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The Case for Conspiracy
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 The
conspiracy theorists
have a new one: they believe that workers in America’s
airports and seaports are now helping smuggle drugs into this country.  Law-
enforcement officials call these alleged operations “internal
conspiracies.”
Can you
believe it? This story actually made the front page of The New York
Times, which usually derides “conspiracy theories,” but
told this one with a straight face.
Next
we’ll be told that high government officials in Latin America have been
involved in these “conspiracies.” Then we’ll be told that
our own government is involved, with the aid of UFOs.
OK, enough
cheap ridicule. These conspiracies are real enough. For example, according to
the Times, some employees of Delta Airlines actually did use
their positions and access to security checkpoints to help get drugs from
Puerto Rico past airport customs. Since last October [October 1996], 148
airport and seaport workers have been arrested nationwide for their
participation in drug-smuggling operations.
What’s
the solution to this problem? Well, as the late political
analyst James Burnham used to say, “Where there’s no
solution, there’s no problem.”
Illegal drugs
are a hugely lucrative business, and the chief effect of the federal
“war on drugs” has been to drive the prices up. It has also had
other effects, though, such as generating conspiracies. It’s
impossible to calculate how many conspirators there are, or how high in our
own government they reach. All we know is that the money is awfully
tempting to an awful lot of people.
If you were
a Colombian drug “kingpin,” would you worry about the war on
drugs? Sure. Just as Al Capone worried about Prohibition. Like most
government regulation, the war on drugs makes the costs of entry into the
drug market too high for small fry, but for that very reason it’s great
for the big operators. And it’s turning much of the world into the
equivalent of Chicago in the Roaring ’20s.
![[Breaker quote for The Case for Conspiracy: A war neither side can lose]](2006breakers/061128.gif) The global drug
trade illustrates the volcanic power of the free market. Like it or not,
it’s beyond any possibility of suppression. That trade involves two
fungible commodities: drugs and cash. Both of these are far easier to
conceal than liquor, and liquor defeated all efforts to ban it by law.
Unlike
liquor, illegal drugs can’t even be kept out of prisons. How are they
going to be banished from a continent? All we can be sure of is that the
attempt to “eliminate” drugs will involve more and more people
in criminal conspiracies, including many of the people who are responsible for
enforcing the laws. The war on drugs is a formula for corruption.
Governments like
to set themselves impossible tasks, such as
“eliminating” things that can’t be eliminated. Why not?
Government officials don’t have to worry about costs. It’s not
their money that’s being wasted; they receive their salaries even
when they fail.
So the war
on drugs pits drug moguls who make huge profits against governments that
don’t mind absorbing huge losses. The costs of selling drugs —
including the arrests of low-level employees — are more than covered
by the profits, while, on the other side, the costs of the futile pursuit of
drugs are passed on to the taxpayer.
In other
words, this is a war neither side can lose, because the government
can’t win and, as long as it can make taxpayers subsidize its efforts,
has no incentive to admit defeat. Its only incentive is to go on spending other
people’s money, regardless of results. The drug dealers’ side is
at least economically rational. The government, whose agents aren’t
risking their own resources, doesn’t have to think in rational terms.
What
beautiful symmetry! What exquisite ecological balance! No wonder both sides
in this war want it to continue indefinitely.
And no
wonder some people, including workers at airports and seaports, want a
piece of the action. They know perfectly well that there’s no light at
the end of the tunnel in this war. And they don’t feel that the
government’s side is their side.
As
taxpayers, they merely cover the government’s losses. As
conspirators, they can at least exploit their own market value.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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