cartel of private protection firms. He further characterized mafiosi as "guarantors of trust", and that Sicilian people tend to be distrustful of each other and therefore routinely seek mafia protection in their business dealings. The central activity of the Mafia is the arbitration of disputes between criminals and the organization and enforcement of illicit agreements through the use of violence. The Mafia does not serve the general public as the police do, but only specific clients who pay them for protection. The Sicilian Mafia is not a centralized organization. Rather, it is a cartel of independent criminal gangs who sell their services under a common brand. This cartel claims the exclusive right to sell extralegal protection services within their territories, and by their labels (man of honor, mafioso, etc.), they distinguish themselves from common criminals whom they exclude from the protection market. Franchetti argued that the Mafia would never disappear unless the very structure of the island's social institutions were to undergo a fundamental change. Over a century later, Diego Gambetta concurred with Franchetti's analysis, arguing that the Mafia exists because the government does not provide adequate protection to merchants from property crime, fraud, and breaches of contract. Gambetta wrote that Sicily (in the early 1990s) had "no clear property rights legislation or administrative or financial codes of practice", and that its court system was "appalling" in its inefficiency. Gambetta recommended that the government liberalize the drug market and abolish price-fixing of cigarettes so as to move these commodities out of the black market; to increase transparency in public contracting so that there can be no rigging, which mafiosi usually arbitrate; and redesign the voting process to make it harder to buy votes. Fixing these problems would reduce the demand for mafioso intervention in political and economic affairs. Cultural aspects Diego Gambetta characterizes mafiosi as "guarantors of trust". He says that Sicilian society has a general lack of trust among its people. This is true for other parts of southern Italy, which never experienced the same post-war economic growth that northern and central Italy enjoyed due to a lack of cooperation and healthy competition among the locals. Gambetta remarks: "people do not often cooperate when it would be beneficial for them to do so; they often compete in harmful ways and consider violence never too remote an option for settling their controversies; finally, they refrain from engaging from that kind