The ability of organised crime gangs to profit from prohibitions and harsh anti-coronavirus measures increases the risk and incidence of human trafficking.
Last month, we established that smugglers do consumers a great favour by making available products that are prohibited or over-taxed by the government. By doing so, they hold government accountable for irrational prohibitions and excessive taxation.
We also saw that black markets, despite their virtues, cause significant problems for consumers, legitimate traders and law enforcement. Still, the best response is not only better law enforcement, but must extend to legalising prohibited products or activities, and easing the burden of regulation and taxation, which offer significant incentives for black marketeers.
When South Africa stimulated the formation and expansion of black markets by banning alcohol and even cigarettes during lockdown, ostensibly to help combat the coronavirus, the wise commanders of South Africa appear to have forgotten the lessons of prohibition in the United States.
Although criminal gangs have existed throughout history, before the US banned alcohol in 1920, the terms ‘organised crime’ and ‘syndicate’ were virtually unknown. The rise of the mafia is widely credited to alcohol prohibition in the US.
As the profits from illegal production and distribution of alcohol grew, the gangs got organised, with formal structures, lawyers, accountants, a wide range of employees, and, of course, heavies with a propensity for violence and coercion. They bribed government officials to look the other way, and bribed the police to help protect territorial monopolies.
Organised crime did not disappear with the end of prohibition. It merely branched out into other businesses that were illegal, over-regulated, or over-taxed. Notably, it went into drugs, prostitution and illegal gambling.
It is tempting, as a free-marketeer, to just say unban and untax the lot of it, then. Turn all of it into legitimate businesses, giving black marketeers no incentive to get involved.
The case of drugs
Sadly, a purist approach doesn’t quite work. While I would argue that prostitution ought to be legal and well-regulated, and that gambling should not be limited to a handful of major licence owners who are highly taxed, there are black market trades where matters are not so clear-cut.
The case of drugs, for example, is complicated. On one hand, one might say that whatever a person puts in their bodies, for fun or otherwise, is solely their own responsibility.
However, we also know that it requires expertise to safely use many drugs, and we know that drug abuse is a scourge on society, leading to poverty, accidents, mental and physical health problems, crime and violence.
I’m not at all convinced that the system of drug scheduling, by which certain drugs are made available only on prescription by a doctor, can easily be replaced with the ‘spontaneous order’ of an entirely free market, and that this would not do more harm than good.
That said, there is a great deal that can be done to reduce the harm of the current drug prohibition policy, by which not only the unlicensed sale, but also the illicit buying, possession and use, are criminalised.
There is no benefit at all in treating drug users as criminals. Doing so is not only likely to prevent them from seeking help with addiction, should they need it, but it will actively turn them into criminals. Prisons do a poor job at rehabilitating criminals, but an excellent job at turning non-violent potheads into hardened criminals and members of organised crime gangs.
Strict prohibitions on certain drugs also prevent scientific research into those drugs. Drugs with the highest scheduling status are described as having no known therapeutic benefit, but if researchers cannot access them, how will we ever know what their therapeutic potential really is? It is slowly becoming evident that many hallucinogens, in more moderate doses than those used for recreation, might have significant benefit in the treatment of all sorts of mental health disorders, and some physical conditions, too.
Trading humans
The trade in illicit goods and services also funds and supports a far more sinister business: the buying and selling of humans.
On one hand, everyone should be free to work at any job they choose, at any pay they choose to accept. It is immoral to deny someone a low-wage job, even if it is below some bureaucratic notion of ‘minimum wage’, when the alternative is unemployment and destitution. It is equally immoral to deny someone the right to use their body to earn an income, whether that is by performing manual labour, providing physical security, engaging in dangerous sports such as boxing, or offering sex-related services.
However, all of this is conditional upon the voluntary participation of the worker. When consent is removed from the equation, we’re dealing with modern slavery.
According to the International Labour Organisation, 40.3 million people were victims of modern slavery in 2016. Of those, 15.4 million were in a forced marriage without their consent, and 24.9 million were in forced labour of some sort, including domestic work, factory work, construction work, farm work, fishing work, or sex work.
Africa is the worst-affected continent, with 7.6 in 1 000 people living in bondage, of which over a third were engaged in forced labour.
The majority of all those in forced labour work in the private sector, in criminal organisations. They are victims of coercion by means of debt bondage, threats of withholding wages, threats of or actual violence, and threats against their families.
A substantial remainder work for governments, and many of those are prisoners who provide free labour to the state.
This doesn’t happen only in less developed countries. Attorneys for Kamala Harris, the running mate of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in the US, once opposed a plan to reduce the prison population by granting early parole to non-violent offenders on the grounds that the state needed these prisoners for labour.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has warned that measures to control coronavirus have increased the risk to victims of human trafficking. Ghada Waly, executive director at the UNODC, said: “With COVID-19 restricting movement, diverting law enforcement resources, and reducing social and public services, human trafficking victims have even less chance of escape and finding help.”
Ilias Chatzis, the head of the UNODC’s human trafficking section added: “At the same time, new opportunities for organised crime to profit from the [coronavirus] crisis are emerging. This means traffickers may become more active and prey on people who are even more vulnerable than before because they have lost their source of income due to measures to control the virus.”
Fighting the scourge
Combating human trafficking is not easy, and traditional ‘law and order’ strategies have largely failed.
Kamala Harris, for example, has long claimed to fight against alleged sex traffickers, but her actions, such as going after a major online platform that advertised sex services, have made sex workers more vulnerable. Her campaign has not reduced actual human trafficking for sex work, but it has turned truckers into snitches on prostitutes, and thrown many women in prison for having consensual sex with clients. How this helps anyone is beyond me.
A first step in fighting unlawful human trafficking must be to decriminalise consensual sex work, be it in prostitution, pornography or other sex-related services. That means decriminalising the buyers, the sellers, the advertisers and the support services.
Without the fear of arrest and imprisonment hanging over them, victims of human trafficking are far more likely to seek help against agents who coerce them. Workers in the consensual sex industry can also take action against clients or pimps who abuse them, if they’re not afraid they’ll be prosecuted themselves.
This goes not only for prostitution. Forced labourers in other industries who come forward seeking protection from human traffickers should also not have to worry about their own legal position, such as the type of labour they were performing, or their immigration status.
Once the victims of criminal enterprises are adequately protected and shielded from prosecution, more effort can be made to go after the real criminals.
As we’ve seen, however, this isn’t merely a task for law enforcement. It requires a legal and regulatory framework which minimises the incentives for black marketeers to break the law. Reducing profit opportunities will deprive them of the funding required to maintain elaborate, organised and diversified criminal enterprises.
That, in turn, militates against unnecessary or arbitrary prohibitions on moralistic or irrational grounds, against excessive taxation on goods and services that are attractive to black marketeers, and against over-regulating industries by, for example, issuing limited numbers of licences to legitimate enterprises.
An environment in which profit opportunities for black marketeers are minimised is one that is conducive to reducing the size and the scope of criminal enterprises. In such an environment, it will be easier for law enforcement to go after those black markets that really cannot be legalised, such as the traffic in counterfeit goods, stolen goods, and unwilling people.
[Picture: Tim Tebow Foundation on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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