Purely for entertainment purposes, Gary Brecher at NSFWCorp:
The Shutdown crisis has given almost all the different focus groups in the giant talk show we call America a chance to have their say. But there’s one constituency that hasn’t been heard from. And yet this under-reported, under-represented interest group has as much at stake in the Shutdown debate as anybody. Their livelihoods, and even their lives, could depend on keeping government comatose.
I’m talking, of course, about the Somali pirates. Three years ago, these small businessmen seemed intent on proving that, in a world of huge, faceless corporations, there was still room for the little guys—specifically the little guys in little boats who zoomed up to giant, faceless corporate cargo ships and demanded a share in the profits in return for not killing the crew.
This was libertarianism in action. Long ago, libertarian theorists suggested that when governments had been destroyed, lighthouses would be run by entrepreneurs who would zoom up to ships benefiting from their light to demand payment. The Somali pirates did these theorists one better. They effectively declared the waters between the Horn of Africa and the coast of Yemen a toll road—after all, what is this so-called “law of the sea” but the tragedy of the commons all over again? By privatizing the ocean, the pirates were able to strike a blow at marine communalism, and make a darned good living in the process. As for price, they let the market determine the amount, as in, “How much do you got?”
Ayn Rand herself would have been overjoyed to see the transformation wrought on the Somali coast. Where once there had been only wretched shacks, mansions were going up, and luxury cars were bouncing over the dusty local roads.
And the money really did trickle down. Even non-pirates cashed in on this booming free market by claiming to be pirates and getting paid for interviews by trusting Western documentary makers.
And then, after years of boom, came the bust. The villain? As always, it was Big Government interference…
It looked like the end for the “little guys” of marine enterprise. But help came from distant comrades. In October 2013, the Tea Party, bastion of America’s libertarians, jammed a 2×4 into the gears of the American governmental juggernaut, bringing it to a screeching halt. Perhaps men like Ted Cruz were not thinking of Somalia’s brave mariners in small boats, but if they had, they would have recognized allies who shared their values, allies worth helping…
You have 48 hours to read the whole thing, unless you decide to subscribe.
Villago Delenda Est
Oh, that’s good. Very good.
Somalia is the best example of a glibertarian paradise in the world. The only problems are the climate, the indigenous religious preference, and the indigenous population itself.
Omnes Omnibus
Warlords did shit like that on the Rhine as well. It leaves romantic looking castles, but it wasn’t fun to live through it.
NotMax
@Villago Delenda Est
There are parts of Somalia which, while perhaps not thriving, are (and have been) doing quite well. Best example is Somaliland, which has been trying to gain recognition as a sovereign state from way back. Puntland, too, has had practically no interruption of effective state government.
piratedan
@Villago Delenda Est: in their defense (the Government of Somalia) they are trying despite the chaos, if the reports are to be believed when they actually thanked the US for taking out an Al Qeida member within their borders…. essentially saying “we can use all the help we can get”…. Hell if Somalia styarts improving their own neighborhood, just where can a good galtian gulcher go?
Cookie Girl
Actually the state of the oceans IS the tragedy of the commons all over again.
NotMax
Amir Khalid would likely have more germane information, but after 200+ years of rampant piracy in the Strait of Malacca, it has been declared all but eradicated due to the efforts of a sustained multi-national effort.
So a viable remedy is extant by example.
The prophet Nostradumbass
So, the BART unions are going on strike, starting at midnight, and my Facebook feed is filling up with whining gits who think that unions should be outlawed because their commute will be longer.
fuckwit
My god, I need a cigarette after that.
I’m in tears, that was so good.
Beautiful. THANK YOU THANK YOU to this author, who made the point better than anyone has in my lifetime.
That article is brilliant. The analogy is perfect.
Having spent the 1990s in Silicon Valley, this is exactly what a libertarian paradise looks like: theft of the commons by robber barons. And Somalia is the most perfect example right now I can think of, for why we need government, and what happens when their isn’t one.
TheMightyTrowel
@The prophet Nostradumbass: pity the poor google analyst. pity the poor pixar animator. no other man has ever felt the yoke of tyranny like he.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Omnes Omnibus:
You aren’t wrong, but it wasn’t limited to the Rhine Valley. If you see a castle or ruins of one on a high perch anywhere in Europe and your first thought is that it’s in a good defensive position, you’d be a bit off- it’s a great position to see a caravan, ripe for the picking.
And it wasn’t just a European thing. IIRC, the House of Saud first rose to power “escorting” pilgrims to Mecca.
Steeplejack
Semi-on topic: I saw Captain Phillips last weekend and will report. (No spoilers below.)
It was mostly well done—good cinematography, good acting (except where hamstrung by clumsy scriptwriting)—but I had a slightly “meh” reaction to it that has darkened to negative over the course of the week. I just feel like what was the point? It was obvious about 10 minutes into the movie that the Somali pirates—four hapless guys in a motorboat with AK-47s—were doomed to a horrific end, and even though what Phillips went through was horrible, too, you couldn’t help but be reminded through the whole movie that his ordeal was one short episode in what amounted to a charmed life compared to that of the pirates. The Maersk Alabama came across as a floating Red Roof Inn—pretty decent accommodations and amenities for the crew—whereas the Somalis came from a shithole village and had nothing. Plus an absentee warlord on their asses to bring home the bacon (or Muslim equivalent).
The other thing was that the hyper-efficient U.S. military—Navy flotilla, drone reconnaissance, SEAL teams, etc.—came across as a cannon blasting a gnat. Yes, I get that we are legitimately policing the world’s sea-lanes, we can’t abide piracy, kidnapping and extortion, extreme situations require extreme remedies, etc. But, jeez, it all felt slightly obscene—almost, at times, like watching a Star Wars movie shot from the perspective of the Empire.
And maybe that is part of what the filmmakers were trying to get at. But, if so, there was a little too much (perhaps unconscious or inadvertent) ooh-ing and ah-ing over the awesomeness of American military might and all its technical wizardry. Never mind diplomacy or “soft” power to address any of the underlying problems; let’s just blast away when shit hits the fan. Boo-yah.
Short version: worth seeing, if you’re interested, but definitely not the feel-good movie of the year. And, while the acting is good, I definitely did not see another “OMG! Oscar bait!” performance from Tom Hanks. Barkhad Abdi was great in the thankless role of the lead pirate.
Tonight I saw The Fifth Estate, with
Cummerbund BandersnatchBenedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange. Pretty good movie. Deep thoughts later.Omnes Omnibus
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Oh, yeah. A castle was a force multiplier. If it was located on a trade route like the Rhine, it was a profit engine.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steeplejack: So, it was too Tom Clancy?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Omnes Omnibus:
River, mountain pass, any well-traveled roadway…
J.Ty
@TheMightyTrowel: they have private bus lines actually, it’s the schmucks that have to live with the strike. And yes, we are able to cling to apartments here for a few more months at least.
I try hard not to be Phil Ochs’s kind of liberal, but absent the safety issues that BART is citing, I don’t see a reason to strike. Didn’t help last time, and now Jerry won’t swoop in to help.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Omnes Omnibus: @Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
The worst thing that ever happened to Silk Road banditry was the Mongols.
Omnes Omnibus
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Until artillery developed, a properly placed, designed, and prepared castle was impregnable, absent treachery. But artillery developed (says the ex-artilleryman).
fka AWS
@Omnes Omnibus: What about large wooden rabbits?
fuckwit
No BART tomorrow? Aye, my day will be possessed of a fair modicum of suck.
MUNI and parking will also probably be a disaster as well.
I’m thinking… long bike ride might be the best option.
Amir Khalid
@NotMax:
Piracy in the Strait was a problem many centuries old when Melville mentioned it in Moby Dick. It goes back to well before European colonists came along. I don’t think it can ever be eliminated, considering pirates have centuries of experience in hiding themselves, but it’s helpful that in the past few decades the three littoral states have been n a position to work together on it.
It does help that Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore are all in better shape as nations than Somalia, with functioning navies — and not in need of the US Navy’s assistance in patrolling their territorial waters, TYVM. (It has been offered, as I recall, and politely but pointedly declined.)
fuckwit
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Actually, no, the worst thing that happend to the SIlk Road was the Justice Department and the FBI. But Bitcoin is better off without it, overall.
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus:
No, it avoided all that bullshit. There weren’t a lot of pyrotechnics. It was more the depiction of the overwhelming technological edge and its clinical deployment against a vastly overmatched adversary.
And the visuals weren’t helped by all the Americans being big, beefy white guys and all but one of the Somalis being small, thin, almost emaciated black guys. Oof.
ETA: I took “Tom Clancy” to refer to the movies, not the novels, which do revel in all that esoteric high-tech stuff in addition to the pyrotechnics.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Oh, sure, they were safe for the inhabitants, but that they could survey their lands from afar and send out parties to collect tribute was why so many of them were built so high up. You don’t need to be that elevated to build an impregnable defense. Look at Constantinople prior to 1453.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@fuckwit:
*Badoom CHING*
Omnes Omnibus
@fka AWS: Large wooden badgers, sure. Wooden rabbits, of course. Stay with the canon.
J.Ty
Successful union overreach is bad for unions, especially public sector unions, in a country like this one with its current laws.
Change the laws? Yes please. More people unionized? Yes please.
This BART thing has terrible optics. I really hope the safety issues they keep mentioning are real.
The prophet Nostradumbass
KRON 4 TV: Conflict of interest? What’s that?
? Martin
@J.Ty:
I think they are. Ridership is up 50% in a decade but the number of workers is down. With some kind of technological disruption, you can get away with that, but BART hasn’t seen much like that aside from how riders pay (which is a pretty big thing). Consider that part of managements argument against increased wages and staffing is that they have to put so much money aside for workman comp claims.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@? Martin: The BART labor dispute should be instructive to people who didn’t already understand this: the Bay Area’s liberalism is a mile wide, but an inch deep. People support “labor” in the abstract, but when it comes down to a real dispute, especially if they’re inconvenienced in the slightest, they find all sorts of excuses not to.
rammalamadingdong
The Panda cam is awesome. I had never watched it before, yet somehow I feel guilty
max
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): You don’t need to be that elevated to build an impregnable defense. Look at Constantinople prior to 1453.
Yeah, but the Roman Empire and Theodosius were unbelievably rich for the time period and could afford (and needed!) that scale of fortification. Perching a fort on a high point lets you look around – not just for caravans, but for invaders, bandits, revolting peasants, fire, flood and storm. And if you’re way the hell up there you have the advantage over just about everything.
If you live in some place like Mesopotamia where the terrain doesn’t really allow that, you’re in trouble.
max
[‘It’s military engineering week on the Not The History Channel.’]
J.Ty
@The prophet Nostradumbass: I had a Twitter exchange today with some confused web developers who didn’t understand that unionization might help them work less than like… 50? 60? 80? hours per week.
Liberaltarians… can’t be helped, it seems.
Same issue with housing here in the Bay Area. The building I live in has signs up in the elevators urging action against an apartment building that they want to put in a couple blocks away, urging people to go to their district meetings and badmouth it. They don’t mention why, but I assume it’s property values, which might go up at a slightly less vertical rate if the building gets built. (I rent, for the record.)
So yeah, my condo in this building good, your building fuck you I got my condo.
Ugh, and then there are the Victorian fetishists.
Origuy
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
The Scottish Borders were like that until the 17th century. They were too far from London or Edinburgh to be easily controlled and were useful as a buffer area. The powerful clans (called Border Reivers) spent their time raiding each other and building towers in between wars between England and Scotland. The Union of the Crowns in 1603 started the end of that libertarian paradise.
A lot of those people from those families picked up and moved to America, where they were called the Scotch-Irish.
wasabi gasp
Thanks for that, Anne.
Bill E Pilgrim
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Yep.
One of the really striking things (no pun intended, believe it or not) about Paris when you spend year after year there is how people behave during strikes.
The first time I saw it was during a huge strike in 1999, which had me trying to get to work various ways, getting on buses that just sat there and then announced that they weren’t going to actually go anywhere, rumors of certain metro lines open but then closing, sending hoards of people out of the station back onto the street, and so on. In the middle of it however with everyone frustrated, angry, just as put out as anyone would be in that situation in other words, I heard “Well, but striking is important” or “I think the transit workers have a point” or whatever. Being from the States (the Bay Area, so I know what you say is true), I admit that I was just astonished. I heard it over and over, from harried, sweating, and massively inconvenienced people, to put it mildly.
If anything it goes too far in the other direction. I recall that that particular strike was caused by a transit worker who had been “attacked” by someone, and died. Once the strike had paralyzed the city, reports came out that actually the attack was by a street vendor, not North African as originally reported, but Asian. Then it turned out that the transit worker had had a heart attack or stroke or something, after having stopped and looked at things at the vendor’s place and walked away — in other words, it had nothing to do with the vendor, nor was any sort of attack. This was all solidly established within the week, meanwhile the strike had spread to other cities in France. Metro lines in Paris each have their own union, so it took many days for each to negotiate opening back up again.
So, yeah. People complain that conservatives don’t support unions– it ain’t just conservatives. It’s a whole public mindset, one that sadly we haven’t had in quite a while.
I’m actually flying into Oakland later today — but renting a car this time, as luck would have it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Origuy: If you had a castle and some supplies, you would win. Once artillery was introduced, the planning and design changed. Vauban became significant.
TheMightyTrowel
@Origuy: Note to the etymologically curious: Border Reavers’ attacks is the origin of the term ‘bereaved’
Yatsuno
@Bill E Pilgrim: Welcome to my time zone! Might I suggest a good hearty bowl of cioppino with some good crusty sourdough?
scav
@Omnes Omnibus: Interesting transitional example is Forteresse de Salses, started Spanish, ended French and there is a Vauban connection. Plus good local wines.
WIth luck, this link might work and come out in English. Not sure, but here goes..
I’m not seeing any english hints in the url though . . . .
Joey Maloney
@Omnes Omnibus: It leaves romantic looking castles, but it wasn’t fun to live through it.
Not unlike more familiar places.
Hypnos
Of course, Somali piracy did actually start as a self-defence militia created by Somali fishermen after European and Asian vessels started plundering their waters in the absence of effective government oversight. In fact, some estimates placed the value of the stolen fishcatch at $300m per year, against $100m in pirate ransoms in the top years.
On top of that, the other great non-governmental organization, the Italian mafia, started providing waste removal services to Swiss nuclear companies – by dumping the stuff off the Somali coast, a fact that was revealed in all its glory when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami stirred the shit up from the sea bed and right into the Somali coastal villages.
boatboy_srq
@J.Ty: There’s the continuing problem that workers under 40 have no real memory of what a work week used to look like, or what it meant to have enough job satisfaction, career and benefits within a single enterprise. The 60 hour work week is becoming the norm (again) only now it’s the skilled labor that’s taking it on and not the factory worker fresh off the farm.
——————————————-
@Hypnos: And there’s the dark side to the glibertarian paradise. Somalia is a good illustration at once of what no government looks like and what no government coexisting with soulless amoral multinationals looks like. Anyone who thinks fracking isn’t that big a deal, take heed.
Randy P
@Steeplejack: If I did go to see it, it would be because of Abdi. As soon as I saw the trailers I started wondering if that skinny guy was Somali. Since then I’ve read a few of his press interviews. Yes, he is, escaped with his family at age 7, total amateur, he and the other pirates are all Somali buddies from Minneapolis who got through the open auditions together. Sounds like his depiction is fairly complex, a guy who’s doing this because he’s desperate.
Frankensteinbeck
@J.Ty:
What? Corsets and striped stockings are gorgeous!
SiubhanDuinne
@TheMightyTrowel: I had no idea. Thanks for the info.
Tyro
@J.Ty: I had a Twitter exchange today with some confused web developers who didn’t understand that unionization might help them work less than like… 50? 60? 80? hours per week
The culture of web development is still stuck in the mid-to-late 90s where their job was a lucrative opportunity as independent entrepreneurs. Now they’re just exploited employees of sub-sub-contractors. If anyone could use some collective negotiating leverage, it’s them.
Cris (without an H)
Libertarians, notably Ayn Rand, explicitly reject coercion by violence. What they don’t realize is that their philosophy makes violent coercion inevitable.
BruinKid
Yeah, Obama also disrupted the small (or big) business of the Silk Road‘s underground drug operation. So what if there was an attempted murder or two? That’s just the free market at work, baby.
LanceThruster
Aah, but the free market *is* at work —
The Two Piracies in Somalia: Why the World Ignores the Other”
The Pale Scot
@Steeplejack: The film seems to BS all the way down.
‘Captain Phillips’ crew members claim mariner to blame
And there is a story told about how the pirates started out as a militia trying to stop Euro factory fishing ships from vacuuming the coast clean.