The US politician, Ron Paul, is finally pushing something in Congress which I can agree with. He is working for the return of the Letter of Marque (mar-kee). In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the US didn't have much of a navy to protect US merchant ships from pirates so they and other countries such as France and England issued Letters of Marque to private ship owners who became known as privateers. The privateer would arm a reasonably fast ship or two, sail around attacking pirates, and taking their loot as pay for the privateers. This saved all of the governments a huge amount of money in fighting pirates.

The problem they are facing in reviving this program today is than none of the brilliant upper class can figure out how the privateers would earn money since today's pirates don't carry large cashes of stolen cargo with them. This brings to question the intelligence of the upper class natural elites.

It would only be obvious that the way modern privateers would benefit financially would be to put together an organization where a shore based management team would make agreements or contracts with ships that the company's privateer teams would escort the freighters, luxury ships, other craft through pirate infested waters for a fee. Duh, hello! Then the shore based team would contact the privateer teams in fast gun boats to direct them to a prearrange meeting place for the freighters. The gun boats would simply escort the ships through the waters destroying any pirate vessels which dared approach the fleet.

This would be a very lucrative business because the pirates are demanding from tens to hundreds of millions of US dollars for captured ships to be set free with their cargoes. This means that the privateers could charge as much as 5 to 10 million US dollars per ship plus a bounty or bonus for every destroyed pirate ship which attacks the fleets. By assembling a small fleet of such ships, a small fleet of gun boats could easily escort 10, 20, or more larger vessels making the company hundreds of millions per fleet.

I don't know about you, but I think that would have no problem in encouraging more than one or two US privateer companies to form and quickly begin escorting fleets safely through the pirate infested waters. Why can't the intellectually superior upper class natural elites figure something this obvious out?

For the privateer fleet, you would just hire some US Navy Seals and other special operations people to purchase some custom designed gun boats that could out run and out shoot anything the pirates have and a well armed tactical support ship, hire the crews, and handle the logistics while working with the shore based management team. Return on investment for the gun boats and the entire operations would be quickly achieved with the expected revenues. The entire business could easily be in the black within months.

Now was that so tough to figure out? I guess for a bunch of intellectually challenged socialists, commie's, and libertarians this could be pretty tough. We capitalists don't have much trouble with this kind of stuff.