I never got into HBO’s Deadwood, but I may have to revisit it after reading Eric Crampton’s Public Choice Television:
Deadwood is the best television series I’ve seen. I’m a big fan of Joss Whedon’s work, but this surpasses it. Read Mancur Olson on stationary and roving bandits, then read some Tullock [founder of public choice theory], then watch the show.Al Swearengen, who owns the town’s bar and first brothel, essentially serves as Olson’s permanent bandit. Self-interest rules and he’s not above sending out a thieving party to rob a wagon coming into town if it suits him. But, he’s far more a permanent bandit. His success depends on the security of the gold claims, constraining rivals like the Hearst combine, on the growth and prosperity of the town, on keeping the hooples from acting up, and on ensuring that the rent-seekers from Yankton don’t take everything during the town’s accession to the Union. Swearengen invests in public goods, like getting a smallpox vaccine into town when a plague happens along. Cy Tolliver, a roving bandit, makes no such investments: instead, he extracts as much as he can as quickly as he can and works to set up the Hearst interests in place of Swearengen, calculating that life as lap-dog to Hearst is more lucrative than that of roving bandit in opposition to Swearengen.
Deadwood takes anarchy seriously. There’s no backdrop of the state to provide law and order, only the threat of possible future accession to the Union. In The Sopranos, by contrast, Tony is only able to operate because of the existence of the State. He earns rents due to his willingness to use violence and cut around the law; absent the law, he’d not exist. He’d be out-competed on every margin of his business. Without state prohibitions on gambling, what would happen to his numbers rackets? Normal rate of return only. Without state protections of unions, what would happen to his pension fund rackets and no-work contracts? Gone. Al Swearengen thrives because of the absence of government. Town needs law and order? Hire a sheriff who’s beholden to nobody and who can’t be bought. Hiring a corrupt sherrif would have you in a perpetual bidding war with Cy Tolliver; hiring one instead that cares about the best interest of the town ensures prosperity where you’re the residual claimant. Doc Cochran feels for the town and cares about what’s best, but Al gets the job done, expecting (and generally receiving) naught but the derision of the soft-hearted. The hoople mob cannot be trusted to govern itself; it needs to be guided lest it fall victim to Cy’s rumour-mongering on behalf of Hearst.
The Wikipedia entry for Mancur Olson explains his notion of stationary versus roving bandits:
In his final book, Power and Prosperity, Olson distinguished between the economic effects of different types of government, in particular, tyranny, anarchy and democracy. Olson argued that a “roving bandit” (under anarchy) has an incentive only to steal and destroy, whilst a “stationary bandit” (a tyrant) has an incentive to encourage a degree of economic success, since he will expect to be in power long enough to take a share of it. The stationary bandit thereby takes on the primordial function of government — protection of his citizens and property against roving bandits. Olson saw in the move from roving bandits to stationary bandits the seeds of civilization, paving the way for democracy, which improves incentives for good government by more closely aligning it with the wishes of the population.
For more on Tullock and public choice theory, I recommend The Fundamentals of Rent-Seeking and the Wikipedio entry on Public choice theory.