“Grrrrrr … There oughta be a law!” This common reaction when we see someone doing something that we don’t think is right is quick and comfortable thinking … Instinctive thinking. Unfortunately, if our wished-for law were actually enacted, things would all too often not work out the way we intend.
Besides the general Law of Unintended Consequences, the particular fly in the ointment here is: Will disenfranchising the soon-to-become law breakers cause more harm than the law will do good?
This section is about cases where disenfranchising part of the community through laws and other systems turns out to be very expensive to the whole community.
It’s not often that we think of health care as an enfranchisement issue. But that’s the point! Because we don’t, the health issues that take up our attention are peripheral, not the core of the problem. We end up with the emotional turf wars about health care that America has been experiencing in the first part of the 21st century.
In January and February 2010, I participated in a lively online discussion thread about who should take the leadership role in providing health care. Several points of view were advocated and most were interesting—few were tiresome clichés.
One apparent axiom was that patients could not successfully make their own choices. At that point, I went “Ah-hah!”
Patronizing patients, disenfranchising them—belying the pious medical truism that “we treat the patient, not the disease”—is deeply ingrained into the health care system. That’s what makes doctors such notoriously difficult patients. Seeing themselves as wholly or partly enfranchised, they don’t submit passively, which is unsettling for care givers who’re used to going unchallenged.
Patronizing the patient has deep roots in the human condition. When you’re sick, you may not feel much like making choices. In the Neolithic village lifestyle for which most of our thinking is well adapted, when you got sick you slowed down, and care was divided between your extended family, your concerned neighbors, and, if you were sick enough, specialist providers of physical and/or spiritual care—herbalists, shamans, other god-botherers, etc.—with decided opinions on what should be done to and with you.
In modern America, friends-’n-family have been nearly eclipsed by the pros. (Happily, many other cultures have resisted this trend.)
This disconnect is resulting in fierce turf wars involving multibillions of dollars among health care providers, their regulators, insurance companies, the employers who mostly pick those companies, and insurance regulators, as in the “Obamacare” law still simmering as I write in 2012.
And while the parties involved almost always claim to be patient advocates, the thought of giving any decision-making power to the patient doesn’t even occur to them—or to us spectators, their potential patients.
I suggest we fix this state of affairs by enfranchising the patient, something I call “Patient Pays”. It simply means that you pay directly for your health care. This would be revolutionary, completely upsetting the current system. That would be a good thing.
Here are some implications.
Regulators would take on the role of rating the authority of information provided on health choices, and it would be illegal to provide such information or to offer treatment without including such rating. But regulators couldn’t restrict the information flow, and ratings could be ignored.
So if a patient wanted to, they could pick a treatment labeled:
Independent scientific evaluation of effectiveness: 0% (prob. = .94).
Agency evaluation of effectiveness: 0% (prob. = .99).
Chance of injury (from any cause) or worsening condition: 98% (prob. = .96). Chance of death (from any cause) during treatment: 1-mo., 50%; 6-mo., 97%; 1 yr. 99%+ (prob. = .95).
They may choose to do so because they figure they’re dying within two weeks and only a miracle can save them now. So … why not give it a try? Or they may be making their choice based on their Uncle Andrew’s tea leaf readings, and never bother with the regulatory agency rating fliers under the aspidistra in the quack’s office.
But the heart of the issue is that what to listen to and what not would rest with the patient.
… but this will seem very chaotic and frustrating to those who want to tell patients what they should be getting in health care.
What is offered will be different. How it is offered will be different. There will be a lot more change over time, with more variety offered, and a much simpler relationship between patient and provider.
If Patient Pays ever made it into a legislative bill, there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth by those who feel patients will constantly be duped by faddish but ineffectual offerings, and often delay what would otherwise be effective treatment until it’s too late to matter.
As you can tell from the bullet points above, my feeling is that, yes, a disturbing amount of health resource will be spent on “worthless or harmful activity”—at least in the eyes of the currently established health care industries and agencies. But if that’s what the patient wants to spend their money and time on, what they feel is best for them … won’t activities that the patient buys into provide them with the greatest satisfaction they can get for their time and money spent, what they can live and die with comfortably?
A patient wants good results. We, the community, want the patient to have good results. The big question is, “Who decides what good results are?” I propose that the patient should be deciding that, not the health care establishment.
If the patient is deciding what the good results are, they’re enfranchised. That is the benefit of the patient deciding, a benefit the current health care debate seems to be ignoring. Because the patient buys only what the patient considers important, enfranchising patients will reduce the ferocity of the current turf wars that health care is experiencing and dramatically reduce the expense.
The patient buys what the patient considers important. It becomes that simple.
In a perfect world, there would be a Disenfranchisement Impact Statement prepared for every proposed law. Not only would this save people a lot of grief, it would save governments.
Ancient Chinese scholars observed that Chinese governments came and went, and their explanation became that a government rose and ruled when it had “the Mandate of Heaven” and fell when it lost that Mandate by misgovernment.
Put in terms of disenfranchisement, that theory is correct: When many people of a community don’t feel they have a stake in the government, it leads to rising crime, corruption, and apathy.
As already discussed, the people who do most to stop criminals are neighbors and family. They do this most effectively by censuring crime to prevent it even being considered, but next most effectively by censuring criminals after the fact and reporting them to the police or other authorities—say, religious and community leaders.
When neighbors and family feel they have a community worth caring about, crime stops.
Corruption happens whenever a person in a position of trust betrays that trust for personal gain, that gain being provided by a corrupter who also wants to violate the trust. A classic story-making example is the citizen conspiring with a government official to evade a law or regulation—say, to smuggle in goods that the community wants or even needs.
Or a building inspector is paid to “look the other way”, to ignore an obsolete building code that has been made irrelevant by a new building technology. When a basically law-abiding corrupter agrees with a sympathetic official that a basically crazy law should not be enforced, the community gets along just fine with the choice the two make.
Mixed in with these many benign cases are the news-making pathological examples where the choice of an evil corruptor and venal corruptee does produce community damage—the building collapses in an earthquake because a strengthening code was ignored.
But even the benign cases are costly. In fact, they are much more costly than the spectacular failures. They are costly because the disenfranchisement adds uncertainty and arbitrariness to the social processes that are under the corruption cloud.
The corruption institutionalized as baksheesh in the Middle East and South Asia, la mordita in Mexico, etc., stems from a completely different form of disenfranchisement. Government officials who are underpaid not merely in their own eyes but in reality—thus being disenfranchised within the system—insist on a bribe to do their duty (say, issue a license) or to not harass you (say, tie you up in court). The only way to stamp out that type of corruption is to pay officials a living wage or better … and then crack down on those who don’t get the message or who insist on keeping three mistresses when they can afford only one on their salaries.
This type of corruption is similarly costly to the community. Even if the written laws are a model of justice and fairness, their administration becomes arbitrary and erratic, and Rule of Law suffers.
A spectacular, textbook example of disenfranchisement producing both crime and corruption was American Prohibition in the 1920s.
Enough people thought the evils of drunkenness justified outlawing all drinking that an 18th Amendment to the US Constitution passed the Congress with large bipartisan majorities and was ratified by 46 out of 48 state legislatures, making legal purchase of alcoholic beverages insanely difficult. (This took an amendment, not a mere law, because under the US Constitution such intervention in the lives of citizens is a state matter, not a federal one.)
It passed, but a whole lot of respectable people thought it was a crazy idea and became disenfranchised. Some of those people were policemen and politicians. So it wasn’t hard for bootleggers to bribe the “evil” and “weak” not to enforce the laws, at least not against those wise enough to pay the bribes, and to mostly look the other way while respectable people had a drink or twelve if they wanted.
These people were disenfranchised on this issue. But remember that disenfranchisement is a continuum, not an off/on state. Despite causing much crime, violence, and corruption, the craziness of Prohibition didn’t threatened to topple the US government. (After all, in contrast to the Blunder Chain engendered by the War on Drugs, set out earlier in this book, we didn’t invade Scotland or Canada in an attempt to make them stop producing Scotch whiskey and Canadian Club. Nor did the turf wars among the disenfranchised bootleggers often involve civilian casualties.) But early twentieth-century Russia was a different story.
The Russian Revolutions might have been inevitable. But if the Tsarist government had made one less mistake—if they had ignored the Russian Temperance Movement, as strong as the US’s, and not prohibited the sale of hard liquor except in restaurants in 1914—then just perhaps the Tsars who had ruled Russia for five hundred years would not have been brought down in 1917.
However, against this view is the fact that the Soviet of the workers and peasants didn’t get around to Repeal until 1925. That and the Blaine Act of 1933 in the US, repealing Prohibition, are examples of how slowly Blunder scars heal.
There are cases where a government looks like it should have been brought down by disenfranchisement, but wasn’t.
Two recent examples are the robustness of Saddam Hussein’s government after the first US Gulf War against him and of the Kim family’s continuing dictatorship in North Korea.
Iraq. After George H. W. Bush defeated and humiliated Saddam in 1991, he stopped fighting. The Commander in Chief believed that Saddam’s government was discredited and doomed—the Iraqis would quickly replace him. But his people stuck with him, despite his increasingly insane rule. Why did Saddam keep the franchise? Although Western media chose to mostly ignore it, I remember a well-informed Iraqi declaring at the time, “There’s no one better to replace him.”
In the years since the Second US Gulf War, the truth of that explanation has acquired increasingly painful clarity.
Korea. The reality of starvation and other economic and political deprivation pales against North Koreans’ deep, abiding fear (already mentioned above) that outsiders will start running the country again. The way to keep that from happening is to present a strong front to the outside world. No dissent must be shown. So long as the “Great Successor” to their “Dear Leader” fulfills the role of nation’s savior, he retains the Mandate of Heaven.
What does all this have to do with running the US?
The lesson is that we must become sensitive to the role enfranchisement plays in our nation. We must be aware that most immigrants, legal and illegal, still believe that America offers enfranchisement: A person can come to America and have a say in running his or her own life.
But we are now dimming our shining example of liberty.
The US government under Bush and Obama was right to take steps to prevent the crash of our financial institutions and goose the economy with stimulus measures in the Great Recession. However, the Obama administration then focused so strongly on fairness—taxing the rich, supporting unions, protecting consumer finance, so-called Obamacare—that it undertook no measures for current economic growth. The Republican obstinate insistence that immediate reductions in government spending, the national debt, and government regulation were the only ways to grow the economy didn’t help. We didn’t need more acrimony.
But on the whole, while fairness is nice for enfranchisement, having a job is nearly essential.
In 2011, there were instructive examples abroad of fairness-based social safety nets failing in the face of disenfranchising loss or non-creation of jobs: The unrest of the Arab Spring and England’s August urban riots.
Besides avoiding or reversing the above blows to enfranchisement, we must support what makes members feel that the community’s rules are their rules.
A community can feel very enfranchised, or just a little enfranchised. Here are two examples of strong enfranchisement, the first from my youth, the second from my age.
In the 1960s America went freeway crazy as the Interstate system was being planned and built. The State of Ohio planners proposed a freeway that would follow Tinker’s Creek, east of Cleveland, in the process wiping out a wonderful series of parks along that Cuyahoga River tributary.
I had just gotten my driver’s license, and I thought it would be a brilliant idea to have a freeway exit next to our driveway. But my parents, and my other adult neighbors, said, “No! It’s a terrible idea!”—not just to me, but to many other people that mattered in Cleveland and Ohio State government.
That chunk of freeway never happened.
The Moral: Our neighborhood had a lot of enfranchisement.
From the KSL.com web site, viewed the day of the report.
Neighbors concerned about strange van
May 7th, 2009 @ 6:03pm
By Sam Penrod
PROVO—Provo police are investigating a bizarre incident this week: a van parked in a residential neighborhood with a sign on it, reading: “free candy inside.”
It turns out police believe the sign was harmless. But for neighbors who live in Provo’s Grandview neighborhood, it raised serious concerns with them that a child predator could be targeting kids on the street.
The white van was parked on a neighborhood street in front of a home. No one on the street knew who the van belonged to, and the neighbors were worried about the sign posted in the back window.
Adults looked inside and did not see any candy, but they did see a mattress and some clothes in the back of the van. Police were called and investigated.
Officers tracked down the van’s owner, who is a college age student. He told officers he put up the sign a few days ago as part of a prank with his friends.
Police credit the neighbors for watching out for their neighborhood. “With this sign possibly enticing children to a van, your worst case scenarios come to mind. So, it was good, a good example of someone in a neighborhood watching out, not only for his own family, but the whole neighborhood,” said Capt. Cliff Argyle, spokesman for the Provo Police Department.
The neighbors were empowered. They noted something wrong, and they took action. They and the police supported each other, and the cops’ role was not to intimidate but investigate.
Examples of weak enfranchisement are legion in popular fiction: The Sheriff of Nottingham overtaxing his people, the wicked stepmother enslaving Cinderella, Ming the Merciless trying to keep a lid on the people of planet Mongo … these leaders were all disenfranchising their followers.
It is frequently argued that being poor is the same as being disenfranchised. This idea is quite popular with those who worry about a tiny percentage of the population controlling a huge and growing percentage of the wealth, both in America and around the world.
This is not always the case. A people can be dirt-poor and still be highly enfranchised:
The most common situation where poor does equal disenfranchised is that the poor are given money by the wealthy for reasons that have nothing to do with earning their livelihood. For instance, more civilized settlers may move into a tribe’s area and cause them to lose their traditional hunting and fishing areas. If entwining with the civilized folks leads them to become dependent on government dole, such as “living on the reservation”, they endure culture shock, a form of disenfranchisement.
In such situations, Delusion (discussed above) becomes easy to fall into, and the capricious and arbitrary nature of the civilized folks’ giving reinforces the disenfranchisement.
Laws are designed to settle arguments.
They are established when people have to settle what is the right way to handle a matter. Sometimes establishing a custom is enough, but if the matter is important enough, or controversial enough, a law gets made.
Where there is no argument or no choice, no law will be made. For instance, no jurisdiction mandates that its citizens must breathe. Breathing is important, it’s vital, but there are no social crusades that we should all remember to breathe, and only advice, not laws, about how to do it best.
The best laws settle the argument involved and the community falls in line behind the decision wholeheartedly. Sometimes it doesn’t matter much which side is chosen, as in picking which side of the road automobiles should drive on, but it is important to make the choice.
A good law settles an argument without creating significant disenfranchisement compared to the good it accomplishes. It can be argued that setting the drinking age as 21 in all states under federal pressure in 1984 was good law. (There are plenty of dissenters on that, but they are not a large part of the population, and apparently most do not feel broadly disenfranchised.)
What to eat and what to drink are things people do argue over, so there are thousands of suggestions and hundreds of laws about the subject. Examples from the 2000s include New York and other US cities outlawing trans-fats in restaurant food, and from the 2010s, campaigns to regulate the nutrition of school lunches and snack offerings.
A bad law does not settle an argument. Dissenters do not accept the decision. Instead of curling up and blowing away on the next breeze, they take the argument to informal venues. Spectacular examples of bad laws include Prohibition, the so-called War on Drugs, and most aspects of the so-called War on Terror; all are discussed above.
A symptom of impending disenfranchisement is acrimony. Acrimony itself is not disenfranchisement but the final step before that—it indicates that those arguing still care and have some hope, but the hope is going to happen outside the law. It’s when what’s being argued about isn’t settled well that resignation and smoldering disenfranchisement set in.
This is important because long-running political acrimony is a strong symptom that the Mandate of Heaven is about ready to move on.
“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you” has regularly been paired with “The check is in the mail” as one of this society’s two biggest lies. In these days of electronic fund transfer, the second statement will need updating. The first will probably last as long as governments.
Because while the joke may be funny, the situation it comments on is too often appalling. When someone comes in from the outside and orders a solution to a community problem, that person or group is going to anger and disenfranchise at least one party to the problem, and quite likely all parties. Because the community did not solve its own problem, any solution imposed, even if it is wise and good, disrupts and disenfranchises the community.
Let’s look once again at Iraq after the Second US Gulf War. Americans had come in with a big agenda but the peace budget was always a trifle compared to the war budget, and the quick-and-dirty half-efforts at nation-building had no hope of bringing the Iraqi communities on board. The result was severe disenfranchisement.
The prime symptom of severe disenfranchisement is violence. Ancient Rome had its mob, occupied France had its Résistance, Prohibition had its gangsters and speakeasies … and Iraq and Afghanistan have their insurgents. (More on them below.) And the harder the disenfranchisers push, the more violence the disenfranchised will support.
Once this has happened, ending the clash is never easy because strong emotions are involved. The violence ends only when the disenfranchised are re-enfranchised.
There is little predictability as to when a disenfranchised community will re-enfranchise, ending the violence, but it usually takes decades. South Vietnam was disenfranchised for 20 years, northern Malaysia for 15. America’s current War on Drugs started with Richard Nixon in the 1960s and shows precious few signs of ending.
But at some point, the disenfranchising rules are changed and the violence subsides.
Sometimes this can occur within the existing mainstream community structure and the Establishment wins. The group doing the disenfranchising decides they’ve paid enough and they back off, usually when something else becomes more important to them than listening to the people who are uselessly prescribing how other people should act. The rule changes come slowly and quietly and actually do “win the hearts and minds of the people.” Until recently, the Irish experience since 1603 was an example of multigenerational conflict, but re-enfranchising in Northern Ireland seems actually to be succeeding in the early 21st century.
Sometimes the violence “succeeds” and the disenfranchisers are thrown out. There is a rapid change in community structure, and the Rebels have won.
Very rarely, one group assimilates the other, which is how the post-1066 nastiness was resolved in England over a mere few generations.
A possible tactic, by either Establishment or Rebels, is to unite people behind a Big Challenge. This might be characterized as “I’m from the government and I’m here to inspire you!” After a breathtakingly close election, John F. Kennedy’s call to “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” at his inauguration is perhaps the most widely quoted example.
Many commentators have wished that George W. Bush had taken advantage of the national mood after 9-11 to unite the whole country in shared sacrifice behind one or more Big Challenges (the choice varies from pundit to pundit) rather than starting the so-called War on Terror.
Whatever the route of re-enfranchisement, the scars of the conflict—crazy laws and customs that make no sense a few decades later—can last for generations. The crazy-quilt drinking laws of the US, and to a lesser extent Canada, are scars from the Temperance Movement disenfranchisement period that included Prohibition. The 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution—about “the right to bear arms”—is a scar from the colonial disenfranchisement period before the American Revolution. And it is an integral part of our chronic gun control argument.
In a region that still remembers the Crusades, the scars on it from Mr. Bush’s Wars will doubtless be even bigger than what those wars leave on the US, perhaps even bigger than the US’s scars from the 9-11 event that started the whole drama. By mid-century, I can imagine a Pirates of the Euphrates ride in Baghdad Disneyland.
In the “Panic, Blunder, and Terrorism” section above, we looked at the problem with the military solution to finding terrorists and saw that it is:
More broadly, whenever the military solves a social problem by military means, it is inherently deeply disenfranchising and sows the seeds of even deeper disenfranchisement. (This of course does not apply to military people solving social problems by civilian means—evacuating threatened residents, feeding and sheltering large numbers of people, reconstructing roads and buildings, etc.—and with military efficiency!)
A military solution should never be applied to any civilian dispute unless the civilian dispute has already turned hopelessly violent.
In 1973, President Nixon was still trying to get the US out of Vietnam. Big, sometimes violent, anti-war demonstrations were something that happened at Harvard, Boston University, and other more liberal institutions, but not often at MIT, where I was going to school. But one day, late in the school year, one erupted there. Sort of.
About noon, a demonstration at some other campus had been broken up. Five or ten of the demonstrators came and moved a dumpster from behind an MIT building into Massachusetts Avenue, the main street going through the campus. I knew this because, as I made arrangements to rent a moving van, I was listening to a radio scanner monitoring police radio bands, and I happened to see these “outside agitators” when I came out of the rental place.
The university responded by getting forty city riot police to stand in front of the main MIT building at 77 Massachusetts Ave. This was a huge response, especially considering that the guys who moved the dumpster ran off right after they’d done it, and that within five minutes other people had already moved the dumpster back where it belonged. In fact this “pigs on campus” response was so strange and interesting that about a thousand students poured out of the dorms to find out what was happening. And thus began the “riot”.
For the rest of the daylight hours not much happened. Both sides just stood there. The few dozen men standing in front of the building stairs watched the several hundred students standing in a large field across from it and vice versa. It wasn’t even a demonstration. But a couple of hours after the cops first showed up, they got reinforcements, including dogs.
Then in late afternoon, they made a show of force. The police launched tear gas into the crowd and marched slowly halfway across the field, then back to the stairs. The students loved it. They got a chance to run away instead of just standing around, they got to smell a bit of tear gas, and those who knew that water neutralizes it (which at MIT was quite a lot of us) ran and got their cooking gloves, picked up the tear gas canisters, and threw them in the nearby pond around the chapel. When the police got back to the stairs, the students went back into the field to watch and see if there would be more fun.
When sunset came and it was time for the policemen to go home, rather than simply march away in good order they decided to charge the crowd again. But this time they ran into the crowd, caught people, and beat them up. Fortunately the worst student injury was a broken arm. They also launched tear gas into several nearby buildings, including the auditorium and the women’s dorm. In short, the police made asses of themselves.
But that night, there were no campus police patrolling as they usually did. That surprised me, until I realized, “If I were a policeman wandering MIT tonight, I’d worry about getting beaten up by angry students.” And that night, after the police riot was over, property damage happened. I remember walking by a couple of guys who were uprooting parking meters. I yelled at them, “Hey, stop that! I have to live here tomorrow!”—and they did.
But even then, I was thinking, “If those riot cops come back tomorrow, how can we screw them over?” I’m sure I wasn’t the only one among a campusful of very inventive students.
The good news is that the riot cops didn’t come back the next day, or the next. The Great MIT Anti-War Riot of 1973 was over. It was followed with an administration apology, student protest meetings, and a student strike that lasted until the end of that school year.
The moral?
If the display of force had been limited to the assembly of scary-looking riot cops, or even to their first benign charge, it might have been a wash. The students would have been a little more impressed by the police force’s strength, and a little less impressed by their good sense.
But the violent “military intervention” in the twilight was very disruptive and very disenfranchising. Escalation could have resulted in greater violence and greater disenfranchisement—alienation—on both sides.
You can understand why the MIT administration initially responded as it did in that turbulent time, as well as why it should have known better. The shootings at Kent State had been just three years before, after all. The administration dropping the police response was the best possible outcome.
In the case of both Mr. Bush’s Wars on Afghanistan and Iraq and Herr Hitler’s Wars on various European nations—better known as World War II—the military phase went spectacularly well, but the following peace spectacularly poorly. In both cases, the heart of the failure was that the conquerors failed to rapidly enfranchise the people they had conquered. They came, they occupied, then they did far too little to bring the people under occupation into the system—whatever the system was to be.
In Europe, the disenfranchised opposition were called “partisans”, in France specifically La Résistance. In the Near East, we’re calling them “insurgents”. In the 1940s they were mostly guerilla warriors and saboteurs, in the 21st century they have a much larger terrorist component and greater tolerance for civilian casualties, but the attack targets of both movements include soldiers, collaborators recruited by the conquerors, and conquest infrastructure.
Compare the reactions of the French, Russian, and other European communities under German occupation with the reactions of the German and Japanese communities under Allied occupation a few years later. The Allies took great pains to set up new governments and new social systems that enfranchised the occupied communities, which rapidly became peaceful, prosperous, and resistance-free.
Such plans for enfranchisement were sorely lacking from Mr. Bush’s War, and are less than excellent even now.
As I’ve said above, crimes such as theft, burglary, and pickpocketing do great damage to the victim, yet I’d guess the value gained by the perpetrator averages roughly a hundredth of that damage. This huge disparity makes property crime emotionally threatening but apparently senseless. The community would be hurt a whole lot less if a burglar occasionally knocked on your door and politely told you, “Excuse me, I’ll be burgling your place next time you’re out, unless you pay me a hundred bucks.”
So … why wouldn’t organized crime’s protection racket work just as well for common burglars? Mostly because a burglar doesn’t have a threatening organization behind him to discourage the householder from turning him in to the cops as soon as the door closes. Darn! It would be a whole lot cheaper for the victims and more lucrative for the criminals!
Having deep-sixed that inspiration, let’s consider: Why property crime?
Ordinarily, criminals steal from people they don’t consider their peers—people from whom they’re disenfranchised. It’s the old Neolithic Village Us-vs-Them thinking.
All but the most desperate thieves and burglars aim at their socio-economic superiors. If the target isn’t a stranger, it’s somebody they’ve got a grudge against. It’s been known for a home burglar to “trade” something for what they steal: Depositing a piece of their literal shit before they go to work (also allegedly because of a superstition that it acts as a sentinel).
I’ve heard of a religious social worker living in a slum whose apartment was regularly burglarized until his original possessions had become roughly equal to those of his neighbors, and then never again. It wasn’t that he had nothing left worth stealing, he said, but that he didn’t have more worth stealing than anybody else around, so he was now a part of the community.
For pickpockets and fare-jacking taxi drivers, the best victim is an obvious out-of-towner who can be looked down on and laughed at later for their gullibility or vulnerability.
As already noted, this Us-Them attitude ranges one step further. It is not only acceptable thinking for the criminals but for their immediate community. When cheats and thieves brag about their adventures over a drink with their pals, those pals’ reaction is acceptance, or maybe a story that tops the first one, not horror. Likewise, as multiple instances in fiction show us, their wives, girlfriends, and mothers are either in denial or willing to accept their share of the ill-gotten gains. If a thief’s family does fret a little, they don’t do anything drastic enough to convince the thief that his activities are not profitable by his personal measure.
On the other hand, when disenfranchised people become enfranchised, they do react in horror when told about criminal exploits, they do report crimes to the authorities and/or gather neighbors and try to prevent them.
As already noted, this applies equally to the subspecies of crime called terrorism. In an enfranchised community, nobody builds a car bomb or sets up a mortar in his back yard where the neighbors will notice.
Why do some communities become infested with corruption, gangs, and organized crime, while others do not?
One major contributor must be the extent to which the community is enfranchised or disenfranchised. In particular, in the areas where organized crime has taken over—whether it’s what we usually call “organized crime” and used to call “gangsters”, or the somewhat more freeform organizations of usually younger people that we call “gangs”, or even the “charitable arms” of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Taliban in parts of the Middle East—it is a symptom that the conventional community government is dysfunctional. Organized crime thrives when it is acting as a shadow government, handling disputes and activities that the formal community government has disenfranchised and/or no longer handles well.
The conventional government may have dropped the ball because its resources are inadequate—either because the community is impoverished, or because corruption has diverted government funds to private pockets, or both. It can happen when the judiciary is so slow and corrupt that no one will willingly submit to it.
Or government may refuse to deal with one or more popular community activities in ways the whole community can accept. To put this another way, if a substantial minority (or, worse, a passive majority) of a community thinks a law is total bullshit, there’s room for criminal activity to circumvent that law. If the prohibited activity is large, complex, and profitable, business-style methods emerge to systematize distribution, enforce acceptable rules, and handle dispute resolution; you get “organized crime”.
In most communities there is sharp disagreement about vice crimes—recreational drugs, prostitution, pornography, illegal gambling, loan-sharking, violent video games. For each of them, some members say, “Let’s get rid of X entirely by banning it.” Others say, “That’s right! For sure! … Except I want to do X once in a while. … Well, maybe more often than that.” And still others, correctly, call those last ones hypocrites.
When there is a constant demand, it will be filled. If community-approved money lenders can’t make the loans people want, or aren’t conveniently available, you get loan sharking. For instance, when I was in the army and another soldier asked, “Can you loan me a ten today and I’ll pay you back fifteen on payday?” he was offering 50% interest for less than 14 days, an astronomical APR. When I helped him out and accepted the deal, technically I was loan-sharking.
Closely related is corruption of the officials in conventional government who are charged with enforcing a law that a chunk of the community hates. If they sympathize and get discouraged about enforcing that law, the temptation to get paid for supporting the shadow government—organized crime—becomes pretty strong.
The moral of this is that disenfranchisement empowers organized crime. To reduce it, a community needs to extend enfranchisement so that it includes more members and more activities, including most of the vices.
If this sounds like having government make a deal with the Devil, well, it is. But the Devil doesn’t go away when you don’t deal with him. He just makes crime grow.
Note that while the constituencies for each vice overlap a lot, they aren’t necessarily identical. The soccer mom who wants to be Amarillo Slim every Thursday night (and hang the county ordinances!) may frown on ladies of the evening. Her husband who occasionally patronizes those ladies likely gets queasy around gay hustlers. The constituents for one type of pornography may be revolted—in fact, probably are revolted—by other types, and may or may not be willing to ban some or all of them.
The case for banning pornography types that hurt or endanger real people, as “snuff films” certainly would and child pornography has been judicially determined to do, is pretty unassailable, of course. Otherwise, there’s probably room to broker “You let me have my vices and I’ll let you have yours” and bring nearly everyone out of the shadows.
Let’s look at a few specific places where a careful reexamination of enfranchisement might produce dramatic reduction in crime.
Mob-controlled construction. The construction industry on the US East Coast, among other places, is notoriously linked to organized crime.
If and where it’s true, it may be that the laws and codes government inspectors are trying to enforce are ill-suited to current conditions, and so disenfranchise the people they affect. But enfranchised or not, completing a building still takes a lot of coordination and dispute resolution. So a shadow government—organized crime—springs up to fill the enfranchisement gap.
It may instead be that the Mob, having gained a foothold in the industry, wants to prevent rivals from underbidding it out of its otherwise rule- and law-abiding local monopoly.
Or it may be simple greed and disregard for public welfare all around.
(More on this analysis under the Curse of Being Important below.)
Chinese government. An article in the October 4–9, 2009, issue of The Economist, “The red and the black: China’s other face,” details China’s problem with “red-black collusion”, between the Communist (Red) government and criminal gangs (the black). Local government actions, organization, and regulations have apparently created an enfranchisement gap. Gangs and other criminals are springing up to fill that gap, or to be hired by or infiltrate local or provincial government, or even ministries. This suggests that if Beijing and/or the Communist Party (from which nearly all change in China still flows) reformed the structure of local governments so they better and more honestly represented and enfranchised their people, shadow governments would no longer be needed.
Bolivian coca. In a November 22, 2009, Wall Street Journal article, Mary O’Grady describes President Evo Morales’s “enfranchisement of indigenous people” that is leading Bolivia into a populist dictatorship. His power base for his power grab? Coca growers, who have been disenfranchised by previous governments.
Mr. Morales is South America’s latest dictator, but he is not the ideological communist that many fear. He’s more akin to a mob boss, having risen to power by promising to protect the coca business. Now he has the capacity to do it.
Under his rule, coca cultivation is legal and he collects a licensing fee from all farmers, whose harvests are sold through a centralized market. MAS officials [Morales’ political party] also regulate cocaine production and trafficking which now reaches down to the household level.
The booming business has made Mr. Morales popular. He may hate the U.S. and freedom but one thing is for sure: He understands markets.
And Morales certainly understands enfranchisement.
Communities often make laws without considering the disenfranchisement costs, which can be very high but not recognized until well after the law is passed, if ever.
Perhaps even in our real world some kind of Disenfranchisement Impact Statement would not be a bad idea.