Privatizing justice and rights produces disastrous economic and social outcomes.

Evidence

Successful market societies are not those in which everything can be bought and sold. If social life is to be acceptably harmonious and commodities efficiently produced and exchanged, the administration of justice, the protection of individual rights, the assignment of public offices, and the running of elections cannot be privatized, and the trade in them must be banned. Rights must apply universally, their enforcement unrelated to personal wealth. If these commodities are subject to commerce, the consequences are nefarious. Even the libertarian right would think twice before privatizing these goods. Yet if protection is privately traded, these goods do become private. Southern Italy appears to have fallen into that unfortunate category in which the liveliest markets are those which deal in the wrong commodities. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 27

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s earlier work on institutional failure and private enforcement: this is the normative counterpart to Milgrom’s private judges — when the wrong goods go private, development stalls.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the wrong commodities’ — a framework for analyzing which goods modern societies still wrongly privatize, using Southern Italy as the natural experiment.