Zimbabwe

[Christopher Browne]

On 9/21/06, Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Teddy David Mills wrote:
> > The move has resulted in slower browsing speeds for internet users.
> > "This is catastrophic as all legal Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
> > utilise TelOne for their outgoing bandwidth to the  World Wide Web as
> > well as for e-mail traffic," MWeb, the country's largest ISP, said in
> > a statement. "Thus all such ISPs have and are being affected by this
> > down time.
> > In short, this is causing an almost collapse of the Internet in Zimbabwe."

> Did anyone catch the reference to _LEGAL_ Internet service providers?
> I wonder what the illegal/underground ones are doing?

The SF show "Battlestar Galactica" had an episode this season on the
operation of a black market within their fleet.  Most interesting; it
started out with a "principled" (ergo, left-leaning, liberal)
politician deciding that as a problem was noticed, therefore the black
market must be eliminated.

Things fell to more of a "detente," by the end, which struck me as
being the right answer.

Black markets tend to arise when the "public" markets break down due
to regulations that enforce uneconomic behaviours.  The Soviet Union
saw the phenomenon for a number of reasons; when they did heavy
price-fixing, things squeezed to black markets in several directions:

1.  Goods that customers valued more than the fixed prices could allow
charging would disappear to the black market because better prices
could be had there;

2.  You're left with "public" stores filled with goods not very much
worth buying; those without the budget to buy things they want from
the black market would be stuck waiting in line for whatever was
underpriced there;

3.  Some goods would simply become publicly unavailable.  Automobiles
were exceedingly challenging to get, for instance.

We have never seen these phenomena here in Canada to any material
degree; we haven't seen prices fixed to a degree that would force
products out of stores, with cigarette smuggling being a near-example.
 What we see, instead, is black markets used to market products that
are outright illegal, such as drugs and prohibited weapons.

The economic tales seem to indicate that to the degree to which the
former Soviet Union did function, economically, the black market was
very likely in considerable service of that.  Attempts to squeeze it
out seem generally bad.  In the case of our black markets that are
primarily trading in illegal items, I suspect there's still some
ambiguity there.  The US "War on Drugs" doesn't seem to have worked
out terribly well.

In more "challenged economies," whether African, historical, or
fictional, seriously trying to eliminate black marks is probably a
very bad idea, in fact.
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