This weekend, CEI co-hosted the conference, “Empowering
Green Bureaucrats: How Global Environmental Treaties Threaten National
Sovereignty and Hurt the World’s Poor,” with Universidad
Francisco Marroquín. But first, CEI President Fred Smith spoke on how the
market can help preserve archaeological treasures, at the conference, “Human
Nature: Destructive or Creative?” hosted by UFM’s Center for the Study of Public Decisions
(CADEP).
Governments, Fred noted, have not done a very good job of
protecting nations’ archaeological treasures. The problem is what he termed an
“antiquities commons”—the fact that because no one is allowed to own what are
considered cultural artifacts, it is very difficult to ascribe value to those
artifacts. Thus, they are left to the goodwill of civil servants. Because there
is no incentive for these civil servants to care for these cultural goods—other
than the intangible desire to do a good job—the cultural goods’ fate is left
too uncertain. “There are Mother Theresas in the world, but experience tells us
that there aren’t that many Mother Theresas,” said Fred.
“The language in this area is poison,” he noted, since the people who do the
actual digging are denounced as “looters.” Yet exploratory entrepreneurship is
what’s needed. Unless, things change, “collectors are going to cease to exist.”
And it is collectors who can capitalize archaeological ventures. Moreover, if
prices are allowed to function, “The rich collectors of archaeological
treasures act like oysters. They sift out the detritus” and give value to these
treasures. Imagine if coffee were valued the way archaeological treasures are
valued now—by not letting it be exported. Here, noted Fred, the Biblical parable
about the talents is apropos. You gain nothing by burying something and leaving
it in the ground.
Yet there are other problems with the archaeological commons, and here Gareth
Harding’s “tragedy of the commons” is instructive. In the political world,
noted Fred, protecting pasture competes with other priorities. Private property
owners have the proper incentives to give the proper amount of protection. The
resource adequacy question is resolved in the private case, less so in the
political case, in which opportunities for rent-seeking and corruption arise.
Citing Louisiana (“We don’t tolerate corruption; we insist on it!), Fred noted
how corruption pervades all societies. However, “In the private sector it’s
very hard to have corruption within your land because it’s very hard to cheat
yourself.”
In the public sphere, on the other hand, this competition
over tradeoffs among various players—none of whose claims trump the
others—creates the conflicts that give rise to corruption and rent-seeking. A
pasture, for example, can be used for many things—grazing, recreation.
How do you resolve this? In the political process you have
the machinations” of bureaucrats and politics. In the private sphere, these
conflicts are avoided.
What are the incentives for political civil servants to use
resources the best they can?
To do a good job, but that’s no guarantee.
In the private world, you have that, plus what is called the
residual claimant status – the benefits accrue to you.
Complete political management of cultural goods, Fred
concluded, would look very much like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in
which the Ark of the Covenant gets sealed in a crate and stored in a government
warehouse.
During the question-and-answer section, an audience member
asked Fred if he could provide an example in which markets have protected
cultural artifacts. He noted that a good parallel is the art market. Today,
there is no example of markets protecting cultural artifacts because that
market is outlawed. In fact, this has created a black market in antiquities
which does lead to looting of arch treasures. The worst thing today is the inability
to experiment. After all, you don’t move public policy forward by arriving at
perfect solutions, “you experiment.”
-- Ivan Osorio
