Who Are We Punishing?

Since I haven’t heard much response, either positive or negative, to Christopher Wellman’s suggestion that we have multiple tariffs for multiple thefts, I will make the assumption that everyone accepts this would be a natural outcome of the original Leif Wenar proposal. In other words, I think we can all agree that we are likely to face a situation in which both American and Chinese goods (and probably the goods of several other important nations) are subjected to stiff tariffs in the international marketplace.

Is this something we are all comfortable with? I take Dr. Wenar’s point that this is a mechanism designed to further legal rather than political ends, and I can appreciate that the intention is to punish theft, and therefore to honor the sanctity of free trade. But it still seems to me that the net result, whatever the intention, is to create a politically charged environment in which everyone is slapping tariffs on everyone else, and the global economy grinds to a halt (or at least a serious slowdown).

Perhaps this is an acceptable price to pay to live in a world in which justice and fairness are our principal touchstones. Perhaps. But I have to admit, at the moment, I am unconvinced. And the main reason I am unconvinced is because this feels to me like we’re not punishing thieves, and we’re not even punishing those who traffic in stolen goods, but rather we’re punishing those who happen to live in countries whose economies happen to depend in part on buying and selling goods that may have been produced from stolen goods. And that feels to me a bit like asking your grandmother to pay war reparations to the Iraqi people because she happens to hold some shares in Halliburton. Why not just go after Dick Cheney?

 

Also from this issue

Lead Essay

  • We All Own Stolen Goods — and How Defending Property Rights Can Help the World’s Most Oppressed People by Leif Wenar

    Developing countries with massive oil or mineral reserves are often wracked by corruption and strife as their would-be rulers jockey for control of the resources that can make them immensely wealthy. But these resources, argues political philosopher Leif Wenar in this month’s provocative lead essay, belong to the people of these countries — some of the poorest people in the world — not their rulers. So trade in these resources amounts to trade in stolen goods. Wenar argues that we must “enforce property rights directly” by taking “legal action in U.S. jurisdictions against the middlemen who trade Americans’ dollars to the worst regimes in exchange for stolen resources.” Because this cannot stop “resource cursed” countries from trading with less enlightened countries, such as China, Wenar additionally proposes a tariff on imports from China (or from whatever country is receiving “stolen” resources), the proceeds of which are to be held in trust for the rightful owners of the resources, and disbursed to those people in the event of their government’s reform. “The priority in reforming global trade,” Wenar argues, “must be to lock in the rights that define the market order. The first step in improving the prospects of poor people is to enforce the rights they already have.”

Response Essays

  • The Wenar Proposal vs. Realpolitik by John Ghazvinian

    While lauding the goal of Leif Wenar’s proposal for fighting the effects of the resource curse, John Ghazvinian, author of Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, questions its practicability. When it comes to determining which governments meet the threshold of a “minimally decent and unified government,” Ghazvinian worries about the possibility that “this process will become deeply politicized” or “simply reduced to who has the best PR apparatus.” Ghazvinian suggests that requiring a government to be unified, though intended to stave off civil war, may “have the opposite effect” by providing “any aggrieved minority the power of an instant veto-risking destabilization in what are often already unstable countries.” Wenar’s “anti-theft” tariff, Ghazvinian argues, seems unlikely really to be seen as distinct from other tariffs and so will introduce just another complicating factor into the realpolitik of trade negotiation.

  • The Resource Curse and Leif Wenar’s “Clean Hands Trust” by Christopher Wellman

    Washington University political philosopher Christopher Wellman praises Wenar’s proposal for fighting the resource curse, but he criticizes the idea of a “Clean Hands Trust” on the ground that it “requires too LITTLE, not too much” of those of us involved in the market for natural resources “stolen” from their rightful owners. Wellman argues that the “Clean Hands Trust” is analogous to a slave-owner attempting to rectify his wrongdoing by offering the slave a large sum in compensation. “If the slave owner cannot clean her hands by paying the slave after the fact,” Wellman asks, “then why should we presume that the person who buys slave-produced cotton from a slave owner can clean her hands by paying the slave after the fact? And if the person who buys morally tainted cotton cannot clean her hands in this way, why think that those who buy inexpensive shirts constructed from slave-produced cotton can clean their hands by subsequently reimbursing the slaves?” Similarly, he argues a Clean Hands Trust would fail really to clean our hands.

  • To Punish the Guilty by Andrei Illarionov

    Cato senior fellow Andrei Illarionov, a former chief economic advisor to then-Russian President Vladimir Putin, argues that there is nothing special about the “resource curse,” which represents just one among many kinds of theft by corrupt political elites. According to Illarionov, Wenar fails to make a principled distinction between the actions of the political leaders of Equatorial Guinea and those of Russia that would motivate restricting trade in goods from the former but not the latter. Illarionov argues that the precedent of treating a country’s natural resources as belonging to its people is the problem, not the beginning of a solution. In practical political reality, the idea of collective national ownership of resources often translates directly into nationalization and control by political elites. Additionally, Illarionov argues that the trade sanctions Wenar proposes would punish innocent citizens who already suffer under corrupt rulers. The issue, he argues, is not a matter of what is stolen, but how we will treat those responsible for theft.

The Conversation