Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How To Take It Back

by Oliver Bullough

Stable government aligns the interests of the strong and the weak, since they both want to see everyone get wealthy. The weak want to be wealthy for their own sake, while the strong want the weak to be wealthy, so they can take more from them as taxes. Olson used the parallel of a mafia protection racket. If the mafia’s grip on a community is complete there will be essentially no crime, since it is in the boss’ interests for local businesses to make as much money as possible, so he can extort proportionately as much money as possible from them. Crime, for a society, is an unproductive activity that forces people to waste money on guards and fences and locks. It is in all our interests to be governed. But Olson had a caveat: the argument only works if everyone is thinking in the long term. Moneyland turns his calculation on its head. Because its citizens are able to keep their assets outside the communities they steal them from, they don’t care what happens in the long term. The more they steal now, the more they and their children get to keep. In fact, they make money from instability: the more disputes there are, the more money there is for them to cream off. These ‘offshore bandits’ combine the worst features of the old roving bandits with the worst features of their stationary successors. Thanks to the magic of the modern financial system and the anonymity provided by offshore jurisdictions that accept money whatever its provenance, they are oppressing their subjects wi...