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| Adam Smith called. He said this scheme is still a load of codswallop, and he's getting his mailed glove to have another swipe at your head with his Invisible Hand. |
So, despite earnest entreaties, some folks still can't grasp basic economic fundamentals that would and do make "Legalize and tax" schemes with respect to drugs a financial and sociological impossibility.
In the military, the standard instruction, upon receipt of an utterly asinine order, was to follow it to the hilt. First, because rules is rules, and mutiny was a hanging offense, but mainly because the easiest and least insubordinate way to show some gold-braided asshole how big a jackass he was, was to do exactly what was ordered. Good and hard.
(I'm here to tell you that in peacetime, that approach works like magic. I wartime, I suspect grenades with the pins pulled are part of the alternative therapy. C'est la guerre.)
Similarly, with philosophical constructs and hypotheticals, usually the easiest way to watch them crumble and fall on their metaphorical ass, is to grant the recockulous premise.
Thusly:
Okay, all drugs are legalized. You're going to tax them and put the drug cartels out of business. You imagine.
So, Poindexter, let us examine your scheme.
1a) Where do coca leaves come from, to make cocaine?
2a) Who controls that real estate, for miles and miles?
3a) Who will set the price for which they'll deliver you the product, to sell in the U.S.?
4a) Who will control all distribution of same to you?
1b) Same set of questions, for opium.
1c) Same set of questions, for marijuana.
So, Pablo Escobar being out of the equation now, when his successor, Pablo Hersheybar, Lord of Bolivian Marching Powder, determines he will only sell you coca leaves or processed cocaine at 20 times the current street price, WTF are you going to do about that?
[You're going to eat shit.]
When he thusly makes your legal and taxed cocaine orders of magnitude more expensive, and short-supplied, than his illegal, untaxed cocaine, which he has in boundless quantities, and you're funding his illegal activities to boot, what are you going to do about that?
[You're going to eat shit.]
When Bolivia, Columbia, etc., decide they don't want you buying cocaine after you completely reversing course on drug policy, and their government doesn't want their number one export to be drugs, and they don't want a fully funded drug cartel to become the de facto government, because they're tired of paying the price there, in lives ruined, policemen killed, and society subverted for your gringo loco addictions, and they're not as fucking insane as you are, and they shoot down your planes and sink your ships trying to pick it up, WTF are you going to do about that?
[You're going to eat shit.]
Will you invade a sovereign allied country, and fight a jungle war, to subjugate entire countries to force them to let you buy your dope?
(History majors, stop me if you've heard this one.)
[You're going to eat shit.]
If not, HTF do you think you're going to get your cocaine at a lower price than Pablo can sell it illicitly?
[You're going to eat shit.]
Now do that again, for heroin.
Except for Pablo, we'll substitute the Taliban.
Repeat, for marijuana.
Now it's Mexico, and those cartels.
Oh wait, for pot, you'll just grow it in the U.S.?
Genius!
Tell me, how many battalions of security troops does a cornfield require, currently?
Think that'll be true for a pot field??
[Nope. More shit for you to eat.]
If not, tell me how you're going to sell at a lower price after hiring all that 24/7/365 security, for acres and acres of land.
[You're going to eat a party sub of shit.]
Especially when Pedro and his buddies from Guadalajara are willing to hump it across the 100° desert in 80# bundles now, for a few pesos (and not getting his head cut off).
So you're over a barrel, forever, and every cent spent to purchase the product you NEED for the U.S. "legal" market will go directly to drug cartels and the Taliban, destabilizing entire regions, FOREVER, just to satisfy your plan for "Legalized and taxed" drugs, to supply the 1-5% of Americans who are fucking dope fiends.
That's asinine, moronic, insane, and evil, all at the same time.
Well-played.
QED
Some old enough may recall that when they got tired of Western exploitation, oil producing countries got together and jacked up the price of their oil to the West.
So, econ geniusii, WTF are you going to do when the drug countries resolve to form the Drug Origin Producing and Exporting Countries organization, and DOPEC tells you the new street price for heroin and cocaine is now 50 times what it was last year, because they don't like gringos and infidels?
[You're going to eat a big shit sandwich, at a 5000% mark-up.]
And then, after bleeding you dry financially for a few years and a few trillion dollars, they then decide to give their shit away by the metric fuckton virtually free, just to give your tottering drug-addled country a push into the shitter of history?
[You're going to choke on shit.]
Historical note: Alcohol was legalized when Prohibition was repealed in 1933.
So tell the class in what year moonshining stopped in the U.S....?__________
That would be never. It's NEVER stopped.
So why will "Legalize and tax" work with drugs, when it hasn't worked for alcohol once in 86 years??
Tobacco has never been illegal.
So, why are people smuggling untaxed cigarettes in 24/7/365?
Shouldn't "Legalization and taxation" have stopped all that?
If not, why not?
So, how do you go after that criminal conduct, plus do it for drugs, without continuing the exact same War On Drugs you say you want to end, because it's stupid and wasteful???
Answer those last five questions first, or admit this whole idea is full of more shit than a Christmas goose, and Let. It. Go.
It will never work because it can never work, and never has.
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part V
42 comments:
I suggested the DNR tattoos. I still believe we need to give the young a second chance and maybe a third to clean up their act.
I also believe the rich and progressives will abuse any laws or rules about drugs just like they do now with drugs, sex, and even normal laws. Sort of Related Example #1 is Jeffrey Epstein who as a pedophile pervert should have been executed along with the men and women that pimped and pandered young girls to him. Instead he got a whole year of work release, and his pimps got immunity. Which was still harsher than the PROBATION the Democrat Palm Beach DA was offering.
I cannot see us ever coming close to implementing your ideas. At least not until you eliminate the 200 million bleeding hearts that would oppose ANY ideas of killing off addicts and dealers, or even just letting them stupidly off themselves. We will go broke and collapse as a society first before we try your plan, or even mine. Maybe after that we will try it your way?
I agree we need to do something besides more of the current war on drugs.
I know they were still making moonshine in Central Minnesota in the 1980's. They were passing around a couple quart mason jars of it at our Fourth of July bonfire on the lake. The dairy farmer down the road made it, and was proud of his product, which wasn't half bad even if it wasn't aged.
Now they make it legally at a couple different boutique Minnesota Distillers too.
The criminal is now the victim and gaining favor. The liberal needs them for their ultimate goal. Hanging a horse thief mitigated a lot but did not stop it. A criminal who needs to get away does not care he is going to die either way back in the day and that is what is missing. I know a great family joke about hanging a horse thief in a well.
>The criminal is now the victim and gaining favor.
Our culture is run by people who largely define themselves by victimhood (some actual, most perceived, or asserted for gain), so it's hardly surprising that victimhood is now the highest virtue. Even worse, victimhood now appears to be genetically transmitted, so you can be a "brave 4th-generation survivor" or some such nonsense.
As to death penalties, we can argue about whether they are a deterrent, but boy do they stop recidivism.
Aesop:
I'm pretty much in full support of your position as you've laid it out in the last few posts, so please don't take this as me trying to play "gotcha" or whatever. But I do have a couple of devil's advocate questions:
1) Illegal smuggling and distributing of cigarettes, while real, surely isn't as big an enterprise as what the drug cartels now enjoy. If legalization happened, couldn't their operations at least be shrunk down to "manageable" levels? (And yes, "manageable" depends on who you're talking to; for people who have to deal with this crap on a daily basis, it's at or near zero; but you know what I mean.)
2) You've said several times that the cartel would stay in business by terrorizing any legitimate businesses selling drugs. The smaller suppliers, yes; but couldn't larger corporations like Bayer et al. absorb the cost of hiring sufficient security to protect their operations? (FTR, I personally find it hilarious that if this did happen, legalization would end up further expanding the power of Big Pharma, which the hippies and potheads claim to be opposed to; but I do see this as a likely scenario.)
Again, I personally despise drug use, marijuana included, and even if I'm right in my two questions, I view them as kind of secondary issues. I didn't support legalization even as a dumb teenager, and I don't support it now.
"It will never work because it can never work, and never has"
Really? Back when America was a free country, all drugs were legal and you could buy them in your local apothecary over the counter or mail order them from Sears. So, I am not buying your hypothesis.
While I don't use drugs nor do I condone their use, I am always for less government and more freedom. On some issues, conservatives are as big of jackboot totalitarians as libtards are.
Aesop: Frequent visitor. Old street medic from Da City, around 30 years an ED nurse. Brother, TESTIFY! We used to consider flash pulmonary edema overdoses, dead with the needle still in their arm, as "evolution in action".
Having said that, and simply as a "proofreading" question, what happened to the ethanol distribution networks, once prohibition was repealed? I simply do not know. I also wonder if that answer might provide some insight into the evolution of the narcotics import/distribution industry, post some hypothetical decriminalization/legalization?
T-ray:
1. Cigarette truck hijacking and illegal sales were the money mainstay of the Mafia for a long time.
2. Cigarette taxes and restrictions actually led to a whole class of motorboats being invented and built. Called "Cigarette Boats," fast v-hulled boats with a small cargo compartment up front. Just to bypass legal taxes and legal sellers. Sure, it happened in Europe, but aren't the legalization fairies (as in "Poof" it's legal now and thus okay!) basing legalization of dangerous chemicals off various European countries?
In other words, wherever something is taxed and taxed heavily, smuggling takes place. Heck, I know a guy who smuggles 'illegal' detergents into the Pacific Northwest, enough so that he makes a reasonable profit off of it. I also know people who smuggle and sell 'untaxed' sodas.
But neither detergents or sodas are as dangerous as even old-school ditch weed from the '70s, which as our noble host keeps pointing out, is like 1/200th as powerful as today's superweed, which is so powerful that it is impossible to block the smell of it.
@Bill in ILL
From all of 1 post before you tuned in:
It should be noted that the largely laissez faire approach of the 19th century, so enamored by pseudo-historians online as "how it oughta be forever" got the U.S. between 500,000 and 1M drug addicts by the turn of the century, when the US population was only 76M. So between 1/2 and 1% of the country was hooked on drugs, before doing drugs was cool.
But never let historical facts get in the way of your feeeeeelz, right?
@T-Rav
Bayer couldn't afford to provide their factories with plant security equal to nuke plants, nor vet 20,000 employees to a higher degree than the CIA and FBI, nor prevent a horse's head from winding up in their CEO's bedsheets.
We also can't produce coca here. At all.
Pot and poppies, maybe.
But the security on hundreds of fields would be horrendously prohibitive, once again making the retail price far beyond what it can be imported for illicitly.
FFS, people are cooking carfentanil and methamphetamine here in their garages now.
Carfentanil, by itself, is as toxic than nerve gas.
The LD50 is the equivalent of three grains of salt in size.
So now, after we legalize and tax it, anyone can buy that for the asking?
What could possibly go wrong there?
I mean, it's not like terrorists would put it in sugar packets and leave it at McDonald's or anything, amirite? Because that's not in the rulebook!
Why don't we just take half our current nuke stockpile, and leave it wrapped with a bow in Afghanistan or Libya, with the manuals and instructions?
Could we get much stupider here?
The entire idea underlying this, top to bottom, is recockulous.
We haven't even gotten into where you're going to sell this.
Pharmacies?
Refurbed banks?
And the convoys delivering the dope will have to look like presidential motorcades.
And how hard will the cartels fight this, and/or try to take over?
You're talking about trying to put them out of business, and take away their livelihood.
They have networks throughout this country.
They have billions of dollars.
They can afford to build single-use-and-throw-away semi-submersibles with a price tag of about $1M@, and they expect to lose half of them, and still turn a profit. So first we half-ass the Slap Fight on Drugs, then we surrender, and count on the good behavior of our former enemies not to take advantage of us???
And half the jackasses on five websites breathlessly state "but we should still stop illegal drug imports", which is the exact "War On Drugs" those same stupid motherfuckers are whining and bitching about in the first place!
This tar baby is a retard check for Joe Average, and 50% of them are already stuck up to both elbows and knees, and can't figure out what the problem is.
Bill the Retard right above thinks this is still the America of 1898, so we can just revoke the laws, go back to the status quo from when McKinley was president, and everything will be fine.
The stupid on this question is breathtakingly biblically epic, and shows no sign of abating.
My suspicion is half the assholes shilling for this are stoned now, or born to mothers who were, and they were fed a steady diet of lead paint chips growing up.
Nothing else explains it.
@Beans:
Ah. Evidently my millennial-ness was showing again with query #1.
Given how many people I've sold cartons and cartons of cigarettes to as a convenience store worker just recently, even after the boatloads of taxes slapped on them, I don't know why I'm at all surprised.
@Aesop:
I think some of them do fall into the stoned/paint-chip consumers category, but I think a lot of them are just a dog with a bone. They get the idea that this one simple trick will fix everything, and they can't let go of it.
Aesop, I used to be a Libertarian. Then I studied anthropology and realize what an ass I was. Yet, it is still with a heavy heart that I admit you are probably spot on with drug prohibition. As much as the gov benefits from the War On Drugs, to include occupying Opiumistan, the alternatives are worse. On the other hand, Darwin supports widespread drug use :)
Aesop, prohibitively high taxes are effectively criminalizing the product. You get the same results. Sure, California and New York are run by idiots, but the rest of the country is far saner.
As to terrorists putting drugs in sugar, what's preventing them from doing this today? The junk is for sale on every street corner. In fact, this is the counter to most of your arguments - the junk is available on every street corner, and potency is way, way up. Having companies needing to meet FDA purity regulations could do a lot to cut overdose deaths, because unless you have a Chem Lab, there's no way to know just what you're taking today.
As to where we get the stuff if it's legalized, this could do a lot to stabilize, say, Afghanistan. I wouldn't legalize with this as a goal, but I could see unanticipated benefits from that.
Aesop, the drug war was lost and now that 26 of 50 states have decriminalized weed, we had might as well accept the will of the people and move on.
It's not that hard to put a reasonable amount of tax, one that will cover some or all of the monetary costs of legal drugs and is low enough that many people will buy from the store instead of the dealer
The potency of legal drugs can also be controlled reducing the number of overdoses which is another plus
Keeping drugs , something there is a vast demand illegal in a nation that cannot and will not control its borders for trade or migration is futile and only grows cartels , violent state enforcer goons , calls for gun control and so on
You've lost. Deal
A question for our host How exactly are you going to win a war in drugs? What is your victory condition and as you are so fond of saying, show your work.
You know as well as I do the profit margin for illegal drugs is so great it can undermine any agency in any nation state including ours.
On top of that, you seem to assume that it is an all or nothing strategy that is the only one that could be employed.
Harm reduction is a thing, make some legal and see what happens. If this fails, try others and eventually if needed make them all legal with controlled USP doses
This will reduce OD deaths nicely
Now I get the fact these crap heads make any nurses life miserable, They screw up everything they touch.
Until the root of the problem is fixed, i.e we have society that works and has hope, decent jobs and a functional system , you can't fix it
They are going to be there and you'll either pay for hospital beds or jail neds out of your pocket or quit your job for a lower paying one to pay less taxes. There aren't other options outside of organized rebellion
And the militia right loves to mouth off about that, they aren't capable of organization on the level of Antifa or ISIS much less enough to take on clown world.
So deal.
The sanest approach is to treat drugs like any other thing that's occasionally misused (guns, booze, cigs, porn, sex toys, weapons) and sold and live with it till we can figure out a way to make a society where demand is lower
Get back to me BTW when you have an idea for the later that doesn't involve religion no one wants.
@A.B. Prosper:
"Deal"?
California is being ruined by (among other things) a swarm of junkies, as is Colorado, and two dozen other states looking to go the same way, and your answer is "Deal"?
The people have made their choice (where they haven't had it imposed on them by black-robed goons), and we do have to accept that, but I don't think there's anything illegal or unconstitutional in letting them know how monumentally stupid they were for choosing it.
As it happens,my first home was Colorado so I am with you on that and you are spot on in that this is a stupid thing to do
I'll defend the judiciary in that the Constitution didn't give the Feds the power to ban alcohol , it required an amendment and it does not give them the power to ban weed or really anything else.
States can and they also have the power to make it legal as 26 already have.
A ruling that says "You can't make it illegal" is in fact the correct one though obviously it should have been applied to weapons as well
Now as the main point, the war is lost and unless you have some way to get enough anti drug politicians in office at every level, you can't even try and fight
The best you can do is to as I said deal and try and mitigate harm
And yes I know this sucks but there is no other option. Our hosts "actual war on drugs" will never happen ever and so long as dangerously potent weed is fine, might as well make the rest legal
"Corner the market and then raise the price forever as the sole supplier" is economic fiction. There are always alternatives, especially for trade with a long history of ignoring legislative bans.
DOPEC is fiction because the real OPEC requires a cartel to act in unison. Cartels are only stable with a small number of members. There are too many drug producers, in too many geographic regions, for a cartel not to break up.
Let the dope suppliers play their speculative supply-disruption games. Some middleman is going to make grain silos for drugs and average the price, just like they do for cereals.
So between 1/2 and 1% of the country was hooked on drugs, before doing drugs was cool.
Except many of those addicts had functional lives, because the threat of prison wasn't held over everyone in their supply chain, and disputes could be more peacefully settled in courts.
people are cooking carfentanil and methamphetamine here in their garages /now/. Carfentanil, by itself, is as toxic [as] nerve gas. The LD50 is the equivalent of three grains of salt in size.
If we had gun freedom, then we could load that in a hollow .22 short bullet and have a decent quiet pocket gun. Given the lightweight ammo, one day that gun will appear on a quadcopter. Pissed-off addicts who want to play first-person-shooter are what you prohibitionists should be thinking about.
And how hard will the cartels fight this, and/or try to take over? You're talking about trying to put them out of business, and take away their livelihood. They have networks throughout this country. They have billions of dollars.
"Shriek! The government has tanks and nukes! You can't fight a war against government and win!" Heard it. Cartels are small potatoes compared to government, which will be facing swarms of armed quadcopters soon enough.
Now, you decide whether you have better odds of disassembling Leviathan, or going after the drug problem.
Leviathan is self-disassembling due to unsustainable debt and anti-survival policies faster than any small number of libertarians could do by their own actions. Government at every level is broke. There's a tsunami of boomers about to retire, further alter the worker/retiree ratio, and then demand expensive medical care. Government: "help, I've fallen, and can't get up"
Eh, let them get their cut. Like everyone keeps saying, the illicit trade is going to happen anyway. Might as well get paid, right? Maybe pay for some bridges or after school programs?
High marks for gain-saying.
1) They have a monopoly on production already.
2) they have a cartel already.
3) Many of those addicts did not have productive lives, and in fact most did not. That's precisely why the small government folks of the late 1800s started passing laws restricting drugs being widely available.
History: still an actual thing.
4) Pissed off addicts are only worried about their next high. Ad infinitum.
5) The cartels can't win? Sell that B.S. in Mexico. Columbia. Bolivia. Afghanistan. And here, if we listened to idiots like you.
6) Call me when government and society collapses. But stop trying to dope it up before you give it a push.
When I can answer your naked gainsaying with obvious facts in about ten seconds, you're not even 1/10th as smart you think you are.
Back under the bridge with you.
@Borepatch
And just maybe d'ya suppose, that using Afghanistan as the tampon for our dope needs might be a wee problem with strict Muslims there, and the exact reason for Islamic fundamentalism to boil over there and want to come and kill us here?
Asking for 2000 people in the WTC on 9/11.
How many more actual reasons would you like to give them to be pissed at us?
How many more 9/11s would you like to see us fight?
How many more OIF/OEF wars?
We spent more in the last ten years IIRC, than we've spent on the entire (Not A Real) War On Drugs, that you bitch, whine, and moan about at the drop of a hat.
[Hint: that's one of the differences between a real war and a faux one: actual costs are astronimical when you really fight an actual war. We haven't, on drugs, since ever. It's just a federal jobs program.]
And what happens when you add pissed off Hispanics who've seen what this gringo loco problem has done to their countries in Mexico, Panama, Columbia, Bolivia, etc., do you want to face when their ex-pat kids vote here?
(Or was the plan all along just to make the U.S. safe for the drug cartels to operate openly here, like they can't do down there, and make the U.S. ten times the hellhole failed state Mexico is right now? Because total legalization would do that in about a year.)
When (if ever) do the unintended consequences of drug use swim up and bite you in the ass on this, Mayor Vaughn?
This entire idea is lunacy, always has been, and always will be.
I urge you earnestly to stop trying to gold-plate this massive turd and put decorative ribbons on top of it. You're playing with a ticking atomic bomb.
What percentage of addicts are welfare recipients versus gainfully employed?
Would reducing welfare reduce demand for illegal drugs?
The prospects for full, meaningful employment for the left side of the bell curve are diminishing with technological improvements, so I don't see the user side of the equation reducing much in future.
Based on the back and forth here and at Borepatch and Bayourenaissanceman, there exist:
No simple solutions.
No good solutions.
Unintended consequences to most solutions.
Choose least worst options; good luck getting those through Congress.
If welfare recipients had to pass a whiz quiz for drugs before getting their disbursement, welfare as we know it would end about next Friday.
Couple that with ending EMTALA for drug abuse, and addiction would lead to death, either by overdose or starvation, in about a month.
I'm fine with that if you think you can get it through Congress.
Legalization of any sort is merely throwing gasoline on the fire.
It accomplishes nothing worthwhile, while exacerbating 57 other problems the jet-fuel geniuses suggesting it deliberately ignore.
Your nightmare scenario is already happening BECAUSE of The War on (some) Drugs or more accurately "the war on plants that are NOT controlled by U.S. Corporations."
Prohibition on alcohol failed.
Your government cannot even keep drugs out of prison for fuck's sake.
"Historical note: Alcohol was legalized when Prohibition was repealed in 1933.
So tell the class in what year moonshining stopped in the U.S....?"
To add to this: fermenting wine, brewing beer, distilling whisky/brandy/et al is now a freaking home hobby. ALL components, from brewers yeast to fancy beer bottles to copper stills of every size are available via mail order/internet, it's right out in the open. How many folks are cutting a check to Uncle Scam when they homebrew a six-pack of a dark porter or a quart of hootch?? None, nada, zip, zero, nobody...…
Mike, there is no requirement for homebrewers to pay tax for personally consumed hooch up to a couple of hundred gallons so long as they don't sell it.
Most of it is not sold , just consumed by the brewer and his buddies
Hard liquor is something of an exception where there is a fair amount of tax evasion but we had a rebellion about that in 1790 . It's hardly new
Hell the Founding Father fought a civil war in part to avoid paying taxes so we are a nation of tax cheats, by national preference history as well as the immigrants from low trust countries . Broadly it's just not possible for the Feds to get more than 20% GDP in taxes at absolute most otherwise the Laffer Curve kicks in. C.F Hauser's Law
It doesn't matter how you play it and if revenue is the goal, best to use the least avoided taxes. If everyone is avoiding weed tax than don't tax it. I suspect though modest taxes will be paid just as the government collects tons of excise on alcohol and tobacco even with some evasion
Also re: taxes. Lots of people in the US evade taxes on things like Craigslist sales and yard sales where such taxes exist . Unless you want Uncle Sam's hand up everyone's ass , it's just gonna happen . The Us people are lower trust than in the past and all of them, every race doesn't much like paying taxes
It will in time get worse too.
as far as cutting off welfare for drug users, many states do this already. It's useless, the addicts just rob or kill people or just chuck urine on a cop to get a meal in jail. And no you can't starve them , sorry. Cruel and Unusual
Stil if anyone has an actually implementable solution other than the clearly failed one that can get through the Congress the President and the Courts I'd love to hear it
Everyone likes to dump on welfare and those who depend on it to live (not live comfortably, not get their welfare queen on. LIVE.)
Might I remind y'all that welfare is the hush money we all pay so society can make these people invisible?
As a wise man once said:
"SSI isn't taxed, and if you recall the First Law of Harbors, "taxation=representation": not taxing them is the same as not giving them representation. So for $700/month they don't call you to account for all the rest of the money. "Yeah, but don't they vote?" HA! You kill me. I meant actual representation: lobbyists."
It's not a right, in so much as Life, Liberty, Happiness and the pursuit thereof are rights, but it is in the contract. We pay, they stay away. Now we want to gyp them out of the money? Cough it up, peeps.
TPHM, you are an odd fit around these parts.
This blog mostly attracts militia right, libertarians and the occasional Paleocon like me.
That said most Conservatives are moralists and assume that the US is a moral nation. It was kind of, sort of at different times but its at its roots and bones a Leftist experiment in self determination that is becoming an abject failure.
THis drives the emotional response to welfare and drug use, both products if our inability to maintain stable families and stable employment against technology and social change
These days it is less moral and can no longer accurately be described as a White Christian Country. This means values that make sense for such a place are null ideas now
many also don't understand is that the Old Republic stopped being suited to the US once the frontier was colonized and we reached the industrial age. FDR like it or not created a new social contract and its the one, minus some changes still in operation
Baring a collapse as automation continues to kill jobs, that socialism we are seeing now with 40% of the GDP being state spending and the other 40% being wages mostly concentrated on the top 10% is exactly what you'd expect . I expect over time less wages and more welfare as well.
Its classic Marxist alienation from the means of production, a clunk way of saying, this is increasingly a nation of wage workers , debtors and renters not property owners or businessmen and such people wisely will level the playing field by government spending
And yes you are completely correct in that it is hush money and payola. The Right can resent that all they like but if they don't pay, they get to have the consequences which in my neck of the woods was a hard working engineer now being a near vegetable from a homeless guys pipe against his head
The only win condition is an authoritarian socially conservative economically populist state with enough understanding to be flexible if technology becomes a problem after the mass deportations
The right however would have trouble getting its people to agree the sky was blue or organizing a cookout so we'll get Brazil 2.0 they go on bitching about drugs and lose the country bit by bit
@AB Prosper
I get that a lot. My opinions fall all over the political spectrum. (My pronouns are Pi/Pey).
I like where your head's at. A lesson that America has to relearn from time to time is that if the high don't respect the low the low will raise the specter of Socialism until the purse strings get loosened up. Maybe elect a Roosevelt or an AOC or two.
Sorry to hear about the Engineer. Best wishes to him and his family.
Complete separation of government and economy.
Complete separation of government and education.
TPHM, He'd appreciate that.
Surprisingly his highly dysfunctional company, a multinational I will not name, took good care of him and gave him his pension and medical insurance for life.
Once and a while even those guys can do right.
BTW what do you mean by Pi/Pey?
My dad ran illegal booze from WV to Steubenville, OH, during the mid-1930's. He was 15 or so when he started.
It paid a lot better than mill work, with less chance of losing fingers and other body parts. He got out, as I understand it, just ahead of a major bust of the still's operation. His buddies went to jail, for a LONG time. He went to live with his older sister in Cleveland, and straightened up.
Note the dates of his crimes. Booze was legal. But the stills could produce it, and sell it, cheaper.
The same will happen to drug sales.
1) The Demokratik Peoples' Republik of Kalifornia is so fucked up for so many reasons that it's hard to name any one that is most responsible. Junkies and wetbacks are part of it. Democrats are responsible for the whole mess.
2) As noted, giggle bush is a plant easily cultivated almost anywhere outside of the Polar regions. It's kind of hard to eliminate it.
3) Most recreational potions can be synthesized. Who needs poppies when Fentanyl can be made from available chemicals? Weed can be grown as easily as tomatoes.
4) Cannabis O.D.s have killed somewhere between 1 and none. People there for weed are just overwhelmed with anxiety and would be fine when they come down regardless of whatever treatment is billed.
5) I recently saw an ad in the paper in which a local cannabis emporium was advertising one of its products @ $99/oz. I recall it going for $75 a quarter back in the early 90s.
6) Drugs constitute a true dilemma: All answers suck, and it's hard to say what sucks the worst.
Cannabis ODs are only cannabis ODs after the patient gets a $5-10K work-up that takes 2-3 hours to allow a diagnosis that will withstand medico-legal scrutiny.
Every bed you're using for that isn't being utilized to see someone with a heart attack, stroke, or other bona fide medical emergency.
Let me know when the penny drops.
"Okay, all drugs are legalized."
-- Fantastic! Now the DEA and 64 flavors of other pig can get off the dole and stop pretending they're useful to society instead of more ravenous tax-leeches that any Octomom ever was.
"You're going to tax them..."
-- Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul can speak for themselves, but then they're just "loyal opposition" cuckservatives and cucksocialists who have no interest in freedom whatsoever.
"and put the drug cartels out of business. You imagine."
-- They will be *easily* be put out of business, and here's how....
"1a) Where do coca leaves come from, to make cocaine?"
-- Irrelevant. The active ingredient (C17-H21-NO4, Cocaina Benzoylmethylecgonine) will be quickly synthesized in pill-factories with the final product crashing down to fifty bucks per 90-count bottle like everything else awesome at Sarmtech or any of a dozenty other competing places all undercutting each other pennies per milligram until they're virtually giving it away for free because robots are doing the work at almost every step.
The Latin American cartels would be insta-extint, like tall-ship sperm-whalers teleported into the age of fracking and LED lighting.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The only reason moonshine is still a viable "racket" is due to lingering government impediments in the form of taxation, age-restrictions, and other forms of workplace meddling (such as Title VII-mandated diversity quota-hiring) that make it more profitable to run a business off-the-books.
@ mike18XX
You imagine.
And d'ya think the cartels aren't going to tell Bayer, Merck, etc. "Say, that's a nice drug factory you've got...it would be a real shame if it suddenly burst into flames with everyone inside on a workday."
D'ya figure there won't be a severed horse's head in their CEO and chief chemist's bedsheets one morning.
D'ya figure there won't be employees' severed heads in a duffel bag left on the factory steps each Monday until the other workers get the point?
How much will those pills cost when every shipment needs the equivalent security of a presidential motorcade?
If they could do this so cheaply now, why d'ya suppose they continue to grow coca leaves in Bolivia and Columbia, stomp them in acid, leech out the chemicals, refine the product, and transport the product 6000 miles, when they could just be doing this undercover in small warehouses, right here, from legal precursor chemicals? Because they're really that stupid, and they just couldn't afford to hire anyone with a chemistry degree?
Capitalism is fun, but it's not a magic wand. Re'think, and solve for A, B, C,...through X, Y, and Z, not just X, and then get back to us.
And then bear well in mind that you're imagining that the government is going to do all this.
Got it.
The government that can't run the VA, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the State Department, BATFE, Social Security, welfare, food stamps, the Post Office, the census, the Park Service, AMTRAK, or even the DoD, not even the parts of it in charge of driving Navy ships without hitting container ships - the absolutely biggest, slowest ships on the ocean - will suddenly be able to make and distribute drugs, for almost free.
And it will totally work.
Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.
Also note that the original suggester of this boondoggle has now amended his plan from "Legalize and Tax" to "Legalize and Give Away Endlessly, For Free".
You know, like we do now with alcohol and tobacco.
Free heroin, cocaine, meth, etc., knowing a percentage of it will end up in the hands of children, and not just allowed by the government, but run by them, top to bottom.
Oh yeah, that will play in Peoria.
Right after Actual Hell actually freezes over.
Exactly as originally noted, this whole cockamamie project is nothing but psychotic bullshit, and should be regarded as nothing less than a desperate cry for psychological help by anyone promoting it with a straight face.
QED
"...d'ya think the cartels aren't going to tell Bayer, Merck, etc. "Say, that's a nice drug factory you've got...it would be a real shame if it suddenly burst into flames with everyone inside on a workday."
-- If that actually worked, they already be doing it in order "to tell Bayer, Merck, etc" that they're going to cut in on aspirin profits and start charging fifty bucks a bottle now rather than fifty cents? (Only Medicare is big enough to mandate that kind of a racket.)
Any Bayer, et al, that decided to submit to extortion would be immediately driven out of business by competition. This is the market-model they'd be up against, where grams-per-dollar for every product is updated constantly, and 1970s-style mafia tactics are merely "damage" that online market instantly route around. The Layer Cake future is already here, now.
Cartels could hold a gun to the CEO of every pill-maker in the Western Hemisphere, and they'd be undercut by these guys (and look at their market-caps). The cartels are pipsqueaks living an extended lease on life due to government policy. Hell, they can't even out-compete domestic pot-growers anymore, and with the likes of Amazon robo-delivery in the wings, will very soon now will be a relic of bad-guy casting for lower-tier police procedural shows on dying dinosaur networks.
The reason aspirin costs fifty cents a bottle is because acetylsalicylic acid is now made out of raw, precursor chemicals in industrial quantities.
I.e., nobody has to deal with cartels controlling the supply of willow-bark.
No, they wouldn't, because they can't find enough places to put the money they make now on narcotics.
Also, they're evil, not stupid.
Why in blistering fuck would they try to make aspirin (or any other legal drug) unsellable??????
That's just stupid.
In the immortal words of Riley Poole: "Albuquerque. See, I can do it too. Snorkel."
But if you go after the cartels' livelihood by trying to get Big Pharma in that business, all bets are off.
That's why you don't get to try spinning the board around, as if it might work.
Anybody driven out of business by extortion would be one less problem the cartels would have to solve, and their problem gets easier in each case.
Meanwhile, their poppy and coca fields aren't going away. if the governments involved can't stop them, Big Pharma sure as hell won't.
But for arguments' sake, if they did, and it somehow worked, where entire nation-states have failed, it begs the obvious question: why continue to feed the problem???
That's just more stupid.
But how long would a Big Pharma company stay in business with another Tylenol poisoning scare? About an hour.
The last one was a billion-dollar hit, and that was amateurs doing it.
Maybe this time they make exact duplicates of Tylenol bottles with lethal doses of carfentanil in it.
Then claim that was contamination from the company marketing all that legal dope you think they'd make.
It'd take news reports of about ten cases, and that company would go under.
(cont.)
(cont.)
And the cartels wouldn't stop at the Western hemisphere.
They'd go worldwide, in about a week, if they had to.
They'd even make it easy, under their long-standing policy of plomo o plata: they'd start with the carrot, and offer the board of directors a nice stipend just to say
"After consulting with our stockholders, and our consciences, even though it would be legal for us to start making heroin and cocaine products, we don't think that ought to be the business our company is in. We're here to help people, not make them addicts. So we decline to produce a single gram of that, ever."
Their stock would skyrocket, they'd be heroes to everyone but the dopers, drugs would stay illicit-only, and they'd get a nice cash bonus under the table from Columbia and Bolivia, every year, to keep it that way.
And once they'd taken the pay-off, they'd find they couldn't double cross the criminals down the road, unless they wanted to watch their spouses and kids disemboweled in front of them.
As far as cartels not out-competing domestic pot growers anymore, you're twenty years behind the curve, and haven't seen the tons of weed being walked across the border 24/7/365, for decades, as of 30 seconds ago.
Even, in fact especially, to states that have legalized and decriminalized it, because once they get it here, it becomes orders of magnitude less risky to move it around, and they pay zero tax, exactly as expected.
That's not even counting the literal tons the cartel is producing right here in national parks and forests all up and down the West Coast.
Read up on that, seriously. You're missing the big picture, yuuuugely.
You're flailing for how that wouldn't happen, but gravity predicts this is exactly what will happen, and it's borne out by the last few years of real-world experience, right here, right now.
CA's predictions on how much weed tax they'd collect from pot shops are coming in far lower than expected, and with the border the way it is, the weed bundles are coming up here in a conga line.
Your entire thesis is overtaken by events, and would be even more so if you imagined any drug company anywhere would ever go head to head with the narco-terrorists for that market.
And if you think the taxpayers will sit still for top-to-bottom government fields, government processing plants, and a government distribution system, to give the shit away free for the asking, and nothing would happen from any number of assymetrical avenues, I suggest you look into the tedious regularity with which Iran's nuclear scientists keep exploding there.
People would be killing politicians and bureaucrats in the streets, with grass sickles and machetes, and stringing anyone with a badge who got in their way up with baling wire from the nearest street signs.
By noon, the Tuesday you announced it.
And Bayer and Merck don't have to deal with pissed-off unemployed willow bark farmers with hundreds of billions of dollars, metric fucktons of weapons and minions willing to use them, and no scruples about slitting throats to preserve their own market share.
No points to Gryffindor for only telling the half of the truth that favors your conclusion.
Look at all the facts, and get back to us.
And before you reply, learn some economic wisdom from Guido the Killer Pimp:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5cS0_op1IE
"In a sluggish economy, never, ever fuck with another man's livelihood."
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