You talk about sovereignity, but it would have been nice if Angola had true sovereignity when it really mattered: i.e., 1975. To quote the NYT:

Other diplomats and analysts say Angola’s ruling party is still trying to get on its feet after a civil war that raged almost nonstop from 1975, when Angola gained independence from Portugal, until mid-2002.

And it was a pretty nasty civil war, with lots and lots of interference from outside powers such as the U.S.S.R, Cuba, the United States and South Africa. Of course it’s going to affect the country, with the educated elite leaving the country if they could help it. Feel wrathful if you like to the kleptocracy, but please don’t forget how kleptocrats get into power into the first place. It’s like a doctor who diagnoses lung cancer but forgets to investigate the patient’s pack-a-day addiction to the ciggies.

What recommendations can I give? Bugger all, apart from forebearing to ignore “inconvenient” facts on the case. I do like the idea of freezing bank accounts for the thieves, and even locking them up when they appear, briefcase in hand. The problem is that you have to make the Swiss do that, and they may not like this invasion of their – “ahem” – sovereignity.

Poor Angola. They’re less fortunate than East Timor – another ex-Portugal colony with sovereignity interrupted (this time, thanks to the Indonesians). At least ET is fortunate to be in Australia’s sphere of influence; we’ve got an army there at the moment.

Somalia has markets only in a minimal, accidental
sense. Look how do you imagine things work in Somalia?
Do you think it’s organized around economic entrepreneurs?
It’s organized around gangs. It’s organized around
warlords who excel at fighting and dominating and
nothing much else. What’s their reaction to economic
activity in their midst? They want their cut; in fact
they want all the money. They take for themselves
everything of value that they perceive. It’s a horribly
anti-market situation.

Markets do happen by themselves because they are natural
human activity. Unfortunately tyranny is also a natural
human activity. When I speak of “free markets” its implied
that there is a government and a society that has an ideology
of markets. Societies that deliberately support, encourage,
and organize themselves around them. That’s what the
United States is. That’s what the british empire was and is.
That’s where the modern world came from.

“Free markets” aren’t something that develop in the absence
of government. They need strong governments. They need,
to be even more specific, strong goverments that go out of
their way to encourage and support free markets.

Unfortunately such a posture isn’t the easist thing for
a government to maintain. Unless there’s a popular ideology
to support it, the more natural reaction of a government
to economic activity in their midst is:

“They want their cut; in fact they want all the money.”

Or in a word: africa.

The other end of the spectrum, and it is a spectrum not a pair of magnetic poles, are the functionally socialist oligarchies and dictatorships. They too destroy human rights for all the reasons you mentioned.

In the vast middle are states like the USA, Japan, Brazil, Finland, and India. Their regulated markets stand beside their governments but are, to differing degrees, independent from them. The state protects people from the market, and the market protects people from the state. Within a national context, that is the only environment in which human rights have any meaning.

The international market does not depend on states. It is the freest market in the world.

Angola’s problems do not arise from a surplus of state power, but from a deficit thereof. Nationally, they are plagued by entrepreneurs. Internationally, those same entrepreneurs operate in a virtually unregulated market. Any country which refuses their oil on the grounds that it was “stolen” is only hurting itself. Angola’s oilmen will find other buyers. Any country which punishes companies for buying Angolan oil is only hurting itself. Those companies will find somewhere else to incorporate.

Only a stronger Angolan government will help the people of Angola, and only the people of Angola can create one. Enlightened colonialism, though martinwiener’s questions are quite apropos, is not a permanent solution. Denying sovereignty destroys the only chance the third world has to find political rather than economic legitimacy… and is no solution at all.

There are two lines of reasoning for believing that
free markets are coupled with human rights. One is
to empirically observe you never find states that
both lack free markets and respect human rights.

The second is to explore as a matter of logic why that
would be the case. That alternative to markets is ownership
by the state. This is what, I think, in all cases what
other economic ideologies boil down to. In most of human
history this has been the dominant ideology, limited
free markets only emerged in those circumstances where
sectors of these economies escaped from complete control
because of practical limitations on the ability of the
state to control everything — certainly not any lack
of desire.

The state, or its rulers, owning the economy goes
hand and hand with the state owning the people, which
naturally couples with an anti-human rights attitude.

Even if we might imagine a state that is both throughly
anti-market and an enthusiastic advocate of human rights,
by the same logic we should suspect that such a situation
would be unstable and not last long because there is no
counterforce to maintain those human rights. All power is
in the hands of the rulers. In the first context
where those human rights become inconvenient to the powers
that be — and we can easily imagine a scenario involving
criticsm of the dominant ideology — they’re likely to be
curtailed.

Those legal hurdles you’re jumping to transfer the car are only meaningful because the car is property. It is owned. It is titled and maintained, indeed it exists, solely for the use and benefit of specific people. Anybody else using that car must have its owners’ permission, probably in a legally binding form should they run afoul of law enforcement, or they will find themselves treated as criminals.

Libertarians and other free-market theorists prefer a broader defintiion of property. They include a category that I shall call “resources”: The land, minerals and water (and oil) below, the air above, the living people, plants, and wildlife. The capitalist, and the lawmaker, understand situations best when resources have owners, but that distinction is weak until the resource becomes a commodity. Water in a stream flows over my property. Water in a jar belongs to me.

Western Civilization has, for at least three centuries, strived to make commodities — to make property — out of everything. Functionally, a massive legal framework has been constructed around the ancient divine right of warlords: If you conquer it, you are its master and may do with it as you please. Today we arrange such transfers by signature rather than by sword, and refer to conquerors as “owners”.

Angola’s elites are not thieves, they are 21st century warlords. Although corporations may own the platforms which pump the oil, the tankers which carry it, and the refineries which process it… the elites own the land on which the platforms sit, the soil in which the oil rests, and the human beings who extract it.

A stream of free people flows over our planet. People within my conquered nation belong to me.

Should politicians or pundits declare “That oil belongs to the people of Angola!” they will be making a moot point. If oil is a commodity controlled by the people of Angola, “The people of Angola” is a commodity controlled by the elites. Divine right only applies to the unconquered conqueror, ownership rights only apply to the unowned owner…

…and human rights are fundamentally at odds with free market capitalism. And more pragmatically, no international law will ever address the former at the cost of the latter.