Free Market Fakes End Looting, Illegal Trafficking

Illegal trafficking in looted cultural artifacts is a serious problem - if you are an archeologist. Even if the artifact ends up in a museum where it is displayed and can be studied, looted artifacts basically loose all of their scientific value simply by being removed from the site. In situ they can be related to their physical and cultural context, and increase our understanding and appreciation for our common human origins. Ripped off, each is an isolated aesthetic object of no great scientific or cultural value - just home decor.

The motive for looting is profit. Archaeologists are understandably against this "free market" activity. Every issue of Archaeology magazine contains one or more articles educating the public about the harm illegal trafficking in looted artifacts does to our cultural heritage and advocating for stricter laws and greater enforcement.

Since this is a "free market" activity, the emergence of cheep, popular, transnational electronic commerce such as eBay was experienced by the archaeological community as a "collective nightmare", according to Charles Stanish, writing in Archaeology. Like drug smuggling, the middle men, who take the legal risk, have the connections, and put together the deal makes the profit. The looter, like the coca farmer, is at subsistence level. Each step along the line adds huge costs. While this trade was raveled by archeologist, for practical purposes it was confined largely to a few very high-end items or to low-end and localized flee markets.

But with the advent of eBay, the fear was that the middle man would be eliminated, looting would become more profitable for the actual looter, and the race would be on to hunt down and strip cultural sites of their artifacts - and their meaning and value to us all.

But the law of unintended consequences - or in this case, unforeseen consequences - took over. The looters found it a lot easier to market the crappy home made junk they had been selling to eco-tourists outside the cultural sites for years than to go out into the night looking for the real thing. Like the rube who buys a "hot" "gold" necklace on the street in New York, the eBay suckers snap up the fakes thinking they are getting the real, and illegal, deal. Since they are ripping off the touristas, not their fellow citizens, the authorities don't have the time to go after them, making it safe.The market for "truthy" artifacts not only keeps the looters from going after the real thing, they make more money and they are able to employ far more of their friends and relatives.

The unforeseen consequences don't stop there! Just as bad money drives out good, fake artifacts overwhelm the genuine articles. The few buyers who are discerning enough to identify and want the real thing now have a harder time figuring out what is real and what is not. Just as trust between buyer and seller is established by regulation in the legitimate marketplace, trust is impossible in the rapidly expanding, unregulated gray market. It is no longer possible for anyone other than an expert to tell what is and what isn't real, and it is no longer profitable for experts to help the collector out.

Yes, the dishonesty and deception of the free, unregulated market can serve a useful social purpose! My idea for the perfect archeological fake: Precolumbian Bongs! What a concept! See you on e-bay.

From the report Forging Ahead, or how I learned to stop worrying and love eBay by Charles Stanish published in Archaeology, May/June 2009.

The Death of a Dysfunctional Dogma

Alan Wolfe maintains, in The Future of Liberalism, that Hurricane Katrina has exposed the antistatism advocated by conservatives (and, need I add, libertarians) is a dysfunctional dogma. It tested the thesis, one of antistatism's central tenets, that private charities and small scale local action are best suited to delivering relief and supporting communities.

The disaster of conservatism's disaster response should be "viewed as a decisive event in the history of political philosophy," he writes. After Katrina, the relevant question is no longer whether or not we need strong government institutions, but how to best and most effectively utilize their power wisely.

In contratast to this dysfunctioanl dogma, Liberalism rejects ideology and may be thought of as "a set of dispositions" which include a strong preference for liberty and equality, and a realism that relies on rational deliberation and actual governance. By denying the reality of its abject failure, by clinging to dogma and ideology, conservatives have consigned themselves to long-term irrelevance, the proverbial dust-bin of history. The future belongs to liberalism.

Sayonara conservatism. Hasta la vista, baby.

From a review by Theo Anderson of Alan Wolfe's The Future of Liberalism, Knopf, 325 pp, $25.95. Review published in The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2009, p 110

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