Free Parking and Ukraine

May good friends Dr. Samuel Liles (who I had the pleasure of meeting in person the other day) has taken to twitter to advocate to an isolation response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea.

Sam has written a tweeted a number of times, but this tweet is probably the most concise description of a pro-Putin line you’re likely to see in the non-lunatic West:

If you say “POTUS should do something” I’ll ask you why. Ukraine wasn’t in NATO or EU so NATO & EU shouldn’t do anything absent specifics.

I like Sam, he has a lot of cool stories and is a serious guy, but his comment is an exact analog to

If you say “McDonalds should provide parking” I’ll ask you why. Customers aren’t yet in the building so McDonalds shouldn’t spend money on them absent specifics.

The common thread in my friend’s Sam’s comments on Ukraine, and that crazy comment about McDonalds, is called “free parking.” Most successful enterprises, whether business or governments, provide subsidized or free secondary services in order to acquire customers for their primary services.

McDonalds runs one of the largest parking lot operations in the world, not because they are in the business of running profitable parking lots, but because the parking “business” is actually critical infrastructure to being successful in the restaurant business.

Similarly, the US has traditionally supported the expansion of the European Union, not because the US is in the EU, but because the Eu is critical infrastructure to being successful in the security business.

The European Union, like the United States, has a political-military system that focuses on extracting taxes from producer surplus of the non-carbon sectors of the economy. An interesting result of this is that the EU and US focus on peaceful relationships with each other, as economic integration allows the economies of scale in multiple sectors necessary to increase the tax base thru increasing the producer surplus of the non-carbon sectors of the economy. Besides the first-order economic gains of this “capitalist peace,” this also provides second-order gains as the costs of the US of providing security are lowered.

Supporting the EU’s provisioning of that political-economic infrastructure throughout Europe is in America’s interests, in the same way that paying parking lot pavers is in McDonald’s interests. The US is not the EU. McDonalds is not a paving company. But McDonalds is in the paving business in order to provide free parking to its customers. And the US is in the business of supporting the expansion of the EU to provide free parking — access to the legal, technical, and economic infrastructure the EU provides — to its customers.