The appropriately named Gawker website is carrying an article with the outrageous headline “Actually, Riots are Good: The Economic Case for Riots in Ferguson.” Author Matt Bruenig thinks riots can be good for imposing costs on racist government institutions, and gets out a calculator and tries to figure out just how economically effective a little rioting can be.
Thus far, the rioting question has been focused on whether it's good or bad, as if those are the only two answers. From an economic perspective, surely the question is whether the level of rioting is optimal: Do the potential benefits of Ferguson rioting as a police sanctioning tool outweigh its immediate wealth destruction? I suspect it does and, in fact, that the current rioting level is likely economically suboptimal.
Bruenig complains that the media lost its objectivity on property destruction:
The media reaction to the rioting has thus far been uniformly ridiculous. As much as we all love AutoZone and Doritos, hysterically sobbing at the sight of the former being burned and the latter being looted is a tad over the top. [And who in the media hysterically sobbed?]
A clip of bullets was unloaded into an unarmed black boy and then his killer was ushered through some sort of cop-loving kangaroo court, after all. Some charred car refreshers are hardly something to get worked up about in moments like these.
Even coverage that didn't exhibit Don Lemon levels of absurdity still endlessly bleated on about how the riots are obviously regrettable. Big time news outlets that generally abstain from telling you directly what to think have decided to make an exception for the rioting. They have discarded their usual straight face of objectivity to tell you that riots are definitely bad and that all right-thinking people should definitely be against them.
But is this really so? There is, of course, the historical case to be made for rioting: the past is replete with examples where rioting gets the goods. But there is also, I'd submit, an even more straightforward case for rioting: at the right levels, rioting is economically efficient.
Robby Soave at Reason found the whole argument was "laughably terrible" as it unfolded:
For starters, it assumes that riots "impose costs on state authorities." But the police aren't the ones getting their [stuff] destroyed; innocent, random store owners are. So that cost is imposed in an extremely indirect manner, if at all. [Italics his.]
In fact, what's to say this is a cost on the police, even indirectly? Do riots cause police departments to say, "Man, we have to police more cautiously and timidly"? Do they cause the store owners to demand less strident policing? Do they galvanize Americans into wanting a less active police force? I think you can argue persuasively in each of these cases the answer is no. It seems to me that if anything, rioting redirects people's sympathies away from the cause of rioters. Destroying other people's stuff is actually a great way to give the police greater license to commit abuses in the name of public safety.
