The LA Times has a somewhat favorable article about the Courts' efforts to rehabilitate gunmen who had been previously loyal to the defeated warlords. As always, I want to know how their programs are financed.
To sweeten the deal, the Islamists promised to continue paying the men's salaries. After some delays, militiamen in the camps received about $100 each last month. Islamists said the money came from taxes at the recently reopened airport and sea port, though critics allege that funding is coming from Middle East countries and Eritrea.I think that "taxes" levied at airports and seaports are more like fees, so I think it still qualifies as anarchy.
posted by Steve | 12:21 PM
3 Comments:
In my opinion it is less important whether it is a fee or a tax. The important thing is whether there are any realistic opportunities to avoidtthem. If A offers something a not so tasty pizza for 60 kronor and B offers me a tasty for 50 kronor I choose that one which is tastier and cheaper. But in both cases I am obliged by law to pay.
The nice thing about the rule of warlords was that all warlords tried to levy taxes, but that each of them controlled so tiny areas that the fact that you were forced to pay was eqvivalent to the situation when you buy a pizza.
Most certainly the UIC will have to charge people fees/taxes to pay their gunmen. The issue is whehter there any realistic opportunies to avoid those fees/taxes.
But if the UIC controlls large areas there will not be any good opportunities to avoid those fees/taxes.
If there were six warlords and six harbours in Mogadishu the problem with taxation was limited due to the fact that if one of them charged too much you could always use another harbour.
For this reason I do not understand why you celebrate the rule of the UIC in Somalia.
The perfect fragmentation where no warlord controlled anything but very tiny areas would have led to perfect laissez-faire.
“In my opinion it is less important whether it is a fee or a tax. The important thing is whether there are any realistic opportunities to avoid them.”
I was basically saying the same thing, but I think that what word is chosen should depend on whether or not you can avoid paying it. You can avoid giving money to a port by not using the port and not buying the things that come through the port. That’s why I think port fees should be called fees, though many people call them "indirect taxes."
"If there were six warlords and six harbours in Mogadishu the problem with taxation was limited due to the fact that if one of them charged too much you could always use another harbour."
Even if there's only one port in Mogadishu, to a certain extent it has to compete with existing ports up and down the coast. More importantly, there is an ever-present problem (for the UIC) that people will creatively bypass their port or build new ones (I’m assuming here that the courts will remain loosely organized and nobody will be able to centralize the revenue flow from all the ports).
"Most certainly the UIC will have to charge people fees/taxes to pay their gunmen."
"I do not understand why you celebrate the rule of the UIC in Somalia."
A group that can systematically tax can only do so if it has a monopoly on the use of force. It would have to be a group of power-hungry sociopaths in an area that is not awash in guns, where loyalties do not shift easily in response to threats of an emerging centralized power. I think Jowhar is an example of such an area where there is a UIC-affiliated group (possibly, of sociopaths) that really does rule that city (the UIC is, after all, a diverse group). However, I don't think this is the case for the UIC as a whole, and if it were I would not be taking such an interest in them. And I don't think their success in imposing sharia law necessarily means that they rule, either. It's just one variant of a legal system that many people obviously want, otherwise the UIC wouldn’t be so successful.
"The perfect fragmentation where no warlord controlled anything but very tiny areas would have led to perfect laissez-faire."
I think an interesting question arises here. Is the sort of small-scale warlordism that you’re suggesting sustainable? Would it have survived had the US not intervened, supporting the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT) warlords, thus inspiring the general public to support the UIC against them?
Or, alternatively, was the UIC destined to triumph regardless of the foreign factor? If so, why?
I think the answer may lie in the possibility that the UIC represents the triumph of a home-grown revolution based on private law (market-based, not coercively funded, yet systematic) over both warlordism (which is usually coercively funded and often arbitrary) and foreign meddling.
Incidentally, I think that anarchic private law is such a powerful idea that it will inevitably spread, meaning that nearby governments (Somaliland, Puntland, Ethiopia, etc., etc., etc.) will collapse, and people who don't want sharia law will be emboldened to devise private legal systems that suit them, hopefully skipping the warlordism phase that Somalia went through or shortening its duration.
If I’m not mistaken, I think there has already been at least one example of the UIC being rebuffed because the people of a certain area did not want to live under sharia law—a very positive development in my opinion.
I do hope that you are right when you say that the UIC has been rebuffed. Do you know where?
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