I recently read Peter Leeson’s paper, Better Off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse, which argues that Somalia’s government was so awful that anarchy was actually better in most of the ways we care about. It has an example of a profit-making enterprise with negative value:
Under government, a great deal of Somali production was military hardware that citizens did not consume. In fact, to the extent that this hardware was used to suppress the Somali population, this sizeable portion of pre-1991 GDP was actually negative value added from the perspective of citizens’ welfare
...
[Military spending] left few resources for investment in public goods, like education, health, or transportation infrastructure...[In 1990,] government spent less than one percent of GDP on economic and social services, while military and administration consumed 90 percent of the state’s total recurrent expenditure
So, weapons manufacturing for an evil regime seems like a candidate for effective malice.
Your conclusion is probably true. But your Leeson quote is comparing the percentage of GDP that goes to things he wants to the percentage of the state’s recurrent expenditure that is military spending. Those numbers are not even enough to distinguish Barre from for example a government that just defends the people against external enemies and otherwise lets everyone handle their own affairs.
I recently read Peter Leeson’s paper, Better Off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse, which argues that Somalia’s government was so awful that anarchy was actually better in most of the ways we care about. It has an example of a profit-making enterprise with negative value:
So, weapons manufacturing for an evil regime seems like a candidate for effective malice.
Your conclusion is probably true. But your Leeson quote is comparing the percentage of GDP that goes to things he wants to the percentage of the state’s recurrent expenditure that is military spending. Those numbers are not even enough to distinguish Barre from for example a government that just defends the people against external enemies and otherwise lets everyone handle their own affairs.
Oh, thanks for pointing that out! I’d not noticed he switched from GDP to the government budget; I’d been thinking it was all the government budget.