MONOPOLY OF FORCE
By Ajit Chaudhuri –
September 2013
Some years ago, I
was involved in supplying rice to villages along the Manipur-Mizoram border during
a famine. The cheapest way was to lift rice in Imphal and transport it by truck
along National Highway 150 to Tipaimukh – but from Churachandpur onwards there
were ten roadblocks on the way, where different insurgent groups would stop the
trucks and demand bags for themselves. Our protestations, that this was a
relief effort and being done via the church, were to no avail – the rice is lifted
from a government warehouse, we were told (the buggers actually checked the
papers), and the levy had to be paid. Our attempts to organize ‘safe passage’
with the insurgents’ bosses were futile as well, there was no common high
command and we would have had to hold ten parallel sets of negotiations – well
beyond our ability to coordinate. We ended up using the more expensive option
of supplying by boat along the Barak River from Silchar and Lakhipur – only two
insurgents’ check posts on the river, both removable for the day if we informed
the local Assam Rifles battalion of impending movements beforehand. “Bloody
hell,” I remember thinking, “where the #@%%#@ is the #@%%#@ government?”
I am sometimes asked
‘what is India like?’ by someone from the twitter generation (they expect deep
insights and sage advice in one sentence). I usually say that India is a
country where, if you figure out that something applies, you soon also figure
out that the opposite too applies just as much.
One of the many things
this applies to is in our attitudes to government. We abuse the thieves and
criminals masquerading as lawmakers in parliament and state legislative
assemblies (to those who don’t like the tone of this sentence – 1,448 of
India’s 4,835 MPs and State legislators have declared criminal cases against
them, of which 641 of them face serious charges like murder, rape and
kidnapping, according to the Association for Democratic Reforms and quoted from
an article entitled ‘The Political Overlords of a Violent Underclass’ by
Rajrishi Singhal in The Hindu of 3rd September 2013) and their
lackeys sitting in the administration. We also expect the government to do
something about anything and everything that happens to us – and if the price
of onions rises, or a river bursts its banks and sweeps away a bunch of illegally
and badly built hotels, or the Taliban kill an Indian writer in some god-forsaken
corner of Afghanistan, it is somehow the government’s fault. And this
schizophrenia lies within all of us – we hate it, we demand it, we circumvent
it, we look up to it, we moan and groan about it, and we depend upon it.
What is this
beast called government, which the philosopher Thomas Hobbes likened to a
twisted sea monster and a gatekeeper of hell in his book ‘Leviathan’ in 1651?
Why do we need it? What would happen if it didn’t exist? And why does it bring
about such a range of emotions within the citizenry? The simplest and most
potent explanation of government comes from the essay ‘The Logic of Power’ by
Mancur Olsen in his book ‘Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and
Capitalist Dictatorships’ in 2000, and this is the topic of this note. I propose
to outline his key arguments here.
Societies, he
says, are most likely to prosper when there are clear incentives to produce,
and to reap gains from social cooperation through specialization and trade. They
are least likely to prosper when there are stronger incentives to ‘take’ than
to ‘make’, when there are more gains from predation than production. In
anarchies, where life is famously ‘nasty, brutal and short’ (according to Hobbes
in ‘Leviathan’), and kleptocracies where those in power seize most assets for
themselves, there is little production and few gains from social cooperation
through specialization and trade. Olsen suggests that, to determine where a
society would fall between these two extremes, one must understand the logic of
power. Power, and especially government power, is the capacity to bring about
compulsory compliance (whether you agree with a law is irrelevant to the fact
that you have to obey it, and the less said about paying taxes the better), and
this is best understood via the logic of force.
He uses the
metaphor of the stationary bandit. Theft makes society worse off – it produces
nothing, reduces rewards from production and investment, and induces a
diversion of resources towards locks, police, judges and prisons. But the
overall loss to society from his theft is not a deterrent to the individual
criminal or the roving bandit – he bears a small proportion of it, compared
with all the loss for opportunities to steal that he forgoes. He has a ‘narrow
stake’ in the society he is stealing from, and it is rational for him to ignore
the damage he does to it. Anarchy is a situation wherein there are many such
roving bandits in society, and therefore few incentives to produce and trade.
Now imagine a
situation where a roving bandit becomes strong enough to monopolize theft, i.e.
to take hold of a given territory, and to keep other bandits out. The power to
monopolize theft, and the related ability to monopolize force in a given area,
changes incentives dramatically – the roving bandit becomes a stationary
bandit. He acquires an ‘encompassing interest’ in his domain – it is now
rational for him to reduce the percentage he takes from each victim of theft,
so that the victims retain incentives to produce and trade. He even has an
incentive to spend some of his takings from theft, which he now calls tax, on
public goods that benefit his victims (education, health, infrastructure, etc.)
and make them more productive, at least up to the point the last dollar spent
equals his share of the resultant increase in output.
Governments,
therefore, arise because of the rational self-interest of those who can
organize the greatest capacity for violence. The acquisition of monopoly of force,
and the resultant move from a roving to a stationary bandit and change in
nomenclature of theft to tax, is key to this process. Everything else –
administration, justice, representation, issues of legitimacy, caring for the
old and sick, poverty alleviation, etc. – comes much later. This is why PM Manmohan
Singh rates naxalism as the greatest threat to India, greater than China,
terrorism and corruption – it challenges the government’s monopoly of force.
And this is what then-PM Vajpayee was referring to in 2002 when he reminded a
certain current prime ministerial hopeful to observe raj-dharma.
To conclude,
Olsen’s analysis is suspected to be tongue-in-cheek and has elements of irony
to it. And yet, seeing the government as a stationary bandit explains much of
its actions – and also many of our attitudes to it.
