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Curzon
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Curzon

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May 16th, 2005

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The BBC Gets It Wrong, Again

Hands down the best source for Africa news is the BBC’s Africa page, a great place to see the latest news on the Ethiopian elections, cashew nut farming in Senegal, Bostwana’s government bonds, and Ivory Coast’s coups.

The problem is, it’s still the BBC.

Living in Somalia’s Anarchy

“Somalia is a pure free market,” one diplomat told me… But is a pure free market a good thing? Speaking from a theoretical point of view, some economists might say so, but in the very harsh reality of Mogadishu, it means guns and other military hardware are freely available in a market not far from the city centre.

Sheesh, if only those economists would get out of their ivory towers to see economics in practice they’d see that their “theories” aren’t so hot in practice. And the author would be right if economists equated a “pure free market” to “total anarchy without any rule of law or order in any aspect of society.” I don’t know if/where the author studied economics, but a “pure free market” is generally defined as an economy with the necessary components of basic functionality such as the rule of law and a currency printed by a centralized authority, but with the absence of artificial price pressures from taxes, tariffs, subsidies, and excessive regulation.

These arguments with lefties determined to prove the free market position incorrect were fun when I was an undergraduate. But to read it in the BBC is just gaaling. That you can buy a Somali passport regardless of your nationality is an indication of a lawlessness, not libertarian economics.

Comments to this entry

Gabriel Mihalache
May 16, 2005
10:30 am
I mostly agree... with one tiny difference. When you say

I don't know if/where the author studied economics, but a "pure free market"Â? is generally defined as an economy with the necessary components of basic functionality such as the rule of law and a currency printed by a centralized authority, but with the absence of artificial price pressures from taxes, tariffs, subsidies, and excessive regulation.


you make it sound like the Keynesian position on fiat money is something any right-minded human would endorse. That's untrue, throughout history and right now.

I won't list all the Economics schools that dislike fiat money, and their Nobel Prize winners, because I don't agree with all of their arguments. I'll just say this:
Fiat money is bad business! Governments, under pressure from their electorate, will end up, inevitably, misusing it to control unemployment, via the Phillips curve... this was the case in post-Revolutionary Romania, where high inflation was allowed, allegedly, to prevent massive unemployment, and this is one of the reason the reforms aren't done already.

Tweaking inflation for social engineering purposes is bad business. Sometimes you need to bite a bullet, otherwise you end up with the quasi-paradoxic situation where you have most people employed, but working for almost worthless money.

What Somalia needs the most is a strong police force, under the leadership of someone other than a narrow-minded bureaucrat, to protect the lives and property of the citizens and a judicial system to uphold contracts (punish fraud). Once they are physically safe and contracts are enforced, then we'll be able to talk of Economics.
Catalin Tilimpea
May 16, 2005
11:14 am
I think the point of this particular piece of news is to draw a fallacious parallel between whatever happens in Somalia and things that _might_ happen in Europe or the US.

More precisely, the author considers the absence of etatist measures such as infrastructure government expenditure to be the indirect root of (all) evil and to necessarily bring about anarchy (Hobbesian, no less!). To quote one of the people (s)he interviews: "I am from Somalia and to live without government is the most dangerous system".

There are people who believe that a totally "free" society, one in which there is state (no police, central bank etc..) is not necessarily a bad thing. And this BBC correspondent merely suggests (in a veiled way) that right-wing policy may or will _lead_ to such a society, in a historically inevitable way, so to speak.

The BBC would probably want us to think twice before we suggest that our governments should interevene less in the economy, for fear that we just might end up like in Somalia. This is the kind of material that parents scare their small kids with.
Improbulus Maximus
May 17, 2005
12:19 am
Why doesn't the Bolshevik Bullshit Collective just quote directly from Marx and Mao? They'd still be dirtbag commies, but at least they'd be honest about it.
Catalin Tilimpea
May 18, 2005
4:34 am
Well, one reason would be because they would not want to be treated as such (dirbag commies), but the _real_ reason I think is the fact that they don't consider themselves Marxists or Mao-ists.

In _their_ view, they could very well be humanists, with little concern for the economics of class warfare or they could be honestly making a point for state intervention in the economy, believing this is the only or best way to save our fellow man (and ourselves!) from starvation etc.
Michael Taylor
May 18, 2005
4:07 pm
Let's face it, they're the powerful Standing Stones left over from the Centrally Collected Information Age. As this age dies, so the justifications for the centralized state will wane, and the desire to organise at more local levels for common goals will grow in step with the ability to distribute enough information to let it organise itself. Those structures which currently justify their existence through a Post War/Cold War belief in the necessity of a strong centralising force - and that includes BBC par excellence - will necessarily react increasingly desperately as the Distributed Information Age sorts out its own solutions. All this will make for some dreadfully disfunctional twitches as institutions thrash around trying to understand what's happening to them. (And just for the hell of it - consider the ID card/National Register project as the epitome, the apogee, the Pyramids in the Desert of the Centrally Collected Information Age. Now ask yourself - what stands a better chance of stopping terrorism (say) - this Pyramid scheme, or the widely-dispersed information networks which spring up in functional human societies (ie, one in which people talk with each other, rather than are atomized by, among other things, national broadcasters.
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