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The Humanity and Resilience of Commerce
by Charles H. Featherstone
by Charles H. Featherstone
I saw the most heartening thing on Tuesday morning as Jennifer and
I were riding through the brick and stucco Tativille that is the U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office and Federal Courthouse complex here in Alexandria. It was
the kind of thing that renews my faith in human ingenuity and the human spirit.
In short, I saw commerce - of the unlicensed, and therefore
"illegal," kind.
No, not drug dealing or anything like that. There's a lot of
construction going on, tall brick buildings going up, filling up the muddy lots
in-between expensive condos and federal office buildings. And where there's
construction, there's usually a migrant workforce, busy setting concrete and
laying bricks and hanging drywall and connecting pipe and whatever else workers
of the construction trades do. And despite the fact that the buildings going up
are very likely a closely monitored federal project (with various and sundry
set-asides and carve-outs for favored contractors and legal stipulations that
all workers be citizens or at least legal residents), no doubt some of those
workers are the undocumented kind.
Some might call them illegal, but when should honest work - or an
honest worker - ever be illegal?
But that isn't what I saw either. As we turned right off a great,
big oval roundabout, Jen and I passed a small woman, who appeared (at first
glance) to be from Mexico or Central America, selling food out of a cooler in
the back of her minivan. (Within spitting distance of the same federal
courthouse where John Walker Lindh and Zacharrias Mussaoui faced their juries
and where Judith Miller cooled her heels.) Or at least it appeared to be
selling. I didn't stop to make an offer to buy anything. She may have been
giving her food away, brought a late breakfast or early lunch to her husband or
brother and his coworkers at the job site. But I don't think so. There was an
awful lot of cooler in the back of her minivan, more than you'd need if you
merely bringing someone you loved lunch.
If she was selling food, most likely she didn't have a business
license. And good for her!
Governments the world over strive to stifle one of the most basic
human impulses - to earn a living through making and selling - by licensing
sellers and regulating business. Ostensibly, most governments say they do this
to protect the health and safety of ordinary citizens, to keep them from fraud
and abuse. After all, the woman may be selling poisoned empanadas! Or she may
take her customers' money and then run away!
But the reality is that governments want to control who is in
business and how business is done. At best, governments want to be able to
count everyone who trades (and all their transactions) in order to tax them,
which is why government data is never as innocent as it seems. At worst,
governments want to make sure that no one can "make a buck" without first
cutting those who run the state in on a share. Or, the managers of the state
use their monopoly power to make sure only their friends can make "an honest
profit."
The old core of Jeddah, called Balad, is full of such "illegal"
businesses, men and women (mostly from Africa) in Saudi Arabia sell wares
brought from home. Some stay beyond the expiration of pilgrimage visas, and
some sneak into the country solely to do business. When I was in Jeddah, I
bought two dashikis from a Senegalese woman who had spread her clothes out on a
giant mat in a dark corner of a side alley, hiding - like many of the Africans
- from the police, who have taken to making fairly frequent sweeps of the
country's less reputable districts to arrest just such people. It's a pity. I
can understand not wanting your country full of people who are there "in
violation of the law" by entering without a visa or staying past the expiration
of a visa, but what Saudi is going to sell dashikis in a dark corner of Balad?
And what American is going to sell good home cooking to Latin
American construction workers building a new annex to the Patent Office?
Even Saudis skirt the law in their own country. The big masjid in
Rehab district, where I lived, would play host to a tiny market every night
after the 'isha prayer - the last prayer of the day - with businessmen and
women selling cheap textiles, appliances, pots, pans, dishes, fruits and
vegetables and keeping careful eyes out for the police, who (strangely enough)
never wandered by. And Balad is, in fact, full of Saudis making and selling,
everything from incense to gold to lingerie. Some do very well, and some just
barely get by. That is the way of things.
Commerce is an essential human activity, and by that, I mean that
making things, buying things, and selling things are essential to our very
humanity. Trade is one of the things that makes us human. Governments have
tried through history to eliminate, regulate and prevent trade, but that
doesn't stop it. Where there is a need - base or noble, depraved or innocent -
it will be filled. Because that is one of the things human beings do. There is
simply no way around it.
Honest labor, honest trade, makes everyone richer. Was I defrauded
by the woman who sold me the dashikis? I still have them, more than two years
after I bought them, and the Ghanaians at my church think them very fetching.
If anything, I defrauded the green grocer at the masjid one evening when I
insisted on paying him five Saudi riyals (about $1.30) for three tomatoes when
that was the price he was asking for an entire box - a box I did not need and
could not use.
The only party worse for wear is the state, which did not tax those
tomatoes, or those dashikis, or very likely the lunches served to the
construction workers. Now, Saudi Arabia doesn't tax its businessmen and women
much, but that doesn't stop the kingdom from imposing license fees and some
pretty silly regulations (like what you are allowed to call your business).
It's why so many work "illegally" to begin with. (And why you shouldn't trust
any published Saudi "unemployment" figures.)
I do not like the words "illegal business." No honest work - work
that doesn't defraud, harm or coerce- should ever be "illegal." No one seeking
to make an honest living by selling a good or providing a service should ever
have to get the state's permission to do business. That just feels so wrong, so
inhuman.
You want an illegal activity? Government. Which of us would
voluntarily wander a dark alley, or saddle on up to the tailgate of an
automobile, and pay for that?
June 28, 2006
Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is an itinerant freelance
editor who currently lives in Alexandria, Virginia. He and his wife are
preparing to start seminary in Chicago in September.
Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com
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