This morning Tyler Cowen has a post up about his column in the NYTimes. That column is about this book on fugitives and life on the lam. The hook for Tyler and his libertarian followers is the drug angle. The libertarian fetish for drugs is comical at times. it really is hard to tell if people drawn to libertarianism come through the drug door or that people come to drug legalization through the libertarian door. maybe both just come through the divorced from reality door. Anyway, there’s this.

You may think of being on the run as a quandary for only a small group of recalcitrant, hardened criminals. But in her study of one Philadelphia neighborhood, Professor Goffman shows that it is a common way of life for many nonviolent Americans. These people often face charges related to possession or sale of small amounts of drugs, or offenses like hiding relatives from the law. Whatever the negative moral implications of such crimes, they don’t merit having one’s life ruined.

Whatever the merits of libertarianism, the obsession with drugs undermines their credibility, because it suggests they are not really serious.. People generally understand that drug addicts and their suppliers are bad people. Some addicts are just unlucky, but most are bums who would be bums without the drugs. The dealers are freeloaders who should be put to the sword. Dealing with them as we do may not be optimal, but romanticizing them is absurd.

That’s what you learn living in and around the ghetto. The people who come from outside, whether from the university, the media or social welfare bureaucracy, are terminally naive about life in the ghetto. The cops and bounty hunters are jaded for a reason. Their jobs require them to deal with this people in a sober-minded fashion. The others come in looking for facts and anecdotes to fill out their already written narratives about the imaginary life in the ghetto..

In another life, I made money repossessing cars. There are hundreds of cars in every city that are not technically stolen, but are treated as stolen by their owners. They can be rental cars that were never returned or used cars bought on payments that were never made. The owners will pay a bounty to tow truck operators and ambitious free lancers to recover them. I would imagine it is different in each city and different today than it was ages ago when I dabbled in it.

Back in the stone age before GPS and sat-nav, hiding a car was easy. The cops would not look for a stolen car. They don’t look for them now. They would rather march around in battle gear looking like fat storm troopers. A rental car that is not returned will never get on the stolen list anyway so that makes relying on the cops totally pointless. The agencies would hire former cops as security men who could get access to parking ticket computers and motor vehicle systems.

They give the repo guys the list of parking ticket addresses, the renters address and anything else they had on the car. The repo guy using just that and experience would find the car in a night. You jack the car and collect a fee. Guys who did it for a living would find a few cars a day sometimes. I knew a Puerto Rican who made a nice living this way. The cops would even use him to help on their cases as the guy was like a bloodhound. He could also steal anything that was not nailed down.

One of the first things you learn about the people absconding with rental cars or not paying their car payment is they know they are scumbags. They are not victims. They scammed the system for a free car, knowing they would most likely avoid the cops and get free use of a car for a month or two. Usually they put a woman up to fronting the money and signature. The girl would rent the car for the boy friend, who used it to peddle drugs or stolen goods. A lot of these cars ended up in drug cases.

In one case I recall, the car was found with two dead guys in the front seat. Someone in the backseat used a shotgun to relieve them of their brain matter. I assume it was a shotgun from the splatter, but the head explodes like a watermelon from point blank shots from high caliber handguns. It is called hydrostatic shock. The dash and windshield were covered in brains and bits of skull. Eventually they figured out the names of the corpses and both were fugitives.

That’s the thing about fugitives. There are a lot of them by choice. They fail to show up for court or they fail to show up at their parole meetings. The “minor drug offenders” are usually guys who pleaded down to possession and were sent to AA or NA as part of their deal. All they have to do is show up a meeting a week for a few months and turn in signed attendance forms. They blow it off and end up with a warrant. Again, these are not fallen angels.

That’s the other part of the drug obsession by libertarians that I find amusing. They think drug laws make people into criminals. Certainly some people fall into the drug game, but most of your dealers are criminals who like crime. If not for the drug game, they would be robbing houses or running scams. They like crime and drugs are a convenient way to indulge their wants. They get paid to do what they love, This last part gets at the naïveté of these guys.

Economists are often skeptical of drug laws, favoring alternatives like legalization, decriminalization, or a combination of legalization and high taxation, to discourage use. (In an essay titled “Prohibition vs. Legalization: Do Economists Reach a Conclusion on Drug Policy?” Mark Thornton, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, chronicles economists’ views of the war on drugs.) Drugs could be treated as more of a public health problem than a criminal matter.

It’s an urgent situation, because Professor Goffman’s book shows clearly that the microeconomics of a life on the run are grim indeed.

Life on the lam should be grim. No sane society wants their criminal fugitives to have it easy while on the run. That’s the whole point of the criminal justice system. The locals who are forced to tolerate these animals want the cops to scoop them up and take them away as quickly as possible. It is easy to romanticize the drug dealer when you’re living in cloistered, gated communities. Ask anyone in and around the ghetto, who is not in the game, and they will tell you a different set of stories.

Economist are often skeptical of drug laws because they have never known a drug dealer. Anyone who thinks the corner boys of West Baltimore are going to head off to college or get jobs at the local university once drugs are legal is not qualified to discuss the issue. The Gangster Disciples and Latin Kings are not turning into charities once heroine is legal. These people will find new crimes to commit. It is what they do. Legalizing drugs just moves the problem, the real problem, down the street.