Free People, not Free Markets

One of our favorite movies here at the Blasphemy Blog is Black Hawk Down, which is about the rocky, maligned 1993 United Nations mission in Somalia. At the beginning of the movie, a truck full of UN grain is accosted by a mob of starving Somalis, who take away whatever they can get their hands on. It’s a disturbing scene that displays the unhappy sight of the strong pushing aside the weak in order to satisfy their most desperate, basic human needs.

Suddenly a flutter of automatic rifle fire disperses the crowd, and a man approaches the vehicle, firing his gun in the air. Finally, the viewer thinks. Order will be restored. But this feeling quickly dissipates, because the man shouts out, “This food belongs to Mohamed Farrah Aidid!” Aidid was the most notorious Somali warlord of the time, and the message of the scene could not be clearer: order may be restored, but the same rules apply.

And so the people go hungry, unless they can afford to pay whatever Mohamed Farrah Aidid is charging for whatever is left after he gorges himself and his cronies.

We thought of this movie when reading about the starvation in Niger. As it turns out, there is actually plenty of food in the country right now, and there is plenty more just over the border in the new West African capitalist powerhouse of Nigeria. However, it is the cruel reality of capitalism, rather than the power of warlords, that is preventing people from getting the food they need this time.

That is because, quite simply, Niger’s farmers can make more money selling their food to the relatively wealthy Nigerians than they can selling it to their countrymen. So they get their best price in Nigeria, and in Niger, people starve.

Free market ideals are admirable, because entrepreneurship is a worthwhile human endeavor, overall. It sparks innovation, forces us to adapt, and prevents boredom. But free markets are not an absolute good; after all, the thing that is being “freed” in laissez-faire economics is the money, not necessarily the people.

Sometimes you have to break the rules of the market in order to accomplish a human good. We must always remember that the market should be our tool, and not the other way around.