Daily Inspiration Quote by William Irwin Thompson

Thompson is poking at a civic fairy tale: that prohibition is a clean subtraction from society rather than a messy form of production. “Interdiction” sounds like sober governance, a neutral act of stopping; he deliberately pairs it with the pulp phrase “cops and robbers” to puncture that self-seriousness. The effect is to recast law enforcement not as the opposite of criminality but as its co-author, writing the rules of an underground game by deciding what gets banned, what gets scarce, and what becomes worth risking prison for.

The key move is economic. Interdiction doesn’t erase demand; it changes the market’s architecture. Once a good is pushed illegal, risk becomes a price component, secrecy becomes infrastructure, and violence becomes contract enforcement. The “black market” is the obvious result. The sharper phrase is “shadow economy,” which widens the lens: not just drug deals in alleys but the whole ecosystem that blooms around illegality - money laundering, corrupt officials, private security, informants, surveillance budgets, prison labor, and political careers built on being “tough.” In other words, interdiction structures incentives on both sides of the badge.

Contextually, Thompson writes in a late-20th-century moment when the War on Drugs and the expansion of the carceral state made this dynamic hard to deny. The subtext isn’t pro-crime; it’s anti-naivete. He’s asking who benefits when the state defines a category of forbidden goods, then spends fortunes “fighting” the economy that definition inevitably generates.