Maguindanao Election Massacre: A Quarrel Over Economic Bones

It's sad and sickening to learn how political violence has resurfaced, where 52 people have been reportedly massacred in Southern Philippines.

This from the New York Times,

``The death toll in Monday’s election violence rose to 52 on Wednesday, the Philippine authorities said, as six more bodies were recovered.

``The regional police commander in Maguindanao Province, Josefino Cataluna, said the bodies were dug out from a shallow pit near a grassy hilltop where police and troops earlier found 46 other corpses after Monday’s attack, The Associated Press reported. He said the 52 victims included the family of a gubernatorial candidate and 18 Filipino journalists who accompanied his relatives in filing his election papers.

So what provoked the aggression?

Again from NYT's Carlos Conde (bold highlights mine), ``it was rooted in rivalries among local clans that the government had empowered as a way of combating the insurgents. One clan, the Ampatuans, is considered the closest political ally of Mrs. Arroyo in that part of the southern Philippines."

``There are at least 250 political dynasties scattered throughout the Philippines, according to the Center for People Empowerment in Governance, a nonprofit group. For many of them and particularly those in the south, politics is literally a blood sport, with the clans’ power and income riding on the outcome of elections. As a consequence, violence has become a fixture of elections here; at least 126 died in the 2007 elections and 189 in 2004."

In other words, Philippine politics is, in essence, a contest to secure economic rent from the state.

And the 250 political dynasties, which has thrived all these years, is manifestation or a symptom of such political blight brought about by statism or the welfare state.

This is also basically a form of protectionism which fuels political competition or feuds that results to dastardly violent acts as the above. And it's a classic case where politics have substituted for trade.

Professor Murray Rothbard in Man, Economy and State accurately explains the phenomenon, (bold highlights mine)

``Individuals recognize, through the use of rea­son, the advantages of exchange resulting from the higher pro­ductivity of the division of labor, and they proceed to follow this advantageous course. In fact, it is far more likely that feelings of friendship and communion are the effects of a regime of (con­tractual) social co-operation rather than the cause. Suppose, for example, that the division of labor were not productive, or that men had failed to recognize its productivity. In that case, there would be little or no opportunity for exchange, and each man would try to obtain his goods in autistic independence. The re­sult would undoubtedly be a fierce struggle to gain possession of the scarce goods, since, in such a world, each man's gain of useful goods would be some other man's loss. It would be almost inevi­table for such an autistic world to be strongly marked by violence and perpetual war. Since each man could gain from his fellows only at their expense, violence would be prevalent, and it seems highly likely that feelings of mutual hostility would be dominant. As in the case of animals quarreling over bones, such a warring world could cause only hatred and hostility between man and man. Life would be a bitter "struggle for survival."

In short, in the absence of free trade, some politicians resort to a fatalistic quarrel over economic bones.