YOU CAN'T MAKE WAR ON ORGANIZED CRIME

In August, two gunmen wounded a Quebec criminal reporter. Since then, Quebec
and Ottawa have vowed to crack down on organized crime with more policemen
and harsher laws than now exist. As with most top-down solutions, this one
is likely to fail. The experience Canadian gardeners have with squirrels
shows why.

No bulb is too deep for the eager claw, no bunch of grapes too high for the
snickering snout of the creatures some call rats with good PR. Gardeners who
set humane traps for their tormentors get no relief. Their frustration turns
to apoplexy as they note that for every hissing eight-inch passenger they
chauffeur to the woods in the trunk of their Volvos, two or three buck-tooth
denizens appear, in the name of Medusa, to multiply ravage upon the
gardener's White Rose dream.

Bikers and Mafiosi are not as cuddly as squirrels, but crackdowns upon them
have the same effect. In the United States, the FBI was surprised that
putting well-heeled Mafiosi in prison opened the streets to ferocious gangs
from Asia and Eastern Europe. These gangs had not yet learned a lesson the
Mafia had taken a century to learn. In the words of Al Capone, violence is
bad for business.

The unfortunate consequences of gang-busting apply to all countries. People
of the Congo who had long suffered the depredations of thieves in official
garments, the so-called kleptocrats, discovered in 1998 that in exchanging
Joseph Mobutu for Laurent Kabila, they lost a classy pickpocket to gain a
brutish extortionist. Tito might have looked bad to Yugoslavs of the 1970s,
but he was a gentleman in spectacles and powdered Whig compared with the
armada of punks who have macerated the Balkans these past 10 years.

University of Chicago historian William McNeill summed up the problem in his
book Plagues and Peoples: homo homini lupus. Man is unto himself like a
wolf. In the early days, men raided each other's fields and left a good deal
of what CNN war commentators would call collateral damage. The raiders who
came to dominate were the ones who did the least damage while taking from
peasants. Government evolved as a peaceful monopoly of force from the chaos
of competitive crime. We no longer live in terror of the arm-snapping
racketeer, but give our money to the number-crunching taxman.

Economist Gary Becker won a Nobel Prize in 1992 in part for showing how
governments, be they dictatorships, democracies or criminal oligarchies,
evolve to extort their revenues efficiently and to provide services for
their exactions. Capone saw himself as a public servant and while satisfying
Chicagoans' $100-million a year thirst for booze, managed to operate soup
kitchens that fed 3,000, as well as to pay the salaries of half the Chicago
police force.

The evolutionary force that transforms criminals into governments should
give our official leaders pause before cracking down on organized crime in
Canada. Organized crime is the government of prostitution, drug-taking, and
gambling. These governments serve needs that have been with us since the
days of glaciers and wooly mammoth barbecues. By putting these industries
outside the law, our elected leaders guarantee employment for juntas of
strong men whose specialty is defiance of the state. By breaking up these
juntas, we push crime back to its primitive condition of unmoderated
violence. The best way to topple the dictatorships that organized criminals
set up is not to make war with crime, but to invite criminals to compete by
the rules of commerce that have taken our elected governments generations to
perfect.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has called for the
legalization of drugs, as have some policemen, and a guild of prostitutes
has petitioned The Hague to legalize their profession. These might be
bottom-up solutions to consider in Canada's search for an answer to
organized crime.