Leopold ran up high debts with his Congo investments before salvation came with the beginning of the worldwide rubber boom in the 1890s. Prices went up at a fevered pitch throughout the decade as industries discovered new uses for rubber in tires, hoses, tubing, insulation for telegraph and telephone cables and wiring, and so on. By the late 1890s wild rubber had far surpassed ivory as the main source of revenue from the Congo Free State. The peak year was 1903, with rubber fetching the highest price and concessionary companies raking in the highest profits.

Once again, the technology of capital markets and modern firearms made imperialism such an effective way of capturing rents that private ventures lead the way, sometimes dragging the state along as a figleaf-and sometimes not. In the Cape Colony, private mining interests found the state indispensable in establishing a cheap supply of labor:

Country Study, South Africa (Library of Congress): Mineowners struggling to make a profit in the early days of the diamond industry sought, however, to undercut the bargaining strength of the Africans on whom they depended for labor. In 1872 Kimberley's white claimsholders persuaded the British colonial administration to introduce a pass law. This law, the foundation of the twentieth-century South African pass laws, required that all "servants" be in possession of passes that stated whether the holders were legally entitled to work in the city, whether or not they had completed their contractual obligations, and whether they could leave the city. The aim of this law, written in "color-blind" language but enforced against blacks only, was to limit the mobility of migrant workers, who frequently changed employers or left the diamond fields in a constant (and usually successful) attempt to bargain wages upward.

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Because blacks would not put up with such conditions if they could maintain an autonomous existence on their own lands, the British embarked on a large-scale program of conquest in the 1870s and the 1880s. Mine owners argued that if they did not get cheap labor their industries would become unprofitable. White farmers, English- and Dutch-speaking alike, interested in expanding their own production for new urban markets, could not compete with the wages paid at the mines and demanded that blacks be forced to work for them. They argued that if blacks had to pay taxes in cash and that if most of their lands were confiscated, then they would have to seek work on the terms that white employers chose to offer. As a result of such pressures, the British fought wars against the Zulu, the Griqua, the Tswana, the Xhosa, the Pedi, and the Sotho, conquering all but the last. By the middle of the 1880s, the majority of the black African population of South Africa that had still been independent in 1870 had been defeated, the bulk of their lands had been confiscated and given to white settlers, and taxes had been imposed on the people, who were now forced to live on rural "locations." In order to acquire food to survive and to earn cash to pay taxes, blacks now had to migrate to work on the farms, in the mines, and in the towns of newly industrialized South Africa.

There was a time when your humble correspondent, mindful of this story, would have insisted the problem was ultimately statist. It wasn't after all, that miners and farmers were unregulated; it was that they could rely on an interventionist state. Leopold II used Belgian state resources to lobby for the creation of the Congo Free State, and, once he got it, raised capital with the implicit promise of Belgian support of his ventures. The monopoly power of the British East India Company was granted by state fiat. This, of course, is disingenuous.

The point of the private sector is that it is supposed to have an adversarial relationship to the public sector. That's not the same of open hostility: a professor has an adversarial relationship with students-that's why students have a motive to cheat on their exams. A judge who doesn't have an adversarial relationship towards the prosecution or the defense is not dispensing justice. "Pro-business" officials are lying about their motives; they're not "pro-business," they're anti-consumer and anti-labor. A pro-business official, in truth, is relentlessly neutral among the competing livelihoods and interests of society; that way, property rights are respected and the market is a neutral arbiter of objective merit. A "pro-business" regime, of course, disregards the interests or livelihoods of people who aren't "business," such as through "tort reform" denying accountability of firms to the public (a public that includes, of course, other businesses), loosening of regulations to prevent fraud or negligence, and sales of public goods to private parties.

The rhetoric employed by the lobbyists for the British EIC or Leopold's private foundations relied on the same appeals to "pro-business," or "pro-market" sentiment. The Conference of Berlin awarded the Free State to Leopold because he promised it would be open to all comers-a colossal free-trade zone, as far as Europeans and North Americans were concerned. "Pro-market" rhetoric is not problematic when it praises the ability of the market to supply information, but very much so when it demands that all private-sector enterprise be freed from accountability. That granted, the next order of business is taking over the state's prerogative to wage war and negotiate peace.