Dear Friends,
It seems to me, now that crime pays, you can expect lots of crime. As in any profitable enterprise, if the profits are too high, that company can soon expect competition. The competition will rise until there is perfect competition in that field. I imagine crime will go this way as well. The amount of crime will continue increasing, until there is so much crime, that the competition will become perfect. Perfect competition is where there are so many people vying for a limited customer base, or in the case of crime, victims, the ability to make a profit depends on efficiency. The less efficient criminal enterprises will be driven bankrupt, else be executed, by the more efficient ones. In this paradigm, there is no criminal enterprise more ruthless, greedy and efficient, than government.
Indeed, it is government that funds almost all the rent seeking activities in an economy. If not for the incentives to graft, because of over regulation, rent seeking would become impossible. Regulations are why someone needs to go to a bureaucrat for permission to do something in the first place. Then the bureaucrat can squeeze the victim for as much as possible. Another rent seeking activity created by regulation is the entire industry that arises to get around them. People in those “industries” would argue they have a legitimate role to play, helping people and firms, get past the regulations. If those regulations didn’t exist however, their entire industry would collapse. Income tax lawyers for example, if income taxes were eliminated, billions of dollars of rent seeking would be destroyed.
There is of course traditional organized crime. The protection racket is simply a derivative of the government’s police game. Then there is the cut a criminal has to kick up to the boss. Gambling is another lucrative source of rent seeking that traditional organized crime has taken advantage of. Of course there is the classic stealing truckloads of un-stamped cigarettes and electronics, as well as other expensive items and selling them on the black market. There are non rent seeking activities of organized crime too, like prostitution and selling drugs. Governments do that as well. If the CIA has a source that wants a child to molest, the CIA will procure a child. Making the government far worse than any mafia don or drug kingpin. Dons do it for money… government does it for egoistic power.
You can see the beginnings of total crime in the US and I suppose elsewhere as well, evolving to become perfect competition for victims. Once a victim is cleaned out, it takes awhile for them to rebuild enough wealth to be stolen. So the profitability of this paradigm is limited. Most of it is front loaded and only for those with the ability to protect it. Identity theft, stealing mortgages and fishing are very efficient rent seeking activities, since the FBI is deployed against parents. People openly take things from stores. Even as employees are forbidden to stop them. Prosecuting thieves is a waste of time anyway. The government could care less. Moreover, illegal immigrants will simply flee the moment they are released. Such common crime proves our system is nearly saturated.
Why is crime becoming so ubiquitous that competition for victims is becoming perfect? Because people follow their leaders… and ours are criminals. Government itself is a rent seeking enterprise, it need not be, but today that is what it has become. Government not only openly steals elections, prints the currency to debasement and prosecutes based on politics, it leads by example. Open boarders don’t scream law and order, do they? Hoards of illegal immigrants, not abetted but encouraged by the government, is a sure sign to citizens the government hates us. Sooner or later, under such a paradigm of crime, even criminals will have had enough of being victims, then will rise up and install a tyrant, to oppress us back to law and order… else we get a handle on it now.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
