Dope

It is late. I've eaten (pork tenderloin, potatoes, veggie). I've drunk (Shiner Bock). I'm listening to Sari Odalar, which begins with a solitary trumpet, an emblematic jazz flourish calling up every dive from the great Spion days in Istanbul, 42, 52, the Germans, wasn't Ribbentrop the Nazi ambassador there, or was it Franz von Pappen? the Americans, Kim Philby himself for a while, the coupling of that tango culture which was imported in the thirties and notes from way away, black New York, cool jazz of California, those unimaginable shores --and then the trumpet breaks off, Sezen Aksu's voice swells, those marvelous, hypnotic vocals, gramaphone nostalgia for that mythic scene becoming, as she goes on, sad with its own irony, as real and unreal as Turkey was, historically, a marginal site on the border of all that great apocalyptic dread, those slaughterhouse movements of peoples, weapons, wealth. Istambul, where the wires crossed, where the man in silk pajamas in Room no. 8, just down the dark hall, smoked a cigarette and extracted the pieces of a listening device from his battered traveller's bag.

And I'm ready -- Limited Inc is ready -- to return to the ultra-tedious issue of regulation.

In, was it Monday's post? -- one of those posts, we outlined a way of thinking of drugs, guns, murder, washing the car and other goods and services as potential market acts - acts that comprise formal and informal markets. This is of course not the only aspect of them that counts, but for LI, this aspect is the way that liberal democracy hooks into society, so to speak. This is not to buy into the myth that free markets produce liberal democracy -- market economies can coexist with monarchies, dictatorships, and even official Communism -- but liberal democracy has, so far, required markets.

We were trying to get a point across. Before we contemplate bannings, as of guns or heroin or euthanasia, for that matter, we have to understand how the market in these things works. The way the good or service is integrated into a sector of the economy (for instance, is it a good, like asbestos, with mainly industrial uses?), the amount of the good that is potentially available (is it feathers from an endangered bird? or an easily grown plant?), the composition of the market for the good in terms of supply (do suppliers have an incentive to comply with the banning? is the banning such that the suppliers can sell the good to a certain market -- for instance, alcohol to adults -- or sell substitutes? Is there a large demand for the good? Is there a hardcore group within that demand pool who will take extraordinary risks to procure the good?) and finally, whether the enforcement of the banning is going to fall on the police.

It is the last named factor which strikes LI as the most neglected of all in the study of regulation. How good are the police as regulators? How good are they at enforcing bannings?

LI's contention is that they are very bad. There are reasons for this that are classically rooted in the literature on regulation. One of the objections to regulation of an industry on the part of the state is that the agents of the industry have more knowledge of their business than are available to the state. While this knowledge assymetry argument has some holes in it, there is also something to it. In the case of the police, we obviously don't want the police to be good at organizing murder -- but this outside status is going to work against their efficiency in enforcing the ban on murder. We accept a large margin of inefficiency here because the harm of murder outweighs the harm of the inefficiency -- the injury, for instance, to the civil rights of innocent citizens that often ensues in the course of a murder investigation. So if the police are our regulators of last resort, we don't want to abolish them all together. It does mean that before we want to ban a good or service, we should consider whether the police, if the onus of enforcement falls upon the police, are going to be good or bad at doing this regulatory task. And if they are going to be bad at it, whether that harm might not multiply harms in such a way that we are worse off than we were before the ban.
LI claims that this is the case of the total banning of a popular product like marijuana or handguns. And we will at some point attempt to prove our case --well, no, we will merely attempt to make our case plausible. But for tonight, this is enough.