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Think Scorsese's upcoming "Gangs of New York", only with
counter-reformatory overtones. Hoover's South Boston "social-club"
putsch, starting in the mid 1960's, was particularly audacious in
hindsight. The U.S. Federal Government actually decided to underwrite
a reversal of the prohibition-era capture of the nation's rackets by
the Italians from the Irish. The fact that the plot was hatched not
for New York, but for South Boston, the most Irish place in the US,
only makes even more gigantic the Big Lie that was told by the FBI to
its ostensible political masters about bringing down organized crime
there once and for all.

The result, as we all found out, wasn't swapping the heroin of
Italian Boston mob violence for Irish methadone. Hoover was,
posthumously, swapping it for Oxycontin, or crystal methamphetamine
- -- or, more properly, PCP. The absolute psychopathology of violence
in Whitey Bulger's crack-cocaine-era reign of Boston's drug markets,
like the identical FBI-sponsored reigns or violent horror by other
also-rans in cities across the US as a whole, went up whole orders of
magnitude, not mere percentage points.

As Stalin said once, quantity has a quality all it's own. And, make
no mistake, J. Edgar Hoover was directly responsible that "quality"
of carnage, nation-wide.


So, yes, on paper at least, it really *was* just the swapping of one
gang of racist thugs for another, and the result was, on paper, at
least, business as usual. Same stuff, different century, with
apparently decent people like Mr. Salvati et.al accidently ground on
the gears of "justice" like so much hamburger.

However, to be much more macabre about it, that hamburger was
"greasing", if you will, an auto de fe only a homicidal lunatic could
love: a perfectly functioning market, legislated out of existence --
on paper, if nowhere else -- by government fiat and the, back-door,
but still elitist, will to power of H.L. Mencken's famous "bluenoses
and busybodies".


It all starts, like all true evil does, from the most innocent of
beginnings. What she couldn't do to alcohol, teatotaling Mrs. Grundy
then tried to do to anything else she could think of that had a
smaller, "manageable" demand. The bloody result was, like nine more
heads of the hydra, an increasingly ubiquitous universal prohibition,
in more markets, and for more things, as the 20th century wore on.

Every time some recreational drug was found to be addictive, or
harmful, or physically distasteful, or carcinogenic -- or, now,
apparently, fattening -- and then prohibited, exactly the same thing
happened to its markets that happened to alcohol during the Volstead
years. A *larger* market than before the prohibition. Hugely
lucrative profits for anyone with the moral stomach to violently
scale newly-legislated "barriers to competition" imposed on them by
the state. Increasingly violent attacks by the government on users of
those substances. And, finally, the ultimate in evil -- the kind of
evil this country actually fought wars to end -- increasingly
coercive axe-handle beatings, by our own government, of the sacred
liberty of the average, but now unavoidably-law-breaking, citizenry.

As Ayn Rand cynically observed a long time ago, you don't need
government if nobody's breaking the law. In some twisted corollary to
Parkinson's Law, governments, to survive, *need* more people,
breaking more laws, or they can never justify the money they
confiscate at tax time.

And, to bring us back to the point, David Friedman would probably
echo here his father Milton's famous observation that government
regulations only benefit the regulated sellers in a given market, and
never the consumer, much less the economy as a whole. Even,
*especially*, if those sellers are *breaking* the law, as they are in
the increasingly ubiquitous prohibition of risky behavior that our
government now imposes on us.


And there, absent the apparent grace of Mr. Hoover, went Mr. Salvati.

In fact, Hayek himself, in "The Road to Serfdom", couldn't have
predicted any better the gory consequences of Hoover's blatant
imposition, "for our own good", of Vietnam-era statist power at the
neighborhood level. And, furthermore, *Stalin* couldn't have had
better "useful idiots" than Hoover did -- and neither, by an
absolutely literal extension, did Whitey Bulger after Hoover.

Useful idiots on both sides of the congressional aisle. Idiots who
were eating out of Hoover's power-craven hand for the entire middle
of the 20th century -- and Whitey Bulger's hand, whether they knew it
or not, until the end of the millennium. A time, you'll notice, which
saw the increasingly steady imposition of "mob" violence, and market
control, from both state and illegal interests, way beyond the
imaginings of even the most power-mad, rum-running, stock-kiting,
movie-flopping, bureau-pumping, Nazi-appeasing Irish-Bostonian Little
Caesar. Or, as for that matter, his safely trust-funded, and now
strictly political, descendents.

In terms of actual financial economics, think of what happened to Mr.
Salvati and the others, dead or alive, as a "transfer-price", in
human lives, of the inevitable consequence of MacNamara-style
Vietnam-era Keynesian "social-cost" input-output accounting at its
most despicable, and you can almost begin to fathom the atrocity that
was committed by Hoover, and his co-religionists in state economic
control, in the name of what really was, as you'll now agree, just a
race war between thugs up in Boston.


This shouldn't be a surprise, really. All race wars are at least
fought by thugs, though they're usually conceived elsewhere, and
endorsed, at the time, by all the "right" people, for all the "right"
reasons.

As far as the FBI itself goes, remember Mancur Olson's observation
that a "prince" is just a stationary bandit.

Though, given his penchant for women's clothing, for other men, and,
what's actually obscene, for violently hypocritical treatment of
people of his own affectional preference, I suppose we can call J.
Edgar Hoover a bandit "princess", instead.

"Bandit Queen", of course, would be a grievous insult to queens --
and real bandits -- everywhere.

Cheers,