Bastiat’s Bastions

Lob STER WARS

On a small island off of the coast of Maine, lobstermen are shooting at each other (Lobster wars rock remote Maine island, Clarke Canfield, Associated Press Writer).  Much like urban gangbangers, they are fighting over profitable territory.  And just like their urban counterparts, the territory under dispute is “un-ownable” or for the lobstermen, un-ownable under current state laws.  But, just as with the gangbangers, they are enforcing their property rights themselves.  With both street territory and fishing territory, agreement as to ownership or property rights reduces conflict and violence. 

When property rights are under dispute, conflicts arise.  When property rights are not enforced by a more powerful authority, such as the state, these conflicts are not settled in courts with lawyers and judges, but in the streets or the seas with AK-47s or 12-guage shotguns.  This is especially costly in human lives.  It also causes people to invest in weapons and armor and shooting skills rather than in boats and fishing skills. 

The violence in the Maine lobster fisheries is nothing new.  J.M. Acheson (Capturing the Commons: Devising Institutions to Manage the Maine Lobster Fishery, 2003) discusses how gangs of Maine lobster fishermen restrict access to what they consider their territory by cutting lobster trap lines, so that they cannot be retrieved.  Ahceson notes that in areas where gangs defend their territory, the lobsters were bigger and more pounds of lobsters were caught per trap.

Property rights are the rules of the game, telling us who gets to make what decisions in what circumstances.  Different property rights result in different outcomes.  Certain property rights regimes allow who ever gets there first to rule.  For instance, open access fisheries where the fish are considered private property only after being caught, can have disastrous results.  Think for a moment about a population of fish where anyone can take whatever fish they can catch.  As long as the fish can be sold for more than it costs to catch the fish, a profit is available to fishermen, more people become fishermen, prices of fish drop and costs to fishing rise.  As more people turn to fishing and total fishing effort intensifies, the population of fish drops.  This continues until the prices drop far enough and the costs to the fishermen rise enough, that it is no longer more profitable than other ventures for these fishermen and the number of fishermen levels off. 

There is just one problem with all of this.  The fishermen, as individuals, do not bear all of the costs of their actions.  There are two distinct cost categories that we should recognize. 

One of these costs is the cost of catching or harvesting the fish.  These costs are born completely by the individual fishermen.  This includes not only their fuel, boat, and fishing gear, but also the cost of their time spent fishing.

Another cost of catching or harvesting fish is the cost of reduced populations in the future.  When the future populations of the fish drop, it becomes more costly to catch the same amount of fish.  This cost from increased future scarcity is sometimes called “scarcity costs.”  In the case of open access fisheries, this scarcity cost from of a reduced future population is borne by all of the fishermen, as a group–it is shared, so that each fisherman only faces a small part of their own costs.  This also means that all of them face costs imposed on them by the rest.

What happens when costs are borne individually is that the action is only undertaken when the benefits of the action exceed the costs.  But when someone bears only a portion of the costs of their actions, they do more of that action than they would if they bore the entire costs.   So, when fishermen harvest so much that the fish population decreases, no fisherman connects their fishing activity this year with the falling fish population and the rising difficulty of catching fish next year.  Also, each fisherman recognizes that even if he reduces his fishing this year to make fishing more sustainable, other fishermen will just catch what he did not, nullifying his individual efforts toward sustainability.  Under these circumstances, no fisherman has an incentive to cut back on fishing, and the population of fish dwindles.

While the defense of territory by these lobster gangs increases the incomes of lobstermen and moves lobster fishing toward sustainability, it could be pushed even further toward sustainability and the level of violence and destruction of traps could be brought down if Maine would follow something that we do in Louisiana with oyster production.  Louisiana leases areas to oystermen, establishing state recognized property rights.  While the state cannot always be there to enforce leases rights against encroachment (and theft), the oystermen are backed up by the state.  Anyone caught tampering with oysters on a leased bed face state-enforced penalties.  While oystermen do often have to protect their own property, they clearly have an advantage by being backed up by game wardens, sheriffs, and the courts.  They do not have to point guns as much as they would if they had no recognized claim. 

-MC

James Glassman has this really insightful article on economic stimulus in the March issue (now online) of Commentary magazine (at commentarymagazine.com).  Readers of Bastiat’s Bastions will note that Mr. Glassman is also a fan of Bastiat and references the same story “What is seen and what is unseen,” that we have mentioned here repeatedly, starting with the first post here in January of 2006.

-MC

Economists look at a lot of numbers measuring economic activity. Good economists always remember what the numbers mean and what is ultimately important, what the ends are for people and what are merely means.

Right now, we are in the midst of a recession—a recession that looks to be quite serious. We see thousands of people losing their jobs, and when people lose their jobs, they lose their sources of income, lose their control over resources and stop being financially self sufficient, becoming someone for others to take care of. This is cause for despair for some, and true mental depression for others. Recently it was reported on the news that a man in California killed his wife, his five children and himself after becoming distraught over losing his job. That is depression.

To deal with this recession or depression or whatever term you chose to describe the downturn we are facing, the Democratic Congress has devised an “economic stimulus” plan that will push the currently large deficit up by more than 800 billion dollars. Surely, 800 billion dollars will put many people to work. The real question though, is “what will we buy when we auction away 800 billion dollars plus interest of our future?

The question of what we will be buying seems to be of little interest to President Obama and his party as he urges all haste in passing the stimulus package. Here is why such a question must be asked: It is not jobs that people really need, rather, it is the ability to buy things that is crucial. If the new jobs are not producing goods and services that people want with this stimulus package, we are just giving people money to buy but with no extra goods being produced, and all we will have done is increased the competition or the bidding war for the same old goods, driving prices for those goods ever higher.

In this story from CNN by Peter Valdes-Dapena, there are two proposals specifically designed to help out the ailing auto industry. One proposal is being pushed by Sen. Diane Feinstein, D.-Calif to not only help the auto makers, but also help the environment, or at least those are her stated intentions. The plan is to give buyers of new and more environmentally friendly vehicles a governmentally financed rebate if the dealer certifies that the buyer traded in their old gas guzzler and that their old car would be scrapped instead of being resold. To keep the dealers honest, the car’s VIN number would be tracked to make sure it did not show up in the used car market.

While there may be environmental benefits to Feinstein’s plan, the economic benefits are doubtful. Feinstein’s plan would cause cars to be destroyed so as not to compete with new cars and bring their resale value down. Think about what is really going on. Cars that still work, that still have value, would be scrapped, destroyed. Cars that could still drive some family around would no longer exist.

This reminds me of the programs of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) that failed get us out of the Great Depression. Recessions usually last about 2 years. The period from 1929 to 1941 became the Great Depression because over and over, the reactions of both Hoover and FDR to the recession, and the inaction of the Federal Reserve System, made matters worse, making the recession deeper and longer than it would have been otherwise.

One such program of FDR that he hoped would help the farmers, one that my Dad saw first hand, was one designed to boost the price of beef to help the farmers. FDR’s Department of Agriculture paid farmers for their cattle, dug large holes in fields around the country to herd the cattle into, shot the cattle and buried them in mass cow graves. While Americans were going hungry, our government destroyed food. Instead of helping to feed Americans, our government destroyed food.

The truth is destroying resources never helps our economy. In the inaugural post of Bastiat’s Bastions, Norbert Michel and I discussed why there was no silver economic lining to the destruction of New Orleans, that Katrina provided no benefit to New Orleans. Had the storm not destroyed the city, all of the resources devoted to rebuilding New Orleans and coastal Mississippi could have gone to building something else or producing something else, something that we could have had in addition to having the city. In Bastiat’s story, a boy broke a window with a stray ball (see our inaugural post again for the links to Bastiat’s story), and many people thought that the breaking of the window was a good thing, because it would increase work for other people. Bastiat, however, points out that had the window not been destroyed, the owner of the window would have still had a window, and would have bought other things had he not had to buy a new window.

Destroying one thing to only replace it means we have nothing that we would not have had. Think about this. Often when people are unemployed, they take the opportunity to finish that degree that they had started years ago or somehow prepare themselves for another occupation. Without the job that they had, their “opportunity costs” of completing the degree has fallen. So, when these individuals take jobs to merely replace something that other people already had and would have still had, if not for the destruction of their cattle by FDR or their old cars by Diane Feinstein, some people would have still had their cars and other people could have prepared for better jobs instead of wasting their time replacing cars that have been destroyed.

Keep in mind, there is no shortage of jobs, there is work to be done all around us. There are yards to be cut, houses to be painted, and people everywhere need help. People are not so much looking for jobs as looking for a way to get goods and services for their families. If we are employing people doing things that people don’t want to pay for with their own dollars, such as building new ATV trails, people will be just be receiving incomes to buy things that are not being produced.

Instead of stimulus, what we see in this package is pure waste. We may as well keep auto workers at their jobs by having the government buy up new cars, putting them on barges and dumping them off of the coast beyond the outer continental shelf. The image that comes to mind is of people being put to work by this stimulus package digging holes while other government workers come behind them to fill the holes back up.

What is the real point of this so-called stimulus package, then? Just as I was critical of Bush and the Republican Congress for wasteful spending on homeland security grants, we see even more pork in this present bill. In other words, the spending bills now being proposed to “stimulate” the economy will do more to stimulate the votes of special interest groups than to stimulate the economy.

My point, then, is that if we give a trillion dollars to people to make things that no one cares much about, we end up wasting the time and talents of our workers. And, like the person in the V8 commercial, when we realize what could have been, we will bang our heads with our hands for squandering funds on things no one wanted.

As is usual, our elected officials in Washington stand at the ready to “do something” about any problem even if doing something means making the problem worse. They are less concerned about the problem than the opportunity that it affords to spend money on their supporters. With the stimulus package, Congress is playing pork-barrel politics, which means the politicians are just using taxpayer funds and IOUs to buy their way to reelection.

-MC

One of the important points made in an introductory economics class concerns a measurement of demand, of buyer behavior, called the “elasticity of demand.”  Elasticity of demand measures how buyers respond to price changes by reducing their purchases.  Here are two possibilities to consider:  1) buyers respond so much to price changes, that when the price of the good increases, total spending on that good goes down;

2)  buyers cut back some when the price goes up, but not by much, so that price increases lead to more spending on the good.

The first case occurs when buyers can easily buy replacement good usually referred to as substitutes.”  An example of this first type of good might be something like chicken thighs, as there are other parts of chicken available, other types of meats and other types of foods, all of which substitute for chicken thighs to some degree.  This type of good is said to have an “elastic” demand.  The second occurs when there are few substitutes for the good under question, such as with an addictive substance, like tobacco or heroin, which are said to have inelastic demands. 

A way that some economics instructors drive home the importance of understanding elasticity of demand is by using the example of heroin and effectiveness of U.S. drug policy.  Heroin, being highly addictive, has a highly inelastic demand.  Higher prices lead users to cut back some, but by such a small amount that overall spending on heroin rises when prices go up.  When the U.S. DEA is able to reduce the supply of heroin into the country, the price of heroin naturally increases.  Since heroin has an inelastic demand, higher prices lead to increased spending on heroin.   Heroin addicts seldom have great jobs and so much of an addict’s source of spending is from money-making criminal activities, from prostitution and pornography production to thefts, ranging from car theft to burglary to mugging. 

What all this means is that higher heroin prices because of more effective interdiction of heroin imports leads to higher rates of money-making crimes even though the amount of heroin flowing into the country is reduced, because the street value of heroin coming in increases.  This suggests that giving heroin away, instead, would cause crime rates to fall. 

Well, that is exactly what happens.  In this article about legalizing heroin in Switzerland, it is noted that crimes by heroin addicts “have dropped 60 percent since the program began in 1994….”  In addition, if the government is supplying safe heroin, so that there is no possibility of running a profitable heroin trade, there will be no wars among rival heroin suppliers.That certainly should give us something to think about.-MC

The U.S. Supreme Court has handed out some important rulings in the last few days. Of course, yesterday, the Court breathed new life into the 2nd Amendment, ruling that it is an individual right to bear arms, not some sort of collective right of the state to have an army. Obvious to anyone who has not executed all of his own brain cells with drugs is the fact that the state needs no guaranteed right to bear arms, as the state is in the best position to bear arms as the state can tax more than any one person can raise on his own to purchase weapons. The very fact the state, by buying arms, can defend its own right to arms by those very weapons, and does not need to have a collective “right” to do so, suggests that the contortions of logic that came up with this “right to form a militia” is nothing but nonsense.

What I want to discuss here, however, is the ill-conceived law from my home state of Louisiana that was declared unconstitutional by the Court in Kennedy v. Louisiana. Justice Kennedy (not the same Kennedy as in the court case) ruled sensibly in his majority opinion by outlawing the death sentence that Louisiana had Okd in convictions for child rape. Kennedy wrote: 

In addition, by in effect making the punishment for child rape and murder equivalent, a State that punishes child rape by death may remove a strong incentive for the rapist not to kill the victim. Assuming the offender be­haves in a rational way, as one must to justify the penalty on grounds of deterrence, the penalty in some respects gives less protection, not more, to the victim, who is often the sole witness to the crime. See Rayburn, ˜Better Dead Than R(ap)ed?: The Patriarchal Rhetoric Driving Capital Rape Statutes, 78 St. John’s L. Rev. 1119, 1159-1160(2004).  see p. 35 of the Court’s opinion here

Justice Kennedy’s reasoning illustrates sound economic reasoning. The idea, of course, is that if the same penalty is applied for child rape as for murder, the child rapist then sees his decision as one where the extra cost for murdering the child which would eliminate an eye witness, as one with a low marginal cost. The reason is that after the child has been raped, there is no extra cost for murdering the victim, as the state can impose no heavier penalty than killing the child rapist. In economics lingo, the marginal cost of killing the child rape victim falls to zero with the death penalty for child rape. If the state law lowers the marginal cost of murdering child rape victims, we can expect the statute to result in an increase in child rape victims being further brutalized by the loss of their lives at the hands of their rapists.

Actually, the court echoes the reasoning Chad Turner and I presented here at Bastiat’s Bastions two years ago in Perverse consequences of stiffer penalties for pedophiles and another I wrote in In for a penny, in for a pound. Our blog posts just echoed what economists, such as Ekelund, Jackson, Ressler and Tollison that Turner and I cited in our “Perverse consequences…” blog post and legal scholars, such as Rayburn cited by Justice Kennedy in his opinion had said or written before us. 

(Principles of Economics students here at Nicholls ought to recognize the names of three of the four economists Turner and I cite, as three of them are the coauthors of the economics textbook we use.)
How would you argue this case?

One of my students commented on my prior post “In for a penny, in for a pound.” My reply was getting too long for the blog editor, so I am taking this route, a post to comment on a comment.

Rape and murder are a bit independent of one another but there are undoubtedly benefits to the sickos of killing their victims, as I mentioned, dead victims neither identify nor testify. But, these benefits, whether independent between crimes or not, need to be though as separate from the costs, and need to be analyzed as separate or independent.

While I would generally argue that rape is less of a crime than murder, I don’t need to make that case here to argue that the death penalty is dangerously too harsh of a penalty for rape alone. I will concede that these two crimes may be equally serious. All I really need to argue here is that the combination of rape and murder should receive a harsher penalty than either alone.

Here is the point. If we give someone a death sentence, we can do little more to them than that. What more could be done? The only penalty worse than the death penalty would be to torture the criminal before they die, as happened in the closing scenes of Brave Heart. That would only serve to make us sickos, too. When the MARGINAL PENALTY drops to zero, as it does for murdering the child rape victim, we will see more murders of child rape victims, independent of the marginal benefits, or as economists say, Ceteris Paribus.

I would argue that neither single murders alone, nor child rapes alone should be punished by the death penalty (see the Tollison article cited in my original post on Jessica’s law and the perverted effects of stiff penalties, or at least read the abstract to that article). Rather, I would argue that only when a single muder is combined with other murder, or with rape, should the death penalty be imposed. Otherwise the marginal penalty for additional crimes falls to zero if we rush to impose the death penalty.

There is an additional problem that I have not mentioned previously. Sometimes, when sentences are seen as too harsh for a crime, especially when judges or juries see them as overly harsh, instead of imposing the sentence, juries often prefer to let criminals go free and find them “not guilty,” and we should understand that as not guilty enough for the punishment that might be given.

-MC

If you haven’t heard, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken up the Louisiana case of Patrick Kennedy, who raped his 8 year old stepdaughter. Under Louisiana law, the death penalty can be applied to someone found guilty of rape of a young child. Kennedy’s attorney claims that for rape, the death penalty amounts to cruel and unusual penalty. Several states are following Louisiana’s lead with allowing the death penalty for the rape of a child. Missouri seems to be considering the death penalty for child rape, and here are some articles from Missouri on the issue: Blunt seeks law, Nixon, too, seeks death penalty and Death penalty for child rape.Personally, like most people, I find the rape of a child sick beyond comprehension, and I am not that opposed to the death penalty, per se. However, I think we should first examine the incentives that would then be in place when we adopt the ultimate punishment for a less than ultimate crime. As reprehensible as the rape of a child may be, it is not as final as the death of that child. Here is the problem I see with this punishment. Once someone has raped a child, he can then let the child go free. If he gets caught and convicted, he is likely to go to jail for a long time. If instead, he murders the child, he is likely to face a death sentence if caught. The extra penalty for the extra crime, the death sentence instead of the lesser punishment, what an economist would call the marginal penalty, is still rather high and may act as a deterrent against the further crime of murder.

At the College of Business Honors Banquet this past Sunday, Associate Justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, Hon. John Weimer, mentioned a case where a defendant, after being sentenced for life, became violent in his courtroom, and Weimer sentenced him to a short extra term for Contempt of Court. The defendant made the point that he could not serve any more time than his current life sentence. You can be sure that the violent outlash was because the fellow knew there was no further penalty he could face, the marginal penalty was zero.

With the death penalty for child rape, there is nothing else that can be done to the sicko that would be more severe than the death penalty. In addition, the sicko has a reason to go ahead and kill his victim: Dead victims don’t identify, and they don’t testify. By imposing the ultimate penalty for child rape, the marginal penalty for murder is considerably reduced to zero. Economists would expect that the higher penalty will reduce the incidence of child rapists, but increase the incidence of child murders, especially ones who have been sexually assaulted.

The British have a saying, “In for a penny, in for a pound.” The saying actually has a few meanings, but one of them is this: If someone is going to get the same punishment for stealing a penny as stealing a pound, he may as well steal the pound. After all, you will get the same punishment in either case. Same punishment but bigger reward! Or in the present case, same punishment but lower chance of being caught and found guilty.

I should mention that I wrote a blog post in February of 2006 along similar lines. In that post, you will notice that I cite an article by your Econ 211 textbook authors, Ekelund, Ressler and Tollison, who make a similar point about mass versus single murders.

-MC

Ever since Nicholls had internet access, I have been a part of a economics teaching listserve, an email-based forum of economics instructors, in the US and beyond.  Yesterday, Humberto Bareto at Wabash University pointed out this article in the New York Times (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/world/africa/17bread.html) by Michael Slackman, “Egypt’s Problem and Its Challenge: Bread Corrupts” New York Times, January 17, 2008.

One professor responded that “it’s almost normative economics” but that he agreed with the normative values. 

I could not let that remain, especially after the very good lecture we we had in my 2M class with Ms. Bhavneet Walia from Kansas State.  Normative values in the article?  Hard to see.  My response was along these lines:

The article is not that normative.  It is about what is happening in Egypt.

The government started a program and created profitable opportunities for some Egyptians–those who could get into the lines and wait.  These people made at least part of their livings off of the program, buying up bread at low, government controlled prices and reselling them to others at market prices.  They come to depend on the program and any talk of cutting back or eliminating the program comes with political resistance, because to do so deprives these people of the opportunities the government set up for them.  They are only doing what comes naturally in markets, and in politics.  

This bread program also created opportunities for government regulators and these special government sponsored bakers.  Sometimes we need to ask “Who monitors the monitors?”  or “Who regulates the regulators?”  This was posed years ago in an article by Darby and Karni (1973), in their paper, “Free competition and the optimal amount of fraud,” Journal of Law and Economics 16, 67-86.  Darby and Karni noted that with consumer fraud, you can’t really regulate it by having inspectors, because if fraud were profitable by, say, auto mechanics, it would also be profitable for fraudulent mechanics to bribe inspectors.

But when the government sets up a program that creates lower prices for some people which makes it profitable to buy up low-priced government subsidized goods and to resell those goods to others.  I bet this never happens with food stamps–yeah, right.  People will try to make these profits, even if it involves breaking the law and stooping to corrupt behavior. 

This story is not normative, a statement of what should be, but positive economics, what merely is.  My interpretation is straight prediction.  

Of course, one might interpret the facts in the story in a different way.  Whether this corruption is a good or bad thing, that is normative.  But the reporter laid out the facts and pretty much lets the reader judge.  

In Rome, something similar happened.  The government provided subsidized bread and politicians and the government provided circuses (gladiator events), placating the voters. 

Would our politicians ever create profitable opportunities for voters and supporters, creating dependence that would lead to uprisings if the program were taken away?  In a New York minute!

-MC

It’s hard to have missed all the talk about Mike Vick, dog fighting, and his plea agreement.

There are some other interesting angles to this whole affair. How much money did Mick Vick lose? Will he play in the NFL again? Should the NFL Players Association fight to ensure he is able to play? All interesting to me, but instead this post is about whether or not there should be a law against dog fighting.

I know some people love dogs – my aim is not to offend you. For the record, I like dogs – I am hoping to get one soon.

But I want to put that aside for a moment to think about the economics of this law, and other laws. Essentially this is a commentary on the law of property, or simply “property rights”. The last time I checked, dogs were indeed property.

What rights are typically associated with owning property? Suppose you purchase a car – that is, you obtain the property rights to car. This gives you certain rights – you can drive around the car, you can change the oil, you can paint you car red. You can even sell the property rights to your car – transfer your rights to another person. If someone violates your property rights by, say, stealing you car, you can call the government and they will help you out. Lastly, you can take a sledgehammer to your car and destroy it if you want. You may choose to destroy your own property – it is not illegal.

Of course, even with a car, your property rights are limited. You can drive your car down Main Street, but you can’t drive you car through a crowded shopping mall. You can drive on the right side of the road, but not on the left side of the road. You cannot run over people in your car. Why not? What is the economic justification for such restrictions?

I hope that is easy – each of the activities that are restricted above would have violated someone else’s rights, caused suffering, or made it more likely this would occur. People are not allowed to run over people in their cars because running over people clearly causes harm to the person that is run over. In all cases, the law is written to ensure that other people (people that are not the driver of the car) are not adversely affected by the decision of the driver. (Bonus question – can you think of something about driving that is entirely legal that nonetheless adversely affects other drivers?)

So, if dog fighting laws are in the same spirit of other property laws, it must be the case that there is someone who is harmed by the act of dog fighting, right? Who is the injured party? Is your answer the dog? Do dogs have rights?

I bet I know what you are thinking; a dog is a living thing. Grass is living? Cockroaches? I bet I know what you are thinking now; a dog is an animal. But there are no laws protecting roosters in the state of Louisiana, or goldfish. Why?

Explain to me where and why the line is drawn? Why not a law protecting me from smashing my car?

Two things I think I might see coming…

One issue might be whether or not the animal you are talking about is personal property. For example, a dog or a goldfish is personal property. A deer is not personal property.

Secondly, if the world “moral” shows up in your answer, should it be illegal to be immoral? Is it illegal to be immoral? Can you give me an example of another activity that is illegal because it is immoral (and doesn’t harm a person other than the decision maker?)

Again, personally I don’t condone dog fighting, and I am not posing this question to be a smart aleck – I want you to help me understand, and for you to think about the economics of property law.

–CT

We know that when crime makes residents feel less safe, they often move away. This has certainly been the history of New Orleans over the last 30 years, with decade after decade of population loss. New Orleans was once a city of about 600 thousand. By 2000, the population had fallen to about 450 thousand.

The mugger in question here is that master thief, Dictator Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Instead of just losing what they have worked their lives for, wealthier Venezuelans are leaving in droves, and emigrating to safer places, such as the US. Take a look at this article from the AP sent to me by my brother, Paul. (the origina article my brother sent is no longer available, but take a look at this article  later in October of 2007).

Just think where this will leave Venezuela: fewer doctors, fewer businessmen, and fewer educated professionals. Also leaving will be capital — the equipment that workers need to be more productive. Venezuela will go from a society of haves and have nots, to just a society of have nots, and Chavez will have no one left to tax or steal from in Venezuela–then, he will have to resort to attacking his neighbors in the name of exporting his revolution. The Cambodians did the same thing with their “killing fields,” killing off and chasing away all of the talented, the educated, and the professionals — ridding the country of its essential human capital.

But to Chavez, that’s progress, “In death there is equality!”

MC