It’s Thursday, February 04, 2010 and the beat goes on.
Death to the criminalization of marijuana.
It’s time to legalize pot. No, really. It is. No, we’re not gonna cite a bunch of studies where marijuana use causes/doesn’t cause this or that. No, we’re not gonna cite the costs involved in prosecuting someone caught with a dime bag of weed. No, we’re not gonna debate whether or not it’s better/as bad/worse than alcohol.
We’re instead going to apply my favorite litmus test: Who is injured by this? First, to get the nonsense out of the way:
- Driving while impaired is a crime, regardless of it being from alcohol, prescription drugs, over the counter medicine or a medical condition.
- In and of itself, simply being impaired, be it from booze, legal drugs, medicine or illness is not a crime.
- Being at work drunk will get you fired. For some jobs, it’s a felony.
- Growing your own veggies cuts into the profits of stores and people who produce food for a living.
- Economics is economics whether we’re talking about soup or nuts.
These dogs won’t hunt.
So, in the safety and comfort of his own home, Ted fixes himself a nice whiskey sour, sits in his Lazy Boy and watches the TV. He has another and another and another, until he stumbles off to bed. Now, aside from the next morning’s hangover, who has Ted injured by this activity? Note that Ted did not beat his wife, his kids, his dog or his cat. Note also that Ted did not get behind the wheel of his Suzuki and go careening about the town. No, he got pleasantly buzzed and went to bed.
Fred lives two apartments down. Fred fires up a joint, sits on his Serta futon and watches the same TV shows. He finishes that joint and burns another, then another. He too gets up and totters off to bed. Now, aside from waking up three hours later, eating a box of vanilla wafers and going back to sleep, what has Fred done to injure someone? Fred likewise assaults no family members or pets and does not drive his Subaru around the town stoned. He also got pleasantly buzzed and went to bed.
Okay, well Fred did buy his dope from a drug dealer who bought it from another drug dealer and by doing so has enriched the lives of some fairly unsavory characters. I have to question if unsavory characters would be involved at all, were marijuana not illegal. Ted could just as easily purchased his hooch from bootleggers, who also can be a properly unsavory bunch.
The question then remains, who has Fred injured? Note that even had Fred beat his wife, that is already illegal, drunk, stoned or sober. Had Fred drove his Subaru while impaired, that also is illegal, drunk, stoned or sober.
I don’t see a lot of value in outlawing something whose use, in and of itself injures no one. For the most part, automatic weapons are illegal to possess in and of themselves. This because of the perceived potential for mayhem and behavior that’s generally unsafe for fellow citizens. But, if an illegal AK47 lays under someone’s bed; who is injured by its simply being possessed by someone who’s not supposed to have it?
It’s what we do that’s the problem. Shooting up a fruit stand is already illegal whether it’s done with an Uzi or a musket. I think we need to get away from banning otherwise harmless things and instead focus on the consequences of doing things that harm others.
The case can be made that Fred is harming himself but the same case can be made for Ted and his whiskey. The main difference here is that Ted actually suffers pain the next morning where Fred just feels like his tongue is wearing a sweater.
I’m not at all sure that legalizing and then taxing marijuana is an idea I like. I’m just not comfortable with adding to the bureaucracy. I somehow think that taxing it would generate just slightly less revenue than what is needed to have the infrastructure necessary to tax it. Regulate it, maybe for quality purposes, but I think the market could probably do that better. Folks that sell bad ganja just don’t seem to stay in business for very long.
Maybe I’m wrong? I’d love to hear about it if I am. I hate being wrong, so if you can set me straight (and that holds with anything I blog about) then by all means, let’s discuss. Otherwise, death to marijuana being illegal.
In other news, I think I know what the problem is.
We seem to have a bunch of people “governing” the country who don’t know a lot about how stuff works. They sure don’t seem to know how business works. In a prime example of fixing what ain’t broke, the Senate is rolling out a bill that will give tax breaks to businesses who hire new employees.
Good idea, huh? Except the tax break applies only if the new hire has been unemployed for more than 60 days. Oh, it gets better still. Rather than simply giving he employer a $5,000 per job tax credit (like the President wanted in his State of the Whatever address) this bill exempts the employer from paying their share of the Social Security payroll taxes for the new employee.
Which is a good deal, providing you’re paying the new hire more than $83,000 a year, then you get to save $5,063 in payroll taxes. If you hire someone at $32,000 a year, you only get $1,952. If you hire a minimum wage employee, $919.
I could be completely wrong here, but I don’t see companies jumping all over this.
What I truly don’t understand is how this is being touted as a bi-partisan effort. What republican(s) signed off on this crap? How did we wind up electing a whole Senate that knows nothing about how business works?
Look, we want businesses hiring again. That we can agree on. We want businesses hiring the best qualified workers they can for the price. I’ve taken a more intense interest in the help-wanted ads these days and I don’t see any ads saying “Must have been out of work for at least 60 days.” Why hobble businesses that actually want to hire this way? I can see trying to make an incentive for employers to hire at the higher wages, but I don’t think this will work as well as a flat $5,000 tax break. I mean, why complicate it?
If this gets passed and results in dropping unemployment by one point, I’ll be amazed. And I don’t mean the 2 point drop that’s fixing to hit around the end of March. That has NOTHING to do with this and had NOTHING to do with economic stimulus. It’s Bush’s fault anyway.
In other news, 18 year-old Richard Sangret, pleaded guilty to three counts of robbery and two counts of burglary. This includes the robbery and beating of a pizza delivery driver and a downtown mugging. For his trouble, Judge Susan Watters ordered Sangret to pay joint restitution of nearly $30,000 sentenced him to concurrent sentences of 15 years, with 10 suspended to the Department of Corrections. She also recommended him for the state’s boot camp program.
Okay, never mind that the Gazette piece is badly written (like omitting HOW MANY concurrent sentences), but I’m going on the assumption that this wasn’t a plea bargain, but rather a straight up, guilty plea.
Which makes me wonder what kind of crimes result in hard time in these parts.
5 years DOC usually means he’s into a pre-release as soon as there’s room. The boot camp thing means he’ll probably be back among us in a year or so. Oh, I forgot to mention that two of these were violent crimes.
I understand that plea bargains save money and that a trial is not always necessary to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. My umbrage is with what are ridiculously lenient sentences handed out as a result of these plea deals.
But unless the Gazette is omitting that part, this doesn’t look like a plea deal, but rather a milk-kneed judge. As with my thoughts on legalizing pot, if I’m way off base, then by all means let me know.
Or, you can be an idiot and only want to argue about my posting anonymously.
Not mine, but worthy of many yucks: 
Pushing this up a little early. I have a meeting with the boss to air grievances and attribute easily explained phenomena to divine intervention. At least that’s what I’m going there for. Who knows what she wants.
So we close off a little early today with this:
