Crimonomics 101

Really obvious stuff about economics and the black-market

Lets take John Smith. John likes drinking beer. So, John has several problems:

• He needs beer
• He needs a nice place to drink the beer
• He needs to get to and from the place where he drinks beer (as he'll be drunk, the normal solution -- driving his car -- might not be appropriate)

Now, people have sprung up to solve John's problems: brewers make beer, land-lords store beer and maintain a nice drinking environment, and taxi drivers will ferry you to and from the pub. They'll do all this under the assumption that you'll give them money. Pretty much economics 101.

Now lets take Druggy McCokehead. Druggy likes snorting coke. So, Druggy has several problems, pretty similar to John's: for a start, he needs cocaine.

Again, people will have sprung up to solve Druggy's problems. A taxi-driver might ferry him to and from his local drug-dealer, who stocks cocaine for him.

If you have a problem, and are willing to sacrifice money to get it fixed, there will be people available to fix your problem, whatever it is. Economics 101.

Similarly, there's infrastructure for other problem-solvers. Take the person who solves John's beer-problem: he'll need a way of getting the beer from the brewers to his pub, hence there's a transportation infrastructure. Some of these transporters might address clients/goods with special requirements: maybe those goods are perishable and thus require cooling/freezing whilst being transported, or maybe the goods need to be hidden and transported covertly because armies of big men with sticks are out to find and confiscate the goods. Either way, there will be people willing to solve your transportation needs... for money.

Similarly, John's land-lord might, in his quest to provide an enjoyable drinking environment, encounter the problem of violent drunks; if he can't, or doesn't want to, solve this on his own, there are bouncers who will solve his crowd-control problems for him. For money.

And, in the worst case, if the problem can be summed up as 'so-and-so is being a problem for me and the people who's problems I solve', there's always lawyers and/or the police (or bouncers).

Exactly the same exists within the black market. As a support-service for out-sourcing the problems that you encounter whilst trying to solve other people's problems, there are available:

• People who move things from A to B
• People who store things
• People who get things
• People who make things
• People who stop other people from being a problem

The latter one consists of:

People who stand there looking intimidating (bouncers, police, 'heavies')
People who physically remove someone from the premises (bouncers, police, 'heavies')
People who go and have a word with people (police, lawyers, 'heavies')
People who go and have a stern word with people (police, lawyers, people who break legs for money)
People who remove other people from the equasion. (police & prison service, hit-men)

All for the same fundamental reason: if someone else has a problem, and you will solve it, there's money in it for you. OK, granted, police are done socialistically via tax, but whatever, I'm mainly focusing on the black-market equivalent here.

Both legal and illegal economies also have people who know what's going on and wander round organising stuff, whether they're called managers or crime-lords.

And there's much, much more to the criminal infrastructure. Coke-dealers, for example, quite often give discounts and are friendly to any of their customers who happen to be taxi-drivers or police, because taxi-drivers tend to go everywhere (so make passable 'spies' and relatively inconspicuous traffickers) and pigs have inside information on 'the enemy', for example; a successful coke dealer often moonlights as an information broker.

My point? Just that problems beg solutions, and that if you have both problems and money, you will have people solving the former for the latter. Laws create crimes not only in the strait-forward 'this is illegal now so everone who does it is a criminal' sense, and not only in the 'criminalising coke creates coke-dealers as well as coke-takers' sense, but also in the 'each law contributes to the existence and financing of the organized criminal infrastructure' sense.

Now... this is all relatively obvious. And the main point of this blog is to force me to write stuff down, and thus check it (in fact, I'm relatively sure I don't have any readers, but whatever). So, the next part of this avenue of thought will come later, when I've checked some (relatively mundane) facts.

tl; dr?

• Criminals are people who do things.
• They do all sorts of things, including boring logistical stuff like moving shit and killing people.
• They do this for money.
• Obviously.