Affter trying the various warlords on offer, it’s not surprising that the people of Somalia have plumped for the Taliban.
It was always one of the great theoretical bugbears of the more swashbuckling kind of libertarianism; that the government’s monopoly on force was unnecessary, and that a competitive market in law and order would allow people to make their own choices of what laws they would follow and how they would be enforced. In principle, the provision of dispute resolution and law enforcement services is a market like any other, so there is a lot of theoretical validity to this argument.
What we are seeing in Mogadishu is exactly the same competitive equilibrium that developed in Afghanistan pre-2001. It’s the maturing of the market for law and order, the period when it settles down from a competitive to a monopoly equilibrium. And as in Afghanistan, after trying the various warlords on offer, the winning product offering was the Taliban.
There were actually quite a few libertarian tracts flying around not so long ago pointing to Somalia as potentially a developmental success story (there is even a blog). It is actually true that during the warlord era, the Somalis managed to install a rather better mobile phone network than a lot of non-“failed” African states. However, the competition between warlords was really quite wasteful, and since the main product characteristic along which the warlords competed was violence, they tended to ignore other product dimensions which law and order consumers also valued, like competence, fairness and even the semblance of sanity.
As in Afghanistan, the Taliban have the big advantage that because they are devout Muslims they do not drink alcohol or tell lies. The Mennonites and Quakers prospered in Europe in the past based on the same commercial proposition. As in Afghanistan, the Taliban appear to have been swept to power on a wave of popular disgust with a rape epidemic which was the natural result of the warlords’ inability or unwillingness to control their own troops. People are prepared to put up with quite a lot in the way of repression, banning football, etc etc if it means that they don’t have to put up with the kind of thing the warlords used to do, which is why our tentative attempts to put some logistic support into the anti-Taliban forces have foundered on the fact that they have no real popular support.
The Taliban in Somalia also appear to have the support of the business community. Although the warlords were reasonably good for business, probably better than the typical African bureaucratic state, their commercial law offering was pretty basic. They only really offered rudimentary protection, contract enforcement and debt collection services, and required significant retainers for doing so. The Taliban provide a semi-functional commercial court and charge much lower fees. It’s not much wonder that they’re more popular.
Obviously, there are better solutions to a law and order shortage than the Taliban. A functional democratic state would be better, for example. However, setting up one of those costs a lot of money, and there is an obvious financing problem. First, a democratic ruler is unlikely to be able, even in an African state, to be able to take enough out of the system to compensate for the costs and risks of building a nation. And second and more obviously, who is going to lend to a would-be founder of his nation (a category of people who are often visually indistinguishable from warlords) in a failed state?
It looks like the stable equilibrium for an anarchy is something like the Taliban. That’s a pretty decisive argument against the anarcho-capitalist theory given that it is meant to be one which values individual freedom. But this also has practical consequences for those of us outside the Ayn Rand sphere of influence.
Because the Taliban equilibrium is the result of a period of free competitive, it looks like an equilibrium point; this is what we can expect to continue unless it is disturbed from the outside. Obviously, this is something which might happen given that everyone is highly concerned that the Somali Taliban could become a haven for more al-Qaeda terrorists, but one thing we do know about Somalia is that it is going to be difficult to stir much enthusiasm for intervention there in the US unless an overwhelming case could be made.
Absent this, it looks very unlikely indeed that the Somali population are going to rise up against the Taliban no matter how awful their regime gets; that’s what it means to have a stable equilibrium. It looks like we might end up having to get used to the idea of doing business with the Taliban.
Source: Guardian, June 22, 2006
