Anarchy and Pirates

I read an incredible article about a Cruise Liner called the Seabourn Spirit which was sailing 100 miles off the coast of Somali with 151 passengers and 161 crew members when two boats filled with pirates sped toward them firing weapons. The captain of the ship sped the boat up and changed course thereby preventing the thugs from boarding the ship. But at some point the captain apparently also tried to run down one of the boats attacking them. Hurray for the captain and for the crew.

Can you believe it? In the 21st century and we have pirates trolling the ocean for victims to pillage!

Why along Somalia’s coast? Well, come to find out that between March and August of this year there have been 15 violent pirate attacks off of the 2000 mile coastline of Somalia. It is in a state of anarchy since the dictator thug Mohamed Siad Barre was ousted in 1991. Anarchy is defined in “The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary” as – absence of government in a society. So what do people do without a government to maintain order? The leaders in Somalia “turned on each other, transforming this nation of 7 million into a patchwork of battling fiefdoms ruled by heavily armed militias” (“Cruise Ship Crew Fends off Pirate Hijack Attempt” by Rodrique Ngowi, AP)

So it’s a free for all in Somalia. “If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door – or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorically savages” (The Nature of Government, Ayn Rand).

This is what some Libertarians espouse, the anarchy of competing “governments”. They should move to Somalia and experience their ideal first hand. But I digress. So what is the purpose of government?

Ayn Rand defined government as an “institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area…If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules….A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control – i.e., under objectively defined laws…The source of the government’s authority is ‘the consent of the governed’. This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose” (The Nature of Government, Ayn Rand).

This is the rule of law and what maintains order thereby allowing a nation to prosper. Somalia’s descent into a kind of hell is warning to all of what will happen when people lose their ability to use reason to solve problems. There is nothing left but the use of physical force otherwise called the law of the jungle. No prosperity ever resulted under those conditions. Africa is a continent self-destructing into the abyss of dictatorship and anarchy.

The problems of Africa, be they poverty, hunger or disease will never be solved by charity from the West (as our genius Hollywood Actors continually suggest). It's simpler than that: all one has to do is think, study history and rediscover the use of reason and the rule of law.