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    Sun, 25 Aug 2002 21:27:42 -0400
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From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>
Subject: TGE: Thugs of South Boston and The Revenge of the Bandit Princess
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Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2002 21:18:34 -0400

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Thugs of South Boston and The Revenge of the Bandit Princess


The Geodesic Economy
Robert A. Hettinga
Sunday, August 25, 2002

(BOSTON) When you think about it one way, the FBI/Winter Hill vs.
Patriarcha/Angiulo Cosa Nostra fight was just another race war
between thugs.

Put crudely, and at its most racist, the FBI and the Winter Hill Gang
were the (mostly) Irish thugs, and Patriarcha's "family" were, of
course, the (mostly) Italian thugs.


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