Sometimes giving something away -- even, paying people to take something away -- makes a profit for the rest of us. This is obvious when we think about it. We happily pay people to take our rubbish away. When we don't just throw it in the street that is. The whole idea of a sewage system is that we're paying someone to take our rubbish away and we're better off for doing so.
How far that idea should be taken is the issue here.
We hear that 15 to 20% of the space of Chittagong port areais taken up by shipping containers that have been there for years. Near 10,000 containers in fact. Something needs to be done about this.
Chittagong is, to put this very gently, not known as the most efficient nor speedy nor even useful port globally. Being able to use more of the space to actually ship goods rather than store them would be a good idea.
Further, a more efficient Chittagong port would benefit all. Exports leave faster and sooner, imports arrive ditto, and the costs of trade decline to all our benefit.
So, get rid of those containers that have been there for years. At which point the port authorities say they do. They run an auction process and this has rules and takes time. So much time that the pile never diminishes -- the number of new containers being abandoned roughly matches the rate at which the old are cleared.
What we're facing here is our old battle between equity and efficiency. We can have a system that's really, thoroughly, fair, or a system that is brutal but works quickly.
Good policy is making sure we've the right balance of those two in any particular action.
Say, to change the subject here, we're going to require higher standards of proof in a court case where the man might get hanged than we are in one where he has to repay a Tk1,000 fine. We're willing to accept a certain amount more of getting it wrong in the second than we are the first.
This calculation, this veering of the system toward fair and to it being effective, changes depending upon what we are talking about. Here, the benefit is making the port itself more efficient to the benefit of us all. Only a small benefit for nearly 180 million people is a lot.
The loss to those 10,000 people of the auction of their container might be quite large but when added up, much less than the benefit to the rest of us.
So, be brutal about the auctions. Forget having detailed rules about this and that and telling everyone what's in the containers and everything. We even have a legal reason to confiscate those containers -- demurrage. It's an odd word but well known in trade.
If something gets stuck at a port then you've got to pay for that storage at the port. After some period of time, the demurrage charges are more than the value of the container so it all belongs to the port.
This is normal and a standard part of international trade. So, just sell off those abandoned containers for whatever. Any amount because we free up the space at the port to all our benefit by doing so.
We could even do what the Americans do. When people abandon their belongings in a storage unit, they get auctioned off. Sight unseen -- no one knows what's in there, the owners simply have not paid their bills so, on the appointed day, a couple of dozen people turn up and bid for the lot. They even make TV shows about it (Auction Hunters and Storage Hunters are two I know about).
This balance between fair and efficient is one we face many times in the economy. Sometimes, we need to move further to one or the other.
Chittagong port is so important to the Bangladeshi economy that more efficiency is what we require here. We want the space more than we want to be fair about this.
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.