A story that brought me a lot of humor was the one in summer 2017 about how orcas were shaking down fishing boats up near Alaska, robbing boat after boat of their halibut catch. It was an absurd happening. Imagine a killer whale disrupting you at your place of work—seizing the fruits of your labor. It was also one of those instances in which a certain animal thoroughly outsmarts humans, which is something that always entertains me. You can have your air conditioning and your antibiotics. If a whale is taking your halibut, he’s in charge, buddy.
I was thinking about that story again the other day, as I do periodically, and I began wondering what would happen if the fishers’ problem became significant enough that they decided they needed to kill the whales. I know that’s illegal, but I imagined, for a minute, a world in which it was legal, and I wondered if someones enthusiastic about whale conservation would perhaps band together to pay the fishers not to fish, and therefore not to kill the whales, the same way you can pay someone to not cut down trees. Following these thoughts, I wondered if there’d be a way to make an activist economy out of this, where people paid others to not do things they opposed or to do things they supported: “I will pay you to not kill these whales.” “I will pay you to not cut down these trees.” “I will pay you to provide affordable housing to low-income families.” “I will pay you to have and raise this baby.” “I will pay you to process this migrant’s immigration paperwork.” This would be a lot of individual transactions, but conglomerations could form—there could be a subscription fee and you could opt in and out of different causes you wanted to support, so that if you wanted to pay Botswanan children salaries to not dangerously mine diamonds and you also wanted to pay Alaskan fishermen to not kill orcas but you didn’t want to pay hospitals in Appalachia to provide free medical care to senior citizens, you could select those preferences and send your money to those places while the processing organization handled the details and the logistics and did so with another few hundred thousand people’s money as well according to their preferences, collecting a portion of the fee for their own troubles but not so large a portion that you decided to withdraw your money and jump to another business providing the same service.
It sounds idealistic and impossible, and it likely is idealistic and improbable, but in a sense, this already exists, but there are two primary conglomerations that serve this purpose, and they are at constant war with one another in something we call “elections.” Amongst other things, this is a function our political parties execute, except that instead of paying fishermen not to kill whales, if not killing whales is the desired outcome of their supporters, they make killing whales illegal, then find back-channel ways to compensate the fishermen the same way they subsidize farmers when their trade wars make it harder to sell soybeans to Chinese soybean consumers. This isn’t a perfect explanation of what they do, and again, it’s just one function among many, but it’s part of their activity, and instead of allowing it to happen in individual transactions it has to be done with one big law, and instead of leaving room for people to support and oppose different sets of actions, whoever has more political power gets to make the rules for how everybody’s money gets used, and instead of asking people to make nuanced decisions on issue after issue, people are told that one issue, the one they care about most, requires them to bend their brain and their morality and believe all sorts of other things they wouldn’t otherwise believe or in many cases recently didn’t believe because, again, their beliefs are driven by their political preference, not vice versa. It’s also done in a monopolistic manner. There are various governments in the United States, but there are few areas of overlap between those governments’ jurisdictions, and because the government is the only place decisions on many of these issues are made, there’s no alternative with regard to those issues to playing the game this way. You can’t go find someone who runs a leaner organization and give them your money to handle these things. There’s only one organization. It can be as bloated as it wants.
Anyway, a little libertarian pipe dream for your Fourth of July Friday. A pipe dream in which we’d maybe hate each other a little less, and the fishermen don’t have to learn new trades and the killer whales don’t start getting harpooned again for outsmarting humanity.
