Funding Enemies; Subverting Civilization; Incentivizing Crime
We Just Never Learn
An Investor’s Business Daily editorial on Monday, March 15th regarding the previous Saturday’s massacre of American citizens in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas:
President Obama expressed outrage Sunday over the broad-daylight massacre in Juarez of a pregnant American U.S. consular employee and her husband, which left their 1-year-old baby wailing in the back of their car. Within 10 minutes, a second attack by machine-gun-toting thugs killed the husband of another U.S. consular employee and injured his two children, ages 4 and 7, traveling in a separate car. All were returning from the same child’s birthday party.
Killings like this in the border city near El Paso are so numerous the State Department cautions against assuming it was a targeted hit — “although we are not discounting anything,” said spokesman Charles Luoma-Overstreet.
The death toll in the Mexican drug war has hit 19,000 now, with Juarez the worst-hit. Over the weekend, 50 people were killed elsewhere in Mexico.
The editorial goes on to rail against the violence directed at Americans, and calls for a tougher approach, on both sides of the border, to back up our inadequate $1.6 billion in equipment and training funds to fight the cartels.
While I am normally in agreement with the IBD editorial board, on this issue we part company. It is outrageous, immoral and delusional that, given the obvious carnage caused by prohibition – American prohibition – anyone can write with sincerity that the solution to the problem is stronger prohibition. It doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked. It will never work. Passing laws against human nature in order to enforce a social preference couched as a moral crusade against addiction is – in light of the observable global consequences – immoral. We have the addiction anyway, because the prospect of illicit earnings propagates armies of drug salesmen looking to create new addicts. That’s the incentive system and unintended consequence of law that we knew was bad when we were forced to repeal the 18th amendment to the Constitution.
Further consequences, without even trying to be comprehensive, are: 1) Funding our enemies in the War on Terror, 2) Exacerbating a sense of racial isolation among American minorities, esp. Blacks and Latinos, by stuffing our prisons with drug offenders, 3) Propagating criminal cartels and gangs all over the world, many of which are better armed than the police or army – and have no regard for the lives of other citizens, 4) Undermines the rule of law and the viability of our institutions by the use of bribery and intimidation – as well as huge shadow-economy profits that distort the economic life and incentives in any communities affected.
There comes a point in any large system where – regardless of its desirability or outcomes – so many people have a stake in its maintenance that it cannot be voluntarily changed. At that point, only catastrophic collapse is possible. We’re getting close to that conclusion, but I would like for our editorial writers to at least acknowledge that – so that we at least have the possibility of saving ourselves from this monstrosity in some more rational way.
Even just since the Nixon years, when the latest chapter of this ongoing debacle was written, shelves of largely ignored books have been printed, warning of the wrongheadedness of the scheme and its horrible consequences to individuals and whole societies. The bad consequences of addiction under legalization and regulation don’t even come close. And I assume that the journalist who wrote the article sincerely believes that the effort formerly called “the drug war” is correct policy, probably because, as William Bennett – one of our former Drug Czars believed – we simply cannot have a society that tolerates widespread drug use. Moral decay followed by chaos and economic collapse. And, of course, there’s really no such thing as ‘recreational drugs.’ Really?
That would be a fitting end to this rant, were it not for your all-time favorite feature:
FREQUENTLY UNASKED QUESTIONS
- As drug cartels become more common – in your community and mine, with violent intimidation and bribery the norm (plata o plomo) – who will you be able to trust?
- Do we tolerate the midnight raids on the wrong addresses and the resultant harassment – and occasional deaths – of our fellow citizens because it’s always happening to someone else; maybe someone you would never personally be associated with?
- If millions of people routinely used marijuana in the 70′s and are currently productive members of society, how is it a “Gateway Drug?”
- Did you know that most of our burglaries are caused by junkies trying to get money to support their habit, and that England briefly had a successful program that allowed heroin addicts to get their drug by prescription – not to get high, but to maintain themselves in order to function in normal jobs (a program, I hear, that was stopped by pressure from the US government)?
- How are our unemployment statistics skewed by the existence of such a massive Black Market?
- How profoundly does this affect the family and societal dynamics within Black and Latino communities?
- Other than the cartels and minor drug pushers, who is profiting from the status quo, and why should we tolerate it?
