Some people here in HN tend to think that drug cartels run businesses, but they're wrong. Those guys are regular greedy criminals, some with sociopathic tendencies. That's why I don't think they'll even bother trying to go after the lost revenue with marijuana trafficking. What I think they'll do is to migrate their activities to other drugs or another types of crimes like kidnapping and human trafficking. That aligns much better with their values.
> Some people here in HN tend to think that drug cartels run businesses, but they're wrong.
If they weren't, they'd quickly got kicked out from the market by someone who was.
> Those guys are regular greedy criminals, some with sociopathic tendencies.
Like some enterpreneurs are much different.
You assume that because they're doing bad things (morally and/or legally), they're not thinking, but instead they are driven by their impulses. It's a silly assumption and I think disproved many times. Freakonomics comes to my mind as one example.
> If they weren't, they'd quickly got kicked out from the market by someone who was.
It's pretty naive to imagine that black market cartels are competing in anything like an idealized free market. In the lawless environments being talked about, a worse businessman can always beat a better competitor simply by being better at violence.
Gang warfare and mass killings are rife down their. This isn't some naive libertarian fantasy market where La Familia is just another scrappy silicon valley startup.
The abstract structure of a market seems to be the same, just the rules are different. Companies operating legally fight in courts, drug cartels fight on the streets with guns. In both cases, it's part of the rules the environment sets. So the competitor better at violence is a better competitor, by the rules of the market they operate in.
Corporations have had entire armies and countries at their command (not to mention that there is no clear dividing line between corporations and the government). The lives lost due to turf wars waged by drug cartels are not even a drop in the ocean compared to the lives lost in real wars waged for profit.
Let's see. The current Mexican drug war seems to have taken about 50k lives.
The Nicaraguan counter-revolution backed by the CIA took an estimated 29K lives.
The two seem comparable. And the comparison in this case is reasonable because the Mexican war stepped up when mercenaries who had fought in Central America joined the cartels.
This is true for a small % of the people. But if those people move over to cocaine or kidnapping or human trafficking, they will at least be in a smaller market. Their sociopathic tendencies will effect less people.
