have developed a lucrative new racket – acting as armed “escorts” to foreign trawlers that steal the country’s fish.

In a striking case of poacher-turned-gamekeeper, the same armed gangs who once preyed on the trawlermen are now acting as their bodyguards, earning huge “protection fees” in return for letting them poach Somalia’s rich fishing stocks.

this is not poacher turned gamekeeper so much as the transition from Mancur Olson’s roving bandits to stationary bandits. Olson’s point being that it always has been the men with the weapons who decide how things get done and who gets what. But for the general population it’s rather better when those men with guns decide to farm the population or a resource on a continual basis, rather than simply steal whatever and everything.

For, eventually, it will click that slicing a bit off the top while growing the pie increases the amount that can be stolen. Thus even though the ruling class might be robbers, even robber barons, it is still possible for things to advance.

The way to look at this particular story is that this process is just starting in that part of the world. The other way to look at it is of course that it wasn’t all that long ago that it was happening in our part of it. 1066 was most certainly exactly the same and there’s various incidents since that we could say very much resemble it.

Government isn’t therefore just the name for what we do together. It is, rather, what is imposed upon us and the best we can hope for is an enlightened stationary bandit. Or, as we might also put it, one with enough guns to stop others imposing upon us but with not enough other powers for that very government to impose upon us.

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