Olly Olly Oxen Free, Evo Morales.

Well its official: grand theft auto is now legal in Bolivia (so long as its stolen from somewhere else).

Question though. The smuggled vehicles are sold on the cheap in the black market because they are illegal and the sellers need to avoid certain laws and enforcement officials. If a seller can now instead "legalize" the stolen car once it is in Bolivia, can't he raise the price now, pay any marginal tax, and avoid the risky cost of being caught and put in jail by Bolivian authorities? Would the legalization not raise the price of cars for the poor, hurting the very people Evito says "have a right" to own them?

And for you car smugglers, hear me out: you no longer have to fear consequences from the local police, so long as you stole your car in another country. The poor you've been selling to have had the implicit threat of ratting you out (or possibly being a police informant). Seriously, raise the price of your merchandise. Evito has done the cost minimization for you.

How would you deal with that situation though? "Officer, I swear, this car was stolen in Chile." How do you prove something like that? VIN number and maybe papers in the glove box?

Update: Follow up question, since Evito is okay with larceny do the Bolivian people expect to have much a treasury left when he leaves office? Some one might want to double check the books.

Rational Thought Update: The italics section actually is wrong. Evito has a point, and I'm backwards. Let's go back to ECON 101. If there are 100,000 "new" cars on the legal secondary market, that pushes out the supply curve, putting a downward pressure on price. So prices in the legal secondary market do indeed GO DOWN, benefiting consumers. Here I think is my confusion: would the price of the legal secondary market be higher or lower than the illegal secondary market initially? I'm assuming it was lower since there were 70 to 100 thousand cars that magically appeared for registration. The legal secondary market price could be pushed lower than the illegal one, and that would be a benefit. If it isn't, than consumers would continue to participate in the illegal one, as the price is relatively lower.

Hm...