Lessons From Qatar

The short and pithy response to idealistic anarchists and extreme libertarians used to be, "if you want to try life without government, move to Somalia." 

A world with minimal government is a nice pipe dream, but the state of nature looks more like Hobbs described it, where life is nasty, brutish and short, in a society that devolves into clans, tribes, and warlords, than it is an Eden-like paradise.

Qatar is another place that exemplifies the visions of a lot of the factions of the New Right. 

It offers "Flight 93ers" the strong man leadership that crushes liberals that they crave, treats women and outsiders poorly, and makes speaking ill of the nation or the Founding Fathers that were the ancestors of its ruling dynasty a crime.

It offers "Integralists" a society with strict, governmentally enforced religious values where the dominant religion guides policy and members of other religions are second class citizens.

It offers "National Conservatives" a society that is fervently anti-woke, with God in schools, and a monocultural society that provides all sorts of benefits to local citizens who are native speakers of the local language and treats everyone else as second class people (who aren't even second class citizens because they aren't citizens at all).

It offers "Red-Pilled Anarcho Bros" a society without the leveling blight of democracy with a government is highly responsive to corporate whims with almost no taxes or regulations of corporate economic conduct. Local men who are citizens are privileged at the expense of women and outsiders.

But, Qatar is not a positive role model that anyone should want to emulate in the United States.

Qatar is rich, although this is almost entirely due to its dumb luck to be situated in control of vast mineral wealth that no one knew it possessed when the country and its dynasty was established. 

This makes it possible for Qatar to ignore the economic pressures that shape a society that productive middle class and decentralized class of business owners exert in an economy based upon commerce and industry, instead of mineral wealth rents. Those pressures lead to a democratic, meritocratic, cosmopolitan society with more economic regulation and less regulation of people's personal lives. 

Without its oil and gas revenues, its migrant workers would all go home leaving it depopulated, its monarchy would have collapsed long ago, and Qatar would probably be a lot like Somalia and Yemen are today - war torn and impoverished. It might have become haven for bona fide pirates of the Persian Gulf.

Qatar must import 90% of its workforce because its own people are unwilling because they are too spoiled, or unable because they lack the skills and abilities they need, to generate economic value, apart from the wealth that flows from the natural resources it owns that is exploited with foreign labor; a wealth that the monarch shares with a small group of citizens (but one that is fast growing with fecundity due to the abundance the monarch shares) whom he treats like extended family.

For all that conservatives and libertarians and business people whine about the costs of taxes and complying with government regulations, the truth is that economies with high taxes and lots of government regulations are vastly more productive than those with minimal taxes and little government regulation.

Regulation advances public safety, public health, worker health and safety, and environmental quality, while minimizing economic exploitation, yet doesn't prevent advanced economies from being vastly more productive and prosperous than countries where business has a free hand to do as it wishes.

If you want an economy without workplace safety regulations, like the U.S. had in 1913, you aren't going to have an economy that adds value to natural resources the way that the U.S. economy of 2022 does. While regulators are criticized when they make missteps, their many quiet successes go unnoticed. But regulators are the intelligent designers of modern economies, and produce more benefits than costs the vast majority of the time.

The lack of government regulation and taxation of Qatar's economy, which is typical of Middle Eastern monarchies, strongly echoes Western societies in the mid- to late 1800s and early 1900s, in much the same way that their harsh criminal punishments, heavy public regulation of private morality, treatment of women, and recent abandonment of slavery does. Much of the Islamic world seems to be living the Victorian era a century and a half later. 

Even trends like the recent tendency of the Arab monarchies to build skyscrapers is happening in lock step with the parallel development of this trend in the early 20th century in major Western cities, where skyscrapers started to be built in 1884, reached a notable milestone with the Woolworth building in 1913, and culminated with the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building which were commenced before the Great Depression began and finished shortly after it struck riding on the inertia that the projects had already acquired. The engineers know a bit more and materials are better now than they were then, but the complex threads of economics and societal evolution seem to be guiding these societies down similar paths in the same sequences.

Maybe there really is just one path of progress and everybody's society has to walk it, admittedly in their own distinct way, to have a developed economy and a society in which a developed economy can thrive. 

If so, we can expect the Middle East and much of the rest of the Islamic world to undergo the economic, religious and cultural transformations similar to those that followed the Victorian era in England and the West in the decades to come.