Category Archives: Private Property

Continuous Cronyism Update: Pretend the Ports Were Private

Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Government, Private Property, The State

DP World is owned by the government of Dubai, which is, in turn, “one of seven emirates that form the federation known as the United Arab Emirates.” This state-owned corporation will soon be operating port facilities in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, New Orleans and Newark, N.J. The deal embroils politicians—ours and theirs—in the usual tangled and tainted interests.

For instance, after Katrina struck, the UAE gave the U.S. government 100 million for disaster relief. Talks about the ports began shortly afterwards. Quid pro quo? CorpWatch alludes to an intricate web of war profiteers. Like Halliburton and other well-connected American companies, the Dubai conglomerate “does brisk war business.”

Tracing the slimy trail of the Bush administration and its corporate cronies reveals that Treasury Secretary John Snow “was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004.” Another edifying tidbit from the New York Daily News has it that “David Sanborn, who runs DP World’s European and Latin American operations…was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.”

Also, former Congressman Vin Weber, a Minnesota Republican, is a consultant to the United Arab Emirates; and former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole is a “fixture” at Alston & Bird LLP—a company that’ll be consulting and lobbying privately for DP World. Bling-bling (as in the sound of a cash register, not a rapper’s accoutrements)!

If U.S. ports were private, and not state run; if the deal were devoid of the cupidity and corruption that comes with government “enterprise”—all those politicized paybacks—then it is more than likely that the private property owners involved would react just as Americans have reacted to the involvement of a Middle-Eastern, state-owned company in the management of their ports. Most Americans are against this deal; only 17 percent approve.

If ports were privately owned, their proprietors would have to underwrite the endeavor and would thus be extra cautious, since it would fall to them—and not to taxpayers—to cover the costs of an attack. There’s no doubt that port owners would then express the same trepidations most Americans are now voicing over who manages—and has easy access to—their ports. Why, in a free market, even the perception of insecurity would cause insurance costs to skyrocket. Fairness doesn’t factor into this.

In all likelihood, if ports were privatized, we’d be witnessing a similar reaction. Right or wrong, the UAE would probably not be doing a rip-roaring trade in managing ports. So, to the extent that popular response to the Dubai deal mirrors what would transpire under private property, it’s neither unethical nor unreasonable; it is what it is.

When the issue at stake is near and dear to their hearts, people become propertarians.

* Related Reading: Whose Property is it Anyway?

Let Private Property Prevail

Feminism, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Private Property

A new right may soon be minted by the nation’s “representatives”: the right to have one’s birth-control prescription filled. As a pro-life protest of sorts, pharmacists across the country are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth-control and day-after pills. In response to their posturing —and the bleating by “reproductive rights groups” — The Great Centralizers in the House and Senate have proposed a bill that’ll allow a pharmacist to refuse to fill a prescription only if a co-worker is on hand to pick up the slack. It goes without saying that a federal law, if passed, would further corrode the cornerstone of civilization: private property. The keys to the store belong with the owner of the pharmacy. The decision is his as to what goods he distributes. If an employee —the pharmacist —refuses to sell goods the owner stocks, the latter has every right to sack the saboteur. One doesn’t possess a right to have a prescription filled, but, equally, one also has no inherent right to stay employed while refusing to peddle the boss’s wares.
The market —not the meddlers —has the best solution: pharmacies that cater to women who use the pill and apothecaries that don’t. The former will employ people who’ll supply these clients; to the latter will flock workers who have an aversion to certain dispensing duties. (My guess is that preachy pharmacists —be they employers or employees —will have a negligible niche market.)
Inhabitants of the land of the free forget that criminalizing behaviors entirely licit in natural law legalizes the use of force against these innocents. (One consequence of the last is that hundreds of thousands of Americans languish in jail for ingesting, injecting, inhaling, or exchanging “unapproved” substances.)
By the same token, Weyco, a medical-benefits provider in Michigan, is just exercising its property rights by refusing to employ anyone who smokes. Inherent to private property is the right to include or exclude; associate with or dissociate from. States that “have passed laws that bar companies from discriminating against workers for lifestyle decisions” are infringing a proprietor’s property rights.
Companies (Investors Property Management in Seattle is another example) who don’t hire smokers are responding to the costs of having to provide workers with another bogus right: healthcare coverage. Their reaction is an example of the perfectly predictable consequences of regulation. It also showcases the immortality of those who clamor for regulation —American workers are all for compelling companies to pay for their healthcare, but want to ban businesses from screening out high-risk candidates.