Pirates, Libertarians and Infrastructure

So, you're thinking that piracy is the product of failed states?  Not quite, argues The Economist, in a piece subtitled "Why Pirates Like a Little Law and Order."  In a word "infrastructure:"

because piracy is a “market-dependent” crime. Pirates may benefit from protection from other criminals. Selling the loot requires transport and the ability to store goods. All this requires some rule of law—but not enough to cramp bandits’ style.

 So piracy does not flourish in/around Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone . They need a "sweet spot," (E's phrase)  like Cambodia or Cameroon where they can draw on the social capital they need.  Even in pirate-ridden Somalia, it appears, the real piracy comes from the more stable north rather than the utterly wasted south.

Where pirates go, libertarians may follow.  Or vice versa.  It has seemed to me that one thing missing in the libertarian argument is any sensitivity to the level of civility and order you need to make piracy libertarianism work: what by way of safe and dependable harbors, reliable night watchmen, fully stocked ATM machines you need in order to support your enterprise and exactly how you get them. It was one of the principal vices of Reaganism that it undertook to demonize not "incompetent civil servants" but "civil servants," as if you could do without the lot. Of course there is no evidence that there has ever been: even if you'd settle for the Cameroon, you don't want Haiti. On this and so much else, where Captain Kidd leads, Ayn Rand may follow.  

Pirates

I suppose the last time I read anything read anything about pirates, I must have been about ten. A lot has happened to pirates since then: they've been trapped and caged by the professoriate; they've been turned inside out and scrutinized so as to understand their place in social theory. Most of this inquiry has been carried on without my knowledge or consent but I begin to get the flavor as I read Colin Woodard's entertaining The Republic of Pirates (2007).

Woodard himself is refreshingly free of ambitious academic pretensions. What we have here is straight narrative, mostly about the Caribbean, chiefly about the period from 1716-20, sometimes loosely described as the locus of "the pirate republic" in and around Nassau in the Bahamas. In context, the label seems extravagant but not quite wrong: there does seem to have been a little window in time, and a little corner of the world, in which pirates could pretty much do what and go where they pleased.

Funny how when we think of pirates it is almost always the Caribbean we remember, letting slip the insight that pirates have been visiting their predations upon "legitimate society" for just about as long as there was anything to predate upon. Pompey cleaned them out of the sea lanes of the Roman Empire; Thomas Jefferson confronted them on the Barbary Coast, and Barack Obama may be the first president in some 200 years to preside over any pirate killing.

But it's Blackbeard and his 18th Century companions who catch most of our attention, and with good reason: aside from the hooks and the parrots, it does seem that around 1720 the planets were in alignment for piracy to a degree only rarely equaled at any other time. You had, first of all, great wealth in the Caribbean, including the scandalous but just barely legal traffic in African slaves. You had weak local government. You persistent instability in the wake of the "War of the Spanish Succession," which pitted English and French against each other in conflict over Spanish interest. You had a history of "privateering"--really piracy under government sanction.

And you had what might have been most important--a bunch of underemployed ex-combatants looking to make a few pence. Which invites attention to one often overlooked fact about piracy: it's a skilled trade. Even the lowliest deckhand had to know a halyard from a bowsprit, and the captaincy of a pirate ship required great management skill. Considering how good the pirates were at what they did, it's a wonder that they weren't even more successful. Indeed while I'm not sure I can put numbers on it, my guess after reading Woodard is that the defeat of the pirates may have had more to do with hostile weather than it did with sovereign power.

I did find my mind wandering to other perhaps comparable gaps in sovereignty. The cowboy era: again just a moment in time, much more transitory than you would guess from its prominence in the movies (I suppose there are all kinds of good reasons why cowboys and pirates make such popular movie themes). The cowboys didn't have the pirate's targets of opportunity to prey upon, but we witness some of the same improvisational state-building in each case.

Another, perhaps more trivial, example, is the shoot-em-up bad boys of the 1930s--John Dillinger, Baby-Face Nelson, that lot. They never reached anything like the pirates' complexity of organization. But they probably do represent a gap in the social fabric--a brief moment of dislocation during which the bad guys had more resources than the good.

And how, exactly, shall I classify the Mongols or the armies of Islam who appeared out of nowhere and came close to putting western sovereignty completely out of business?

Present-day comparisons are seductively easy. I see that some guy at George Mason (surprise!) has written a book arguing that pirates are just capitalist entrepreneurs in bright colored bandanas. Pirates as bankers? Next thing you know, somebody will be telling us that bankers are pirates. Oh wait.

Pirate Duds

The topic is pirates and why they wear all those fancy duds--patterned head scarfs, bright-colored blouses and such.

Maybe you knew but I'm just finding out: it's because they were predating on (inter alia) the East India trade, as it hauled fancy goods back from the great Mughal Empire to the rather more threadbare upstart in London. So, you take the gold and rape the women and boys. And you play dress-up. Or so I surmise from Colin Woodard's The Republic of Pirates (2007). which tells you know all that you may want to know and perhaps more about what life was like before Johnny Depp.

Piracy: He Was Ahead of the Game

A few weeks back, Wichita proposed in this venue that we fight the piracy problem by letting people pay for the privilege of making war on them. Turns out somebody was reading Underbelly:

Luxury yachts offer pirate hunting cruises

Luxury ocean liners in Russia are offering pirate hunting cruises aboard armed private yachts off the Somali coast.

Wealthy punters pay £3,500 per day to patrol the most dangerous waters in the world hoping to be attacked by raiders.

When attacked, they retaliate with grenade launchers, machine guns and rocket launchers, reports Austrian business paper Wirtschaftsblatt.

Link. That's all well and good but I still think we can go a step further. Years ago, it occurred to me that someone could make money with a "Mafia Tour"--they'd fly you to Palmermo and meet you with a black bulletproof liimo. Then they'd whisk you back to the boonies where you would share ricotta salata and plump Sicilian olives in the company of plump Sicilian dancers.

Don't know why you couldn't transport the whole concept to the Indian Ocean. Avast, ye mateys! Management secrets of Captain Kidd!

From the Annals of 20th Century Piracy

Once again, Ivan is dousing himself in the warm bath of memory :

In 1948 I was an able seaman on a freighter that carried cargo to pacific ocean ports starting with Pusan (called Fusan by the Koreans). we went to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Penang, and several ports in the Philippines. going south along the china coast from shanghai, we had been warned to be especially wary of pirates. at that time on American merchant ships there were three men to a deck watch -- two able seamen and on ordinary seaman.The able seamen had passed a test and been certified, after sailing 18 months as an unrated ordinary seaman. I was an able seaman and after finishing my turn at the wheel I went to the bow and the seaman there went to what we called standby. one guy at the wheel, one guy on bow lookout -- you rotated, and that completed a four hour watch. Did that twice a day.

Dark, moonless night, kind of cold, and i started to hear a clanging ahead. I picked up the bow phone, called the bridge, they had already heard it. It was a bunch of Chinese in small boats, sampans, anchored and tied together off shore beating pots and pans together to warn us that they were anchored out there in front of the way we were headed. Fishing boats? Pirates setting a trap? We didn't know. I sensed the ship was picking up speed. In a few minutes we were plowing right through them. I could hear them right under the bow as we moved through them but it was so dark I couldn't see anything -- couldn't see or tell if we were plowing the boats in half or they were out of the way. Sounded like we crunched a few. We didn't swerve an inch -- held our course and they beat the hell out of their pots and pans. in a few minutes they were astern of us and the clanging cut out. we didn't slow down.

Maybe the reason that we havent hear much about piracy until recently is that so few ships fly American flags. Maersk is an ancient steamship company from one of the Scandinavian countries -- they arranged to lease or somehow get the Maersk Alabama registered under the American flag. i think a ship has to be flagged American to carry govt paid for relief help -- mostly food -- to foreign countries.

I wonder if Ivan has seen this:That's the number of pirates killed, per US president, going back to McKinley. Source: here.