What Can We Do About the Pirates?

"In short, if we socialize the costs of fighting piracy, we create both an incentive problem and an information problem. The incentive problem comes from the fact that shippers have incentives to be careless since they can expect a taxpayer-funded military to come to their rescue. The information problem comes from the fact that we forsake the social processes that tell us whether we are choosing wisely or not when we make these tasks the responsibility of the government rather than the responsibility of the firms in question."

What Can We Do About the Pirates? - Art Carden - The Economic Imagination - Forbes