Psychopolitik 2.0

So according to the NYT & multiple sources, Hamid Karzai’s brother the accused opium trafficker is on the C.I.A.’s payroll.  Gee, no wonder Karzai needs fraud to stay in office & U.S. mercenaries to stay breathing…

Somewhat in reference to this, I will ramble:

To be blunt, I’m personally not a believer in the idea that things have to suck as painfully as possible before improvement can come.  This informs how I approach politics: you may have noticed that, though I’ve actually become more radical politically over time, I still will talk about particular issues.  It’s by design, in that what I’ve discussed here and elsewhere are data points I consider against statism, and also because my day-to-day goal is to keep conditions against me & my principles from getting worse.

If people come along that, though they may not agree on the end result, get pissed enough about particular encroachments & injustice to throw it back, then that still helps to an extent.  I try to make clear the thread tying it all together, hopefully to be considered later.  In the meantime, maybe I have more space to operate in.  This is why though I reject the state as a concept I don’t ignore it.

Get and maintain wealth by using your high-level business connections to game the system?  Possible criminal:

By all appearances, Raj Rajaratnam was a self-made billionaire, having built Galleon Group into a giant hedge fund with a specialty in technology companies.

But prosecutors said on Friday that he had profited not from his trading genius but from his Rolodex, and they arrested him on charges of conspiracy and securities fraud in what they called the biggest insider trading scheme ever involving a hedge fund.

In all, six people were arrested, accused by prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission of earning more than $20 million from illegal trading in companies like Google, Akamai and Hilton Hotels over nearly three years.

Even now, after the discovery of Bernard L. Madoff, the scheme outlined by law enforcement officials is the stuff of Wall Street thrillers, not seen since the days of Ivan Boesky two decades ago. Mr. Rajaratnam is accused of tapping a vast network of informants across a swath of corporate America: a senior official at I.B.M. considered a contender for the top job at that firm; executives of Intel and the consulting firm McKinsey & Company; two former Bear Stearns employees who had moved to a hedge fund, New Castle Partners; and an analyst at Moody’s Investors Service.

Get & maintain wealth by using your high-level business connections including members of the government to game the system?  Sure thing, go ahead!

If the alleged regulatory standard in finance was applied evenly, there’d be a lot more CEOs wearing handcuffs, and government agents would basically have to frog-march themselves right behind people like Raj.  After all, if the issue is profiting from your connections, then whether hidden or overt makes no difference, as the entirety of Wall Street does this.  No, enforcement is a matter of convenience, throw the occasional bone & hope the rubes take it & shut up.

Yet still they wonder why people conclude the problem is the system itself rather than particular players…

The question: anyone that either lives abroad or has lived abroad or has been abroad or whatever, can you get Mexican food in places other than Mexico?  By this I mean if places exist where you are/have been that are not Taco Bell uber-americanized but places opened by people who just happen to like Mexican style food and wanted to have that back home, wherever home was/is.

The recommendation: Brother Thelonious Belgian style ale.  Trust me, it’s worth it, if you see it buy it.

Yes, I realized that the previous post was #1000…

What say we try a bit of a thought experiment to start the next 1000, eh?  Since the last post dealt with the Nobel Prizes kind of, take the following (all emphasis mine):

Oliver Williamson, co-winner of this year’s Nobel Economics Prize, said there’s no easy way to deal with the question of institutions whose failure might pose a threat to the financial system.

“There is no silver bullet,” Williamson, 77, said at a news conference today at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is professor emeritus. “There is no instant answer that I or any of my students or any of my colleagues would be prepared to advance on that.”

Williamson is a founder of organizational economics — the study of how institutions are created and developed and how they affect growth. In research that may have applications to the financial crisis, he suggested that it is better to regulate large companies than to try to break them up or limit their size. [...]

In his academic work, Williamson found that large corporations exist primarily because they are efficient and benefit owners, workers, suppliers and customers, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said today in Stockholm.

A warning: no, I haven’t read this guy’s work.  Hadn’t heard of him until now to be honest.  That said, here’s the first thing I thought in response, or more accurately the whole stream of consciousness before I decided to post it:

“‘No silver bullet’, well duh if the idea is to resist any structural change to the system…yeah, fat lot of good that ‘regulation’ is doing, the regulated own the regulators…’efficient’ at what?…If benefit was inherently that widespread, then what exactly would there be to ‘regulate’?…in effect, the claim amounts to ‘bigness is good!’, and if that’s the case then the only question left for people like this is big corporations vs big everything.”

Here’s the experiment: regardless of your own view of it, argue against my attitude.  Seriously.  I used to have to argue crap I didn’t believe all the time at student debate competitions, I’m curious what comes out when people who read this try it.  Why?  Because I’m bored, and football is getting annoying to me since the refs placed that protective bubble around the QB.

Heh…either somebody hasn’t been paying attention since the inauguration, or there’s a loophole in evaluation that allows for sabre-rattling & threatening war while still qualifying.  Eh, who am I kidding, of course there’s a loophole.

A common bit of snark that bubbles up among the political blogosphere is to respond to state skeptics by saying “well look at Somalia”.  This completely ignores the reason why Somalia doesn’t have a central government, among other things, but whatever, it’s out there.  Oddly enough, the New York Times did a profile on one of the warlords currently running a piece of the country:

ABOVE the shimmering horizon, in the middle of a deserted highway, stands an oversize figure wearing a golf cap, huge sunglasses, baggy jeans, and an iPhone on his hip, not your typical outfit in war-torn Somalia. But then again, Mohamed Aden, the man waiting in the road, is not your typical Somali. The instant his guests arrive, he spreads his arms wide, ready for a bear hug.  “Welcome to Adado,” he says, beaming. “Now, let’s bounce.”

Mr. Aden, 37, is part militia commander, part schoolteacher, part lawmaker, part engineer, part environmentalist, part king — a mind-boggling combination of roles for anyone to play, let alone for a guy who dresses (and talks) like a rapper and recently moved from Minnesota to Somalia in an effort to build a local government.

Think of him as the accidental warlord. And a shard of hope. In less than a year, Mr. Aden, who was born in Somalia and emigrated to the United States at age 22, has essentially built a state within a state.

The wording the author of this article adopts for the subject is a bit annoying, though unsurprising.  So what does the Aden Administration look like?

Somalia is one of the most violent countries on the planet, and at times Mr. Aden has had to speak with the business end of a machine gun.

This is like saying “at times, major league pitchers have had to throw fastballs”.  But I digress…

His patch — which encompasses around 5,000 square miles and a few hundred thousand people, most of them desperately poor nomads and members of his own Saleban clan — is now one of the safest parts of this broken nation. [...]

Mr. Aden does not get much help from the United Nations or the internationally supported transitional government of Somalia, which is led by moderate Islamists and preoccupied with beating back an intense insurgency in the capital, Mogadishu.

Most of what Mr. Aden has accomplished he has accomplished on his own, in distinctly Somali fashion. His police officers carry rocket-propelled grenades. Parked in front of the police station are two enormous tanks.  “My Cadillacs,” Mr. Aden calls them.

But however playful or flamboyant he may come across, Mr. Aden seems to have hit upon a deeper truth. People want government, he says, even in Somalia. “They’re begging for it,” he said. (emphasis mine)

There’s no way of knowing how literal this is, barring an in-person survey of Somalis.  Food, money, medicine for common regional ailments?  Of course they want that.  Stability?  Obviously chaos is counterproductive.  Yet it seems a bit of a stretch to claim of a people with such a long tradition of polycentric order that they beg for a State, at least if we’re assuming the Western view of such.

Acknowledging their history leads to a realization: the residents under Aden are used to having plenty of options if they disapprove, so his claim of a monopoly on force doesn’t carry an immovable amount of weight.  They must be getting something out of the arrangement, right?

With the elders firmly behind him, he was able to form a well-armed police force of several hundred fellow clansmen who are fiercely protective of him — essentially his own private army, which has made it difficult for the extremist Islamists wreaking havoc in other parts of Somalia to establish a beachhead here.

Well, that works.  But as always, there’s the reminder of what else comes with the authority:

People who have challenged his authority have paid the price. Last summer, his police officers shot to death four men who violently refused to vacate a piece of property that Mr. Aden’s administration ruled belonged to someone else.  “I knew there were outliers, people with their own rules,” he said. “I knew I had to challenge them, sooner or later.”

Much of the 1st World ignores this.  The few who do acknowledge it, most do little beyond shake their head & call it barbaric.  A waste, as this leaves a question hanging in the air that both anti- and pro-government types could benefit from asking: just what is a State, really?

(cross-posted to FreedomDemocrats.org)

Average U.S. resident, according to Economic Policy Institute survey response [PDF]: “The economy still sucks, and what the State is doing is benefiting Wall Street, not me.”

Matthew Yglesias, “progressive”: “Nuh-uh!  U R cynical!”

Psst…Matt, the burden of proof that we’re being ungrateful bastards is on you.