Um, the wholesale privatization of "security" operations and the creation of mercenary forces (in the pay of merchant fleets?) bodes ill for the survival of the nation state. The peak-to-trough part of the business cycle is an outlier. Carnot would have died laughing.
And that's where the EU is so interesting as a concept, and at the heart of that fight, because the EU is in a much better position to impose rules on corporations. The fact that it is currently busier deregulating is not something that need be permanent; in fact, the more the EU is pushed by the corporations to impose pan-EU deregulation, the more legitimacy it has to impose re-regulation on a continental scope.
What matters in the end is whether the EU has political legitimacy or not, and ironically, big business needs the EU to have the ability to make pan-EU rules, and the more it does to strenghten such pan-EU powers, the bigger we have a chance to fight big business back, eventually. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
* The symbiosis between private insurance and privateering dominates. If the company that owned the rescued ship wasn't a US defense contractor, its kidnapping insurance company (likely Lloyds) and its designated crisis representatives (likely Control Risks Group) would have negotiated to pay the pirate's fee to get the hostage back -- as are thousands of kidnappings from Mexico to Colombia to Nigeria to the Gulf of Aden are settled every year. Somali pirates have made tens of millions this way already. Further, in many parts of the world, kidnappers are almost never caught/killed (<5% in Mexico and the same is likely true for Somalia). So, given this backdrop, the Navy's rescue effort was just a sideshow and the industry that made it possible will continue to grow rapidly.
And anyway, sea-based mercenaries aren't a serious threat to any modern state. I'd be more worried about militias taking over police roles on land.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
