Global organized crime as big as a G20 nation: Australia

Yeah well that's no real surprise.

But is it such an unsolvable problem??

Here is how to solve the problem: 1. Legalize drugs, (in doing so you will also solve a lot of the petty crime of addicts). With quality control, and age restrictions on them and counseling available a lot of other social problems will begin to heal. 2. Legalize prostitution. Again with regulations and health care a lot of other problems will clear up, like diseases etc.

You have now just cut organized crime off at the knees, taken away their power and taken away their cash. You have also just freed up a lot of your resources to focus on things like child porn (which is thankfully a "niche" market that can only grow so much due to the fact that only certain ppl will go for it, and therefore can only generate a certain amount of cash (ie power) for crime lords), and human trafficking (slave market) which again should be somewhat dented by #2 above already.

There's your biggest problems solved or severely diminished. This leaves gambling and protection rackets. Gambling, again, legalization and regulation is one alternative. As for protection, with all the resources freed up from the above, should be very fightable.

However much you don't like them, keeping those things illegal does not protect anyone and give huge resources to criminals. We are handing them the weapons IMO.

The biggest organized criminals are the governments themselves...Unless you can convince me that all taxes are voluntary...

Lowly if only it was that simple .

StormR

Well, I don't really think doing all those things would solve all problems, but a lot of things would improve, and a lot of gangsters would be "disempowered."

Of course not enough people will agree with that in the near future. They enjoy feeling morally superior to people and fighting drug wars etc.

They can legalize everything and start collecting taxes to be used in Education and healthcare.

“If organized crime was a country it would be in the G20,”

yes, I agree, so much difficult to see the difference nowadays....

It's a fact that Global organized crime is like any multinational corporation striving to adapt to market and create unknown forms of crime in efforts to transcend cultural, social, linguistic, and geographical locations. It's very sad but countless lives are lost from drug related health problems, firearm deaths and other different types of crime by their unethical methods and motives. Basically high levels of organized crime and corruption are linked to low levels of human development. As a result their is a vicious cycle of poverty that is exploited and compounded by organized crime and grand corruption. No doubt this illegal globalized economy is here to stay on this planet. However there is probably hope for change as we usher into the 3rd millenium.

Organized crime is never a factor in all the world economic models and projections that we see; can this be one reason that they always seem to fail?