We haven’t had a good Ron Paul post in a bit, so
In a YouTube video earlier this week, Paul suggested lawmakers consider issuing letters [of marque], which could relieve American naval ships from being the nation’s primary pirate responders — a free-market solution to make the high seas safer for cargo ships.
This would, of course, be Constitutional, since Congress has the power to “to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water.” How about a combination of Indian Ocean Cruise and Pirate Capturing Expedition? Carnival might be interested.
The Edge of the American West 
42 comments
April 15, 2009 at 3:14 pm
ari
You knew what you were doing, and yet you went and did it anyway. Madness, that’s all there is to it, sheer madness. Me? I’m heading for cover.
April 15, 2009 at 3:22 pm
ben wolfson
Are you kidding? Crazy? This is a fantatisc idea. Market the letters of marque primarily on right-wing blogs and the amount of online insanity is surely likely to go down.
April 15, 2009 at 3:22 pm
ben wolfson
Yes. Fantatisc.
April 15, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Vance
Forget Carnival — here’s your cruise line.
April 15, 2009 at 3:51 pm
kid bitzer
i dunno, ben. i hear they’re suspending the market to marque rule.
April 15, 2009 at 3:54 pm
silbey
You knew what you were doing, and yet you went and did it anyway. Madness, that’s all there is to it, sheer madness.
With malice aforethought, big guy, with malice aforethought.
amount of online insanity is surely likely to go down
Two words for you: satellite uplink.
Potential post from Pajamas Media:
“I’m stroking the trigger of my AR-15 carbine, here in the Indian Ocean….”
April 15, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Chris J
Yes, I’m sure there are vast sums to be made by high-tech, modern privateers scrambling for a chance to seize small, leaky, former fishing boats.
April 15, 2009 at 4:17 pm
wren
Nitpickers. Maybe corsairs aren’t the answer but what is? If you don’t have an alternative you should hold your fire. Me? I’ve got one. Let Peter Thiel and all the other Silicon Valley “winners” finance seasteads in the Indian Ocean. It would solve two problems at one time. The seasteaders would quickly realize how “free” they were back in Atherton. The pirates would finally understand the shallowness of their Galtian lifestyle.
April 15, 2009 at 4:35 pm
neil s
interesting proposal.
it involves the assumption of a lot of risk by the privateers, e.g. the risk of being tried criminally in the us or abroad for attacking the wrong people, the risk of death, and the risk of not catching any pirates. there for the bounties would likely have to be quite high, and the ships used by the privateers inexpensive and uninsured.
it also risks drawing in the us military, if media attention is paid to privateers who are captured by the pirates and the public wants the military to intervene and “bail out” the free market privateers.
there are administrative problems with determining when to pay the benefits, either upon conviction in a tribunal set up to determine guilt of piracy, or if the pirates are killed in action then upon some sort of proof of kill and proof that those killed were pirates. this, as well as convenience, would create problematic incentives for the privateers to kill first and ask questions later.
the likely heavy-handedness of privateers, as well as a very unappealing privateering tourism industry which might arise, which would make america look very barbaric abroad.
April 15, 2009 at 4:38 pm
kid bitzer
well, that’s the thing, chris. since pirate ships of today do not have vast stores of loot in their hold, there is really no intrinsic incentive for privateers to pursue them.
so instead, we would have to put bounties on pirates.
and how exactly would that work?
if you put bounties on ships, then you’ll just wind up buying up a lot of old beaters for inflated prices.
if you put bounties on young somali fishermen, then you’ll just re-open the triangle trade, without even decent prospects of rum. it’ll be like the glory days of guantanamo, when enterprising afghans could make a tidy sum just by turning in their business rivals to the gullible yanks.
so i think ron paul is going to have to put bounties on specific, named, individuals. you know: william kidd. edward teach. osama bin laden.
hey, wait a second. there already *is* a bounty out on that last guy. like, $50 million, plus another $2 million from the airline pilots association.
and yet, for some weird reason, the wonders of the market have not led any can-do rambos to go out on their own and hunt him down.
can that be true, ron paul? could it be that we offered a bounty, and no one came?
April 15, 2009 at 4:52 pm
fromlaurelstreet
the brilliant thinkers over at “the corner” have just the thing to cure what ails us:
“privatize the seas”
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2YyYWQ0ZTQwYjQzZTFiZGViMGUzZTZlOWY5ZDgxMTg=
April 15, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Colin
Vance is on the right track, though if I were bucklin’ swash I might rethink that guest speaker list just a little.
April 15, 2009 at 5:19 pm
ben
Two words for you: satellite uplink.
I meant after they got killed.
April 15, 2009 at 5:25 pm
kid bitzer
oddly enough, ‘swash’ is the verbal, ‘buckle’ (or ‘buckler’) the nominal component.
‘buckler’ as in small, one-handed shield (and then ‘buckle’ by back-formation). ‘swash’ as in swipe, wave, swing.
i think that makes it an anomalous coinage for english. usually the object would be the first element in the compound.
April 15, 2009 at 5:27 pm
dana
Swashing your buckle, you mean! (Literally: beating on your small shield with a sword to signify that you want to duel someone.)
I think this is a great proposal that could benefit the unemployed. (Cut loss? Cutlass and cut loose!)
April 15, 2009 at 5:28 pm
dana
and screw you, bitzer, for pwning me. walk the plank!
April 15, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Colin
pedants
April 15, 2009 at 5:36 pm
jeff
For a minute I had my Patrick O’Brian fantasies in full swing, and then Vance had to bring Karl Rove and Dick Morris into things and kid bitzer had to be all reality-based and, damn, I’ll just go read a book. _Letter of the Marque_, perhaps.
April 15, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Jonathan Dresner
Actually, when Daniel Pipes brought it up, I was under the impression that letters of marque would effectively be creating mercenary forces, which are illegal under international law.
No, I’m not sure how we’ve actually been justifying our heavy use of mercenary security forces in Iraq.
April 15, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Mike D.
In contrast, if these waters were privately owned, the owner would have a strong incentive to maximize the waters’ value since he would profit by doing so.
Since we all know that very little crime occurs on private property.
April 15, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Walt
The only crazy person here is you, silbey.
April 15, 2009 at 7:36 pm
neil s
“I have directed the [State] Department to work with shippers and the insurance industry to address gaps in their self-defence measures.”
quote from sec state clinton in bbc article here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8001102.stm
i know that is not exactly the topic of this thread, but i’d be interested in the posters and commenters view on self-defense measures (likely involving guns) by ships and their crews.
April 15, 2009 at 7:48 pm
MELISSA SPORE
The lament song of privateers by the great Stan Rodgers
God damn them all!
I was told we’d cruise the seas
For American gold we’d fire no guns, shed no tears
I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier
the last of Barrett’s privateers
April 15, 2009 at 8:02 pm
kid bitzer
well, i think there’d be a lot fewer columbine tragedies if all teachers were required to carry ship-based aegis-guided phalanx gatling guns.
preferably concealed carry.
April 15, 2009 at 8:11 pm
mike
That “the corner” article is tongue-in-cheek, right?
…right?
April 15, 2009 at 9:43 pm
Cryptic ned
i think that makes it an anomalous coinage for english. usually the object would be the first element in the compound.
So a swashbuckler is someone who swashes a buckler. This is not a unique word formation, but it’s odd.
Others:
turnkey
pickpocket
sawbones
lickspittle
killjoy
and then I thought “maybe there’s a word for this”. Here’s a, um, term paper describing the phenomenon.
April 15, 2009 at 10:24 pm
kid bitzer
yeah, the ‘verb-object’ compound does have other instances than ‘swashbuckler’. i still suspect that the ‘object-verb compound is more generative, e.g. ‘codebreaker’, ‘teadrinker’, etc.
part of what makes ‘swashbuckler’ even odder is that the original noun itself (buckler) ends in ‘-er’. that’s not an agentive suffix (so far as i know), any more than the ‘er’ in ‘hammer’. (in its ordinary sense, a hammer is not something that hams.)
anyhow, someone who breaks codes is a codebreaker, but the final ‘-er’ there *is* the agentive suffix which was not part of either of the formants. it’s tempting to parse ‘swashbuckler’ the same way, i.e. as terminating in an agentive ‘-er’ which was added onto the end of the verbal form. thus we get people understanding it as swashbuckler = someone who buckles swashes.
i think your examples of ‘verb-object’ compounds don’t contain any ending in ‘-er’. to make one, i suppose we’d have to find another noun ending ‘-er’, a verb that frequently accompanies it, and see how the compound sounds?
he is quite the handy lad at swinging a hammer; he’s a right swinghammer.
which obviously sounds lame, but perhaps there are others out there.
i’m heading off to be a burrowcomforter.
April 15, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Vance
Giving aid and comfort to burrows?
Verb-first is more common in the Romance languages, I think — It. cacciavite for screwdriver, etc.
April 16, 2009 at 3:27 am
ajay
Jonathan Dresner: I don’t think mercenaries are actually illegal under international law, but they aren’t entitled to the protections that the GC gives regular soldiers. But the GC and the UN define mercenaries as third-party nationals; most of the “contractors” in Iraq are US citizens and so don’t count as mercenaries. A Frenchman working for Blackwater would be a mercenary; an American working for Blackwater wouldn’t be.
The point about a letter of marque, as any O’Brien or Forester fan knows, is that it created a legal pirate – a privateer – who could prey on enemy trade without the fear of being strung up below the high tide mark by the enemy when they caught you. The LoM meant that instead you’d be imprisoned, just as if you were a regular naval officer. (Witness the scene in “Hornblower and the Hotspur”; Hornblower captures a French privateer and threatens to have him strung up as a pirate, because the privateer hasn’t got his letter of marque with him.)
Suggesting the use of LoMs against pirates is historically illiterate. You don’t need a LoM to go after pirates as a private citizen.
April 16, 2009 at 3:34 am
rea
I don’t see how the economics of privateering would work–it’s not like all those Somalis pirates have chests full of pieces of eight.
Moreover, privateering appears to have been outlawed more than a century ago by international treaty.
April 16, 2009 at 4:43 am
silbey
crazy person here is you, silbey
That’s “Dr. Crazy Person” to you, mister.
April 16, 2009 at 6:46 am
ajay
I don’t see how the economics of privateering would work–it’s not like all those Somalis pirates have chests full of pieces of eight.
Well, quite. You rob banks because that’s where the money is; you raid merchant ships because they’ve got stuff.
Moreover, privateering appears to have been outlawed more than a century ago by international treaty.
The Paris Declaration of 1856. Not signed, however, by the US, which continued to issue letters of marque until (amazingly) 1942, when one was issued to the Resolute, which was an airship.
April 16, 2009 at 8:28 am
tf smith
1941-42 – when the USN, USCG, Maritime Service, and Merchant Marine worked together to create an amazingly high tech weapon system to allow merchant ships to defend themselves:
The Naval Armed Guard.
An organization made up of sailors (ie, the USN; occasionally USCG) formed into small groups of 6-24 men, generally, led by a senior petty office, chief petty officer, and/or reservist ensign or jaygee, and including a mix of gunnery and signals specialists, who went aboard designated US-flag merchant shipping (ie, the Merchant Marine) and/or USG-owned but contract-operated shipping (ie, Maritime Service) and even US-owned but foreign-flagged (i.e. flag of convenience) and even foreign owned and flagged shipping (ie, the Allies) and manned the guns (USN property) and specialized signalling equipment (again, USN property) placed aboard said ships to allow them to defend themselves against attack and operated safely (when required) in convoy under naval escort.
Amazingly enough, this was accomplished by Congressional action (repeal of the Neutrality Act sections dealing with armed merchantment) and establishment of the War Shipping Administration (whose functions today are handled by the DOT/Maritime Administration.
Given the relative size of the US-flag merchant marine and the even smaller number of such vessels trading in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea, the requisite armed guard teams could be assmebled in the space of 30 days or less from reservists (including as many merchant mariners as possible) in the appropriate specialties, flown to the theater, and operating under the command of an 0-6 chopped to 5th Fleet.
Given the strong ties that exist today between the Navy, Military Sealift Command, Maritime Service, and the Merchant Marine, this would be a simple and straightforward solution. Naval escort of convoy of US flagged ships in these waters would eliminate any chances whatsoever of any future piracy aimed at US shipping.
April 16, 2009 at 11:41 am
Erik Lund
Arming merchant ships is an excellent idea –if the problem is a submarine menace. Submarines can carry few torpedoes, but many shells.
Piracy, on the other hand, flourished in the days when all merchant ships were armed. It might be worth a try on the basis that a maritime arms race increased the barriers to entry. As long as we’re on historic remedies, though, protection money works better.
And versus Stan Barrett, Arrogant Worms and “…see the Jolly Roger on Regina’s mighty shore.”
April 16, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Walt
I prefer to think of you as Crazy Person, Ph.D.
April 17, 2009 at 1:42 pm
tf smith
Actually, my read from Marcus Rediker is that Atlantic World piracy flourished in the Golden Age (late 1600s, early 1700s) because it was either state-sponsored (with a light veil of plausible deniability in the days of Drake et al) or because the pirate ships carried larger crews than the merchantmen, which, whether armed or not, had to devote most of their ship’s capacity to cargo, unlike the pirate ships, which could devote most of their capacity to pirates.
Now, if a US-flag container ship or tanker with a crew of 20 has a USN Armed Guard detachment of 6-24 sailors aboard (depending on the threat level), the combination of merchant mariners and sailors will outnumber and outgun the current level of threat (as seen in the Maersk Alabama incident, four men in a defective small boat with automatic rifles).
The “Naval Armed Guard” concept is not a particularly expensive option, in terms of manpower, equipment, or funds, especially given the realtively small number of US-flag merchant ships trading in these waters; even if the NAG parties are organized along the lines of a 24-strong team, with a third on watch at any given time and the remainder off-duty but ready to respond, here’s a simple disposition:
Put two men and a heavy weapon (a .50 caliber machine gun, for example) on the bow, two more and something similar astern, two men on the bridge (one sniper, one spotter), and a two man-patrol team (one sniper, one spotter) walking the decks, with support from the merchant mariners working topside as additional eyes and ears.
Given that practically all licensed USMM officers are ex-active duty and/or reservists of various stripes, they have experience with small arms, naval communications, and basic security procedures, as do many un-licensed personnel – and unlicensed personnel, even civilians, can be trained to handle small arms proficiently; the SIU provides firearms training at the Hall Center in Maryland, for example, up to and including rifle marksmanship.
Organize the 24-strong Navy AG team into three watches of eight each, one on deck, one on-duty but belowdecks, and one off-duty, and the result is three-eight hour watches per day; not a draining schedule.
Put the Navy personnel and weapons aboard at an obvious transition point (Suez to the north, Simonstown to the south, and somewhere (Vishnakpatam? Diego Garcia?) to the east or southeast…once the ship being guarded exits the theater, disembark the team and fly them back to Bahrein or wherever for a stand-down pending the next assignment – of, if the schedules work out, have them transition to an “in-bound” ship at the appropriate entry points into the theater.
Silver bullets are certainly an answer, but given the very small number of US-flagged ships in the theater, naval armed guards would probably be cheaper and would undoubtedly be a better use of naval reserve personnel on six-month ACDUTRAs then having the same personnel backfilling for AUS in Iraq, A-stan, etc.
April 18, 2009 at 11:10 am
Erik Lund
Let’s assume the strategic dialectic goes to the end. All merchant marines are armed to this level, or more, and the pirates have responded by escalating, to, say, war-surplus ATGM. We have the same problem, only with more explosions.
Take a halfway point: Americans are armed, pirates have escalated, other mechant marines have not. American countermeasures are useless, but American shipping is pricing itself out of the market.
Take a quarter-way point. Americans are armed, other merchant marines are not, pirates have not escalated. Piracy continues, but Americans are spared –for now.
Take the situation on land. As I read recent work on Tudor/Stuart piracy (N.A.M. Rodger, Susan Ronald, any amount of “coming of the civil war” stuff), one can as easily argue that piracy drove policy. If English coastal agencies cannot be prevented from piracy, the crown has little choice but to manage it. At the moment Somali coastal piracy flourishes in near-anarchy. Do we really want to force the higher level of organisation implied by armed escalation, and instaurate a pirate-state? Better that everyone who benefits from the current maritime regime spends to create a Somali regime that does so, too. (After all, the fact that Somalis see no downside to piracy is a problem in itself.)
April 18, 2009 at 1:11 pm
dana
One of the political bloggers had a map showing areas of piracy around the globe. Unsurprisingly, they’re active in areas where the land isn’t well governed. In areas with powerful navies and the ability to govern the seas, there’s almost no piracy.
Given that, I’m not sure arming the merchant marine is a good solution. One, this would mean that armed ships capable of blowing up other ships, from other ports, would be landing at our ports. Doesn’t this complicate shipping regulations? Second, it’s not just as simple as giving some sailors some guns; it’s closer to creating a bunch of private navies. And third, I’m not sure the merchant marine want arms aboard ship (they take up room that could be used for cargo, it makes it harder to train sailors); that’s traditionally been the job of someone’s navy. (I’m not sure about the Naval Armed Guard proposal.)
April 18, 2009 at 2:43 pm
TF Smith
Erik and Dana – I understand your points, but with respect, you are unaware of the roles and missions of the USMM – given the realities of US Merchant Marine, there is no possibility of “American shipping is pricing itself out of the market” – that happened a long time ago.
Other than what is required to service the Jones Act routes, the only US-flag shipping moving cargo anywhere in the world today is moving USG (either DoD or US AID) cargo; there is no “private” cargo that is in danger of being lost to cheaper foreign shipping. It left US lines a long, long time ago.
My point is the only true strategic issue for the United States in the current situation is for the US Navy (and USCG) to protect US-flag shipping (unless any other nations are willing to put their merchantmen and naval forces under US command for the duration; if not, too bad for them). The NAG, with naval escort-of-convoy as a fall back response to any potential escalation, addresses that issue relatively simply and economically. Invading Somalia to “create a Somali regime” to prevent piracy originating from Somali ports would not be simple, as witness the results of the last US expeditionary force in Somalia.
Mogadishu is not a liberty port anyone in American uniform would look forward to, and given the current demands on the ground forces, opening a new front in Southwest Asia/Northeast Africa would be insanity of the Bush/Cheney level.
A few hundred sailors and coasties organized into NAGs, as part of 5th Fleet’s on-going mission, is doable; deploying a joint expeditionary force strong enough to control the Somali coastline is not anywhere close to the realm of possibility today or anytime soon…if ever.
April 21, 2009 at 10:35 am
tom spisak
indeed, an interesting proposal
too bad it violates the 1856 Declaration of Paris (to which the US became a party after 1865)
April 21, 2009 at 11:57 am
thegreatgatsby
Where are Errol Flynn and Bert Lancaster when you need them?
April 23, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Erik Lund
Still dead.
But Zombie Errol Flynn can do it!