Violence from Prohibition Laws: Atimonan Killing

I have been repeatedly pointing out here that prohibition statutes engender unnecessary violence. Worst, violence have always been arbitrary instituted by political authorities in the name of supposed moral uprightness. 

Today’s headlines shows of a good example, from the Inquirer.net

The gun battle in Atimonan town, Quezon province, that left 13 people dead on Sunday was the culmination of a three-month police operation approved by the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOCC) headed by Executive Secretary Paquito Ochoa Jr.

But Ochoa denied there was any mission order from the commission authorizing the police-military operation in Atimonan.

The operation, code-named “Coplan Armado,” had only one target: Victor “Vic” Siman, operator of the numbers racket “jueteng” disguised as government-sanctioned Small Town Lottery (STL) in Laguna and Batangas provinces in southern Luzon…

A Philippine Daily Inquirer source in the Philippine National Police described the 12 others killed  in the alleged shootout between security forces and Siman’s group as “collateral damage.”

Such violence has been exercised against alleged crimes based on “vices” or what American individualist and anarchist Lysander Spooner calls as “Vices are not crimes”

It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without a criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practices a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others.

Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property — no such things as the right of one man to the control of his own person and property, and the corresponding and coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property.

For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth.

Jueteng is about gambling and personal vice. The ban on this has created a shadow industry, like all others, prostitution, drugs and etc... Ironically, on the other hand, the Philippine government promotes the "casino" industry.

Yet the war on jueteng has been an endless crusade by the Philippine government that has hardly attained proximity to its stated political ‘moral’ goals.

As pointed out in the past, the downfall of the ousted administration in EDSA II, has been tied to this. The difference is that because the involved had been the top political brass, then “no killing” had been dispensed with.

But of course, application of laws has been different with people with lower levels of political power.  I call this political inequality.

Unfortunately, the public has been benumbed or inured to “collateral damage”, which echoes on the my edited version of Stalin’s axiom “one death is a tragedy, one million dozen is a statistic”, or that “collateral damage” has been perceived as “reasonable” for as long as government does it, or has been carried out with good intentions, and or for as long as this happens to the others (and not to them)

The tragedy here is that the public doesn’t realize which has been more immoral: violence as a means to a (questionable) end or personal vices.

Yet the above example exhibits the institutional violence inherent in all governments, as the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises once pointed out (bold mine)

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

To draw attention to this fact does not imply any reflection upon government activities. In stark reality, peaceful social cooperation is impossible if no provision is made for violent prevention and suppression of antisocial action on the part of refractory individuals and groups of individuals. One must take exception to the often-repeated phrase that government is an evil, although a necessary and indispensable evil. What is required for the attainment of an end is a means, the cost to be expended for its successful realization. It is an arbitrary value judgment to describe it as an evil in the moral connotation of the term. However, in face of the modern tendencies toward a deification of government and state, it is good to remind ourselves that the old Romans were more realistic in symbolizing the state by a bundle of rods with an ax in the middle than are our contemporaries in ascribing to the state all the attributes of God.

In upholding an unjust populist edict, the recourse to violence means that government creates more victims via repression than attaining its political goal. It also means the government has hardly been about the fiction of social justice but about the preservation, expansion and the showcase of political power.

Plus Ca Change: President Aquino's Policy On Jueteng

It's been argued in this space that the new administration will unlikely provide a meaningful change in the way current things are being done.

For instance, the declaration of war against corruption will be unmasked as nothing more than demagoguery or posturing, for the simple reason that we cannot solve "corruption" by mere virtuosity because governance is about laws. And laws affect the way people conduct their business or individual actions. And in most occasions, official malfeasance function as a product of arbitrary laws.

Well, events are indeed turning out the way we see it.

President Aquino seems likely to begin his term by taking upon a populist stance.

This from the Inquirer,

``Presumptive president-elect Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III has thumbed down a proposal by his uncle to legalize “jueteng,” a numbers racket that brings in millions of pesos in cash to operators and their protectors.

“Jueteng is against the law and we will enforce the law,” Aquino told reporters."

Nice.

Whether it is the church, media or politicians, the simpleminded solution to any social problem will always be the visible...in the case of jueteng, a numbers game used for grassroots gambling--by prohibition.

There has been nary an attempt by the domestic academe or by any institutions to study or analyze the impacts of these laws on society or how prohibitions can lead to corruption.

Incidentally, accepting jueteng money had been used as the main basis for the indictment of former President Joseph Estrada's plunder trial in 2001 to 2007.

For the mainstream, enforcement issues are merely a matter of virtue.

And it is why for the economically misinformed public, the solution is to change the people in charge, rather than to examine the net effects of the law. And it is also why eradicating corruption has been an ever elusive task.

And President Aquino's actions seem no better than his priors.


The fundamental problem with prohibition laws is that it does not deal with demand.

It mistakenly assumes that if you do away with supply, so will demand. That's where things go awry. Demand does not go away, but supply is now controlled by illegal elements through the backdoor with apparent blessings by those in charge. The huge profits from restricted supply and monopoly, thus, allows for mass payoffs along the layers of government's bureaucracy and to media.

Here is Professor Mark Thornton on the supply side impact of the Economics of Prohibition.

"Prohibition is a supply-reduction policy. Its effect is felt by making it more difficult for producers to supply a particular product to market. Prohibition has little impact on demand because it does not change tastes or incomes of the consumers directly. As supply is decreased, however, the price of the product will rise, the quantity demanded will fall, and demand will shift to close substitutes. For example, consumers of narcotics might shift their demand to alcohol and tranquilizers as their prices become lower in relation to narcotics as a result of prohibition."

In the case of jueteng, or the poor man's gambling game, this represents as an alternative (substitute) to horse racing or casino or Jai Alai which are legalized.

Ironically, the disparity of application of laws makes it appear that the poor have no right to engage in the same activity as the rich or the middle class. Hence, in my view, such laws are not only arbitrary and unenforceable but also discriminatory.

So whether rich or poor, where some people are inclined to gamble, the choice of horse racing, jai-alai or jueteng becomes an issue of accessibility or as substitutes to the poor.

Jueteng, in short, is a niche market for grassroots gamblers.

Nevertheless another negative effect of prohibition laws: waste of resources.

Again Professor Thornton,

"Efficiency in economics is the search to equate the marginal cost of an activity with its marginal benefit. For the individual, this means that the number of apples consumed depends on each apple's being valued at more than its cost. In public policy the situation is more problematic.

"In simple terms, the marginal cost of prohibiting one unit of a product is the cost of the law enforcement necessary to bring about this result. Every dollar spent on prohibition enforcement means one less dollar that can be spent on alternative public policies such as national defense, shelters for the homeless, or Congressional postal privileges. If taxes are increased to fund prohibition enforcement, individuals will have less to spend on food, medical insurance, and lottery tickets. Initially, the declaration of prohibition, the use of excess law-enforcement capacity, and the existence of marginal users make expenditures on prohibition enforcement highly productive.

"Also, these resources can be diverted away from the least important policies or consumer expenditures and therefore can be obtained at a low cost. After these initial conditions, the price of additional enforcement increases, its productivity declines, and the cost of expended resources increases."

So resources that could be spent on worthier social programs are wasted on law enforcement which has little benefit to the society. In short, society suffers from a net loss/deadweight loss (cost greater than benefit) on jueteng prohibition.

And here is the corrupting influence of prohibition laws...

Again Professor Thornton,

``Another motive for enacting prohibition legislation is to reduce corruption of both public officials and the democratic process. People have sold their votes for money or drugs, and the alcohol industry tried to influence elections and public policy. Politicians could also be subject to corruption and blackmail because of alcohol and drugs, and drug use can have a corrupting influence on the actions of political leaders. For these reasons, prohibition was promoted as a means to maintain the integrity of democracy and government.

[my comment: same here, the only difference is that good intentions backfires]

``In general, however, prohibition results in more, not less, crime and corruption. The black markets that result from prohibitions represent institutionalized criminal exchanges. These criminal exchanges, or victimless crimes, often involve violent criminal acts.

``Prohibitions have also been associated with organized crime and gangs. Violence is used in black markets and criminal organizations to enforce contracts, maintain market share, and defend sales territory. The crime and violence that occurred during the late 1920s and early 1930s was a major reason for the repeal of Prohibition (Kyvig 1979, 123, 167). The nondrug criminal activity of heroin addicts has been associated with the economic effects of prohibition laws and is viewed by Erickson (1969) and others as a major cost of heroin prohibition.

``Corruption of law-enforcement officers and other public officials is also a familiar manifestation of prohibited markets. Experience with prohibition has shown it to be a major corrupting influence. The corruption of the Prohibition Bureau proved to be a major stumbling block to the effective enforcement of Prohibition and was also cited as a reason for repeal. Most important, this corruption penetrates beyond the enforcement bureaucracy to government in general. Recent experience has shown that worldwide multidrug prohibition is a major corrupting force in several national governments, such as Colombia and Mexico."

So whether it is about drugs, abortion or jueteng, these issues have fundamentally the same grounds: Prohibition induces corruption but does not stop or limit these activities or that the unintended effects are greater than the supposed benefits the law aims to achieve.

So President Aquino's first act demonstrates more of the same things, an administration that seeks popularity or desires to look and feel good (public choice theory again!) but seems tolerant of law induced corruption and wastage of government resources from feckless Prohibition laws.