Great news for liberty lovers! Somalia anarchy becoming more peaceful.

[gavino]

Does anybody besides me get real fidgety when Somalia is held up as a shining example of a Libertopia?

I haven't visited there.  Have absolutely no idea if it's hell on earth or the next Paradise.  But the Somalian Tourist Bureau will surely have a hard row to hoe.  Yeah, yeah, ok, sure, maybe it's just because the press decided that "War-Torn" would be the obligatory adjective they'd always insert before "Somalia".  And maybe Somalia is ten times better than any of it's neighbors-- so what, they're ALL still about 100 times worse off than we are here in the U.S.

It seems to me that freedom lovers are wriggling down further into a "nut-job" pigeon hole when they talk about Somalian anarchy as a good thing.

[Phuket]

You're right in the sense that it's too early to hold Somalia up as a model of economic growth under anarchy. On the other hand, the anarchy is at a higher level now, so I would expect the economic growth to be considerably faster from this point forward.

What is more obvious at this point is that Somalia is a shining example of the superior defensive military potential of a stateless society, having driven out the anti-freedom proxies (ARPCT warlords) funded by the most powerful government in history.

Something else that will become more and more obvious is that security in the anarchic areas is likely to get better and better in the absence of a taxing "authority," making the Transitional Federal Government, which is backed by the UN, the EU, and now the US and is holed up in the town of Baidoa, look more and more ridiculous and irrelevant, until such time as the TFG will simply be dissolved. This is going to be a colossal embarrassment for the UN/EU/US, which have placed enormous bets on the TFG.

All of these factors will embolden other liberation movements around the world, first and foremost in Africa and the Middle East, where states are already embattled and weak, while promoting the idea of voluntarily-funded court-and-militia groups within those movements.

By the way, many of the courts in Somalia engage in selective application of sharia law (probably the less draconian aspects of it) in combination with their customary clan law. So, as other states collapse in domino fashion, we'll probably see similar experimentation in privatized law.