November 2000 Fraser Forum: A New Way to Fight Organized Crime
In August, two gunmen wounded a Quebec crime reporter. Since then, Quebec and Ottawa have vowed to crack down on organized crime with more policemen and harsher laws than those that 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 Volvo, two or three buck-tooth denizens appear, in the name of the Hydra, to multiply their attacks on 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 US, the FBI were 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 the lesson that the Mafia had learned over a century: in the words of Al Capone, violence is bad for business.
The unfortunate consequences of gang-busting apply to all countries. The people of then-Zaire, 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 and the Democratic Republic of Congo, they lost a classy pickpocket to gain a brutish extortionist. Tito might have looked bad to Yugoslavs in the 1970s, but he was a gentleman in spectacles and a powdered wig compared to the armada of punks who have lacerated the Balkans over the last decade.
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 others’ fields and left a good deal of what CNN war commentators call collateral damage. The raiders who came to dominate were the ones who did the least damage as they stole from the 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 instead give our money to the number-crunching tax man.
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 operated 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 woolly 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 under 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 a solution to organized crime.
Filip Palda is Professor at l’École Nationale d’Administration Publique in Montreal, and Senior Fellow of The Fraser Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.
info@fraserinstitute.ca
4th Floor, 1770 Burrard Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6J 3G7
Tel: (604) 688-0221 Fax: (604) 688-8539 Book Orders: 1-800-665-3558 ext. 580
You can contact us at the above email address for any comments or information requests. Please report any dead links or technical problems.