Illicit is the inside look at the world of Illicit trade. Moises Naím shows us how distorted our perception of illicit trade is and how little we actually know about what is going on. Not only is there the trade of Coach purses and Heroin but there is illicit trade going on at a much larger scale; trade of ideas, weapons and even people. Moises Naím not only analyzes what our governments are doing wrong to stop this problem but he suggest how to effectively stop it starting with internal operations in our governments themselves. He also discusses the corruption behind governments and leaders and sometimes just how stupidly blind they are to the trade going on around them.
Moises Naím did a remarkable job of depicting a real world scenario of the Illicit trade market. This was not a dry book full of senseless facts, he stated the facts while weaving in ideas on human morals, incentives and an economical stand point to why each of these different types of trades makes sense in its own way. The book was written in such a way that made it easy to put into perspective. Not only did Illicit explain the truths of the underground world but it also expressed various ideas on how we can fix this and where exactly the government is failing.
The most fascinating thing to me was most likely the chapter on human trafficking. Moises Naím explains it as something based off of profit rather than immorality. As Americans we are taught from the time that we are children that slavery is immoral and in learning about the African American slaves we see it as something immoral. While it was a dirty business and inhumane it was all for the purpose of profitability. It is also hard for Americans to understand that we abolished slavery almost 200 hundred years ago and there are still parts of the world that do this and no one bats an eye.