A warning to prohibitionists

This is true of booze, of drugs, of tobacco and, yes, jet engine parts:

Ryanair has found “fake parts” in two of its aircraft engines during scheduled maintenance checks, becoming the latest airline to be impacted by a brewing scandal.

The parts were discovered during assessment in Texas and Brazil over the past few months and have since been removed from the engines, the low-cost carrier’s chief executive Michael O’Leary told Bloomberg News.

It comes as the global aviation industry is grappling with a fake parts scandal that has left airlines and regulators scrambling to assess engines and trace equipment.

We do not, of course condone this. But we do know quite a bit about it as a result of having been out there in that international and global economy for all these decades.

The difficulty is that the nut, bolt or screw for a jet engine is worth 5x to 10x with the right piece of paper than it is without. Let’s not make the situation more complicated than that. It’s righteous that it should too, traceability of parts in something so complex, so horrendous in effects if failure occurs, is a very good idea indeed.

But, it’s always going to happen that people will try to trade across a 5x to 10x price difference. Note that this is not a result of markets or capitalism. This isn’t neoliberalism run riot - this is just what happens among humans. This also doesn’t mean that people who do even fake jet engine parts should not be righteously jugged, not that we should not investigate allegations of it - as here, allegations only so far.

What it does mean is that governments simply cannot go around creating 5x and 10x price differences as will be true of banning tobacco and so on. Because people simply will trade across those differences. As they do with drugs, at large scale, and as currently also does happen with both tobacco and booze.

With jet engines the consumers - the airlines - absolutely do not want fake parts at any price. For knowing use of them would likely violate both their insurances and also their licences. Now switch the model to one where consumers do desire the item on offer - drugs, booze, baccy. There is that demand, there is that profit margin, trade will happen across it.

This then being the message for the prohibitionists. Even if it were true that society would be better without these things - it wouldn’t - it still won’t work. And there’s absolutely no point at all in implementing a policy that won’t work. So, don’t.