Freddie deBoer on online life; Timothy Taylor on Social Security; Ruy Teixera on jumping ship; Free Black Thought on back-to-school DEI; Leighton Woodhouse on today's marijuana
The article on cannabis is populated by recovery center entrepreneurs, a particularly parasitic crowd. Propaganda is in their business model. The truth is they help almost no one except the judges who are looking for alternatives to jail sentences.
That said, legalization in the US is a disaster wrapped in a deception. The recreational/medical distinction is a legalistic slight of hand to ease cannabis into mainstream acceptance. One glance at the regulations faced by cannabis entrepreneurs should be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion that it represents a libertarian victory. An over-regulated market designed for big business which has decided the only way to compete with a sophisticated legacy market is to develop a "malt-liquor" category for cannabis by manufacturing flowers with astronomical percentages of THC for enhanced "recreation". And the continued success of the black market is guaranteed to endure because the government has constructed unsurmountable barriers to enter the legal market. Cannabis is a kind of microcosm of what's wrong with the entire US economy -- hamstrung by regulations that incentivize bad actors. And it's so complicated that solutions seem like a dream.
It is an odd but undeniable truth that cannabis has always been low and high status at the same time. The poor use it for escape and the well to do use it to enhance well being and facilitate associative thought patterns.
In either case, as long as it is kept away from brains that are developing, it is innocuous and all the fuss about it is a testament to a society's immaturity. (I include the artificial spiking of flowers by big cannabis in the category of making a fuss.) The libertarian victory will arrive when it's announced that possession, cultivation, sale and consumption is legal. Full stop. Also, the best treatment for alcohol abuse, which is deadly and harmful to others, is monitored cannabis use, which is neither.
The key fact supported by the Woodhouse article is that with cannabis, the dose makes the poison. Which shouldn't be surprising, because that's true of almost every other known drug and drug-like behavior. I'd add that "set and setting" makes a difference that complements the dosage difference. The effects of a glass of wine with family dinner and a whole bottle swigged alone are qualitatively different; so too is the poker game with friends qualitatively different from the evening spent at a video poker machine. We'd expect increasing loneliness and alienation to exacerbate the bad effects of cannabis just as it does alcohol, gambling, etc, but Woodhouse makes no attempt to control for that.
Given all that, is there a regulatory regime that respects people's individual bodily and mental autonomy, doesn't create excessive barriers to legal drug market entry, but puts harm-reducing speedbumps on the road to overdosing? Taxes proportional to dose and concentration-- so e.g. a big bottle of vodka would get a tax nonlinearly higher than a can of beer-- might be one path; so might packaging mandates. Cass Sunstein "nudge" types should want to address this kind of mechanism-design problem.
1) The optimal solution with entrenched not hard drugs is to make them inconvenient and expensive, but not illegal. Same with gambling and lots of other vices. We don't need to "return to the prohibition regime". We need to return to like the 1950s, or modern day Singapore.
I still think genuine hard drugs should be illegal, especially if they are not already entrenched in the culture.
2) My parents and I have paid a lot of money into social security. Let's not turn it into another means tested mess that penalizes people like us for being responsible. If you want to cut benefits, just cut them uniformly for everyone.
Office workers can certainly work past 65, but my Dad was barely hanging on at 65 because he worked a physical job that destroyed his body. Even with office workers, having the oldsters stick around keeps the younger crowd from moving up.
It's undeniable that drugs, including marijuana, cause a lot of problems. The real question, though, is whether prohibition of them causes even worse problems, like feeding money to organized crime. Almost everyone agrees that alcohol prohibition was a big mistake, so why did we make the same mistake all over again?
"I say that the smart phone mashed together the intimate world and the remote world."
This works in the reverse of your conclusion, too. You used to be able to present a slightly different persona to your family, friends, co-workers, associates, and strangers as necessary to lubricate social interactions. Nobody thought it was unusual to do this to perform the different roles we all fill. Social media, along with trends like 'taking your whole self to work', destroy that ability.
One possibility for Social Security: the overwhelming majority of recipients are white, and pretty soon most payers will be nonwhite. So what would equity demand?
The article on cannabis is populated by recovery center entrepreneurs, a particularly parasitic crowd. Propaganda is in their business model. The truth is they help almost no one except the judges who are looking for alternatives to jail sentences.
That said, legalization in the US is a disaster wrapped in a deception. The recreational/medical distinction is a legalistic slight of hand to ease cannabis into mainstream acceptance. One glance at the regulations faced by cannabis entrepreneurs should be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion that it represents a libertarian victory. An over-regulated market designed for big business which has decided the only way to compete with a sophisticated legacy market is to develop a "malt-liquor" category for cannabis by manufacturing flowers with astronomical percentages of THC for enhanced "recreation". And the continued success of the black market is guaranteed to endure because the government has constructed unsurmountable barriers to enter the legal market. Cannabis is a kind of microcosm of what's wrong with the entire US economy -- hamstrung by regulations that incentivize bad actors. And it's so complicated that solutions seem like a dream.
It is an odd but undeniable truth that cannabis has always been low and high status at the same time. The poor use it for escape and the well to do use it to enhance well being and facilitate associative thought patterns.
In either case, as long as it is kept away from brains that are developing, it is innocuous and all the fuss about it is a testament to a society's immaturity. (I include the artificial spiking of flowers by big cannabis in the category of making a fuss.) The libertarian victory will arrive when it's announced that possession, cultivation, sale and consumption is legal. Full stop. Also, the best treatment for alcohol abuse, which is deadly and harmful to others, is monitored cannabis use, which is neither.
The key fact supported by the Woodhouse article is that with cannabis, the dose makes the poison. Which shouldn't be surprising, because that's true of almost every other known drug and drug-like behavior. I'd add that "set and setting" makes a difference that complements the dosage difference. The effects of a glass of wine with family dinner and a whole bottle swigged alone are qualitatively different; so too is the poker game with friends qualitatively different from the evening spent at a video poker machine. We'd expect increasing loneliness and alienation to exacerbate the bad effects of cannabis just as it does alcohol, gambling, etc, but Woodhouse makes no attempt to control for that.
Given all that, is there a regulatory regime that respects people's individual bodily and mental autonomy, doesn't create excessive barriers to legal drug market entry, but puts harm-reducing speedbumps on the road to overdosing? Taxes proportional to dose and concentration-- so e.g. a big bottle of vodka would get a tax nonlinearly higher than a can of beer-- might be one path; so might packaging mandates. Cass Sunstein "nudge" types should want to address this kind of mechanism-design problem.
1) The optimal solution with entrenched not hard drugs is to make them inconvenient and expensive, but not illegal. Same with gambling and lots of other vices. We don't need to "return to the prohibition regime". We need to return to like the 1950s, or modern day Singapore.
I still think genuine hard drugs should be illegal, especially if they are not already entrenched in the culture.
2) My parents and I have paid a lot of money into social security. Let's not turn it into another means tested mess that penalizes people like us for being responsible. If you want to cut benefits, just cut them uniformly for everyone.
Office workers can certainly work past 65, but my Dad was barely hanging on at 65 because he worked a physical job that destroyed his body. Even with office workers, having the oldsters stick around keeps the younger crowd from moving up.
It's undeniable that drugs, including marijuana, cause a lot of problems. The real question, though, is whether prohibition of them causes even worse problems, like feeding money to organized crime. Almost everyone agrees that alcohol prohibition was a big mistake, so why did we make the same mistake all over again?
"I say that the smart phone mashed together the intimate world and the remote world."
This works in the reverse of your conclusion, too. You used to be able to present a slightly different persona to your family, friends, co-workers, associates, and strangers as necessary to lubricate social interactions. Nobody thought it was unusual to do this to perform the different roles we all fill. Social media, along with trends like 'taking your whole self to work', destroy that ability.
One possibility for Social Security: the overwhelming majority of recipients are white, and pretty soon most payers will be nonwhite. So what would equity demand?
If retirement benefits and health insurance were financed with a Vat in stead of a tax on wages the trust finds would be properly financed