my teacher commented that copolla /puzo compare the concept of “friendly to business” and the mafia. now it is obvious that in the movie Hyman Roth loves the political economy of Cuba, where businesses can operate more freely. but his business is criminal.
i think the concept of laissez faire is begging the question. you can do freely what you can do. it doesn’t have a solid theory as which freedoms people should have. it states that the state shouldn’t interfere in things. but it doesn’t differentiate between legitamate, voluntary trade, and theft or robery that the mafia do. its actually kinda of friedmanite. if theres a demand for stabbing people then that market sector should flourish. there is no mentioning that its the voluntary nature that sets apart trade from violence.
When the French businessmen replied to Colbert that what the French government could do for them was “laissez-nous faire”, they did not mean “let us alone so that some other overbearing thug can tell us what to do.”
The context of any well-formed concept must always be consistency.
Libertarian philosophy does have a very strict theory of legitimate actions and freedoms. Two basic axioms: non-aggression axiom and private property axiom. With these two rules, virtually every action can be determined to be legitimate or illegitimate. Any action that does not violate these two rules can be considered legitimate. The mafia is not necessarily a criminal organization in the libertarian sense. Dealings in prostitution, gambling, drugs, etc. are voluntary for both parties involved; they do not violate private property rights and do not aggress against anyone else (I would recommend reading Lysander Spooner “Vices are not Crimes”) Theft, robbery, assault, murder etc. obviously violate the individuals private property rights and are therefore illegal in libertarian society.
i was aware of that. mafia’s portion of activity is voluntary, the rest is not. the problem is that the laissez faire theory does not emphasize the voluntary aspect that differentiates crime from peaceful trade. it simply states that people should be left free to do things. so if i contract a mafioso to kill people, should we be remain unmolested in our transaction?
im smart enough to understand the nuance, but a majority of people, including coppola conflate freedom with doing whatever you want.
Actually the mafia are keenly aware of the consequences of killing too many people and are quite restrained about it. A gang which starts killing off too many of its rivals is going to be dealt with in a joint action. Violence is not like selling carrots. To violence there is an opposite reaction.
A “business” consisting of theft and fraud has in itself the seeds of its own demise. The bigger it grows, the bigger the demand for it to be shut down that it creates. It is only feasible for it to exist in a non-laissez faire enviroment because the monopolist police does not operate on the market and is unresponsive to the demand for it to be shut down.
In a laissez faire enviroment the demand for justice would be answered by private providers of justice and they would be dealt with.
The same way an overly ambitious and brutal crew will be dealt with by its competitors right now. The competitors, which deem themselves providers of mafia justice, answer the demand within the mafia for the overly violent crew to be dealt with.
Violence is not selling carrots. Selling loads of carrots does not create a demand for people to put a bullet in your brain.
I have to wonder whether the mafia could even exist in a laissez-faire society.
Acts of aggression would be dealt with harshly. There is no monopoly for the mob the way they have it under the current system (a major part of the success of the mafia has been the corruption of government officials to protect mob interests). Since crimes of vice would not be crimes, they’d lose that angle, and that’s the part of the business that makes money. What’s left for the mafia? They’d simply have to act like any other business, produce a product or service, and compete with other businesses.
Oh you’d have criminals try to set something up, but they wouldn’t last very long.
And I don’t think anyone is saying that you wouldn’t have crime with laissez-faire. You’d just get rid of the biggest criminal - the government.