Legal prohibitions create supervised illegal markets the state profits from
Evidence
Delinquency, controlled illegality, is an agent for the illegality of the dominant groups. The setting up of prostitution networks in the nineteenth century is characteristic in this respect: police checks and checks on the prostitutes’ health, their regular stay in prison, the large-scale organization of the maisons closes, or brothels, the strict hierarchy that was maintained in the prostitution milieu, its control by delinquent-informers, all this made it possible to canalize and to recover by a whole series of intermediaries the enormous profits from a sexual pleasure that an ever-more insistent everyday moralization condemned to semi-clandestinity and naturally made expensive; in setting up a price for pleasure, in creating a profit from repressed sexuality and in collecting this profit, the delinquent milieu was in complicity with a self-interested puritanism: an illicit fiscal agent operating over illegal practices. Arms trafficking, the illegal sale of alcohol in prohibition countries, or more recently drug trafficking show a similar functioning of this ‘useful delinquency’: the existence of a legal prohibition creates around it a field of illegal practices, which one manages to supervise, while extracting from it an illicit profit through elements, themselves illegal, but rendered manipulable by their organization in delinquency. This organization is an instrument for administering and exploiting illegalities. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 429
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to modern moral panics and vice law: prohibition generates the very delinquency that justifies and funds continued policing — a structural irony parallel to the self-reinforcing surveillance loop in the reader’s Orwell analysis. — connects to: Secret-discount auctions create a marketable information commodity for corrupt officials; States make markets as much as markets determine states — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 266; Price fixing among small-market-share firms should not be per se illegal — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1145 (+2 more)
- SEED: Article angle: prohibition of vice creates supervised black markets that extract profit for the dominant class — a pattern from 19th-century brothels to modern drug enforcement.