📓 notes/journals/2022_04_09.md by @forshaper ☆

[[Violence]] providers grow into [[enforcement]] partners when they provide a [[stable]] set of [[constraints]] that enable [[agreements]] of [[economic]] [[exchange]].
- After the [[collapse]] of the [[Soviet]] Union, it took about four years for [[violence]] providers to turn into [[enforcement]] partners.
  - [[Businesses]] did call on violence providers to resolve [[disputes]] and provide other services, but once called, they often found themselves in a permanent relationship with the provider that they may not have wanted.
    - A dummy [[business]] partnered with a [[violence]] [[provider]] might setup and con customers. When customers found the dummy business, they would be stopped from punishing the dummy business by the violence provider. However, if violence providers from another area requested that the dummy business returned the unrealized investment, the request would be honored. On both ends, violence providers would gain between 30 and 50 percent as a [[commission]]. The prevalence of [[scams]] and recuperation by violence providers led to a sort of [[insurance]] industry, where credit providers and local businesses would end up paying a violence provider for insurance against scams and [[theft]]. The violence providers observed a [[norm]] of never scamming each other. In the cases where that happened, [[punishment]] was especially harsh.
      - [[Violence]] providers would ‘create a [[problem]]‘ and offer to solve that problem.
      - The [[transitionary]] post-[[Soviet]] [[state]] was trying to [[privatize]] as quickly as possible. This rushing was an opportunity for [[violence]] providers, who came in to deal with [[debt]] [[defaults]], [[cash]] flow, [[contract]] [[enforcement]], and [[secure]] [[delivery]] of [[goods]].
      - For a [[business]] in [[Russia]] in the 1990s, a lack of [[transactional]] [[stability]] was regarded as the biggest [[problem]]. To deal with this, businesses relied mostly on informal [[relationships]], a little on the [[state]], and more on [[private]] [[enforcers]]. Many [[arbitration]] [[courts]] took more than three or four months to process [[disputes]], which gave violence providers an opportunity to step in. Some charged far less in transaction costs than the state.