A high school economics teacher in suburban New York City regularly spends the first few days of his Beginning Economics course by gathering groups of students around Monopoly boards and letting them loose on the game. The point, however, is not to teach students the basics of real estate because the teacher suspended all rules of the game. Students could do whatever they wanted. Chaos, of course, ensued and the games ultimately broke down as some students took advantage of every opportunity to exploit their fellow game players, steal money and property, overcharge for rents and break every known rule of civilized economics. The situation in Jeddah in the aftermath of the November floods bears no small resemblance to those lawless Monopoly games halfway across the world. We are beginning to discover that rational property law was wholly ignored in the quest for straight-out ill-gotten profits. The fact that all indications point to widespread collusion among players and bureaucrats at various levels of the real estate process shows that the rules were suspended as effectively in real life as they were in the Monopoly games. It is not just that government lands were sold to individuals illegally by people who had no right to sell them but that the bureaucracy facilitated the sale. In addition to the sale, the lands were then illegally developed with no physical infrastructure to ensure a standard of physical living that should be ensured in a country as wealthy as Saudi Arabia. The end result, of course, became glaringly apparent when the nation was shocked by the unnecessarily devastating effect of the floods in November. The first step must be to reexamine property laws in the Kingdom, especially in the realm of transferring government land to private ownership. And the results of a reexamination must be put into rational law that is strictly enforced. With the Minister of Justice declaring that anyone involved in faking deeds to land will meet with severe punishment, the punitive arm of the government is gearing up for action. Only when the other arms of government begin to act as well will the culture that allowed such travesties to take place so visibly begin to change its ways. There is a glaring need to make fundamental changes. __
