Here’s a better idea – and one that will help the federal and state governments fill their coffers: Legalize drugs and then tax sales of them. And while we’re at it, welcome all forms of gambling (rather than just the few currently and arbitrarily allowed) and let prostitution go legit too. All of these vices, involving billions of dollars and consenting adults, already take place. They just take place beyond the taxman’s reach.
Legalizing the world’s oldest profession probably wasn’t what Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, meant when he said that we should never allow a crisis to go to waste. But turning America into a Sin City on a Hill could help President Obama pay for his ambitious plans to overhaul health care and invest in green energy. More taxed vices would certainly lead to significant new revenue streams at every level. That’s one of the reasons 52 percent of voters in a recent Zogby poll said they support legalizing, taxing and regulating the growth and sale of marijuana. Similar cases could be made for prostitution and all forms of gambling.
According to Wikipedia, Gillespie has two sons.
So it is okay with him that his sons choose to shoot heroin? To raise some cash for the government?
Suppose he had a daughter.
He’d be cool with her being a tool to enhance the revenue streams of the government?
I think many of my leftist critics would be to find how liberal I am – in the classic sense of that word – but, as a father to two daughters and two sons, I see a problem with Gillespie’s reasoning here.
The question then: Who wants their child to be treated as a resource to be milked by the government for revenue? Who wants to offer up their child’s body to be used for that?
its never about them. just shows how caring they really are.
Then what’s the answer, Gaius? One can convincingly argue that the profits from the drug trade are destabilizing Mexico. If Mexico were to collapse, a Mexican Somalia on our southern border and the resulting tidal wave of refugees makes me shudder. The ‘War on drugs’ clearly isn’t working. And yet, if we legalize drugs, no one knows what the social costs will be. One wonders if the social costs incurred by drug legalization would be less than maintaining the status quo? I don’t know the answer. What else can we do stop the illegal drug trade that we haven’t already tried?
The simple way to see the fallacy of the question would be do you want your children to smoke? Smoking is legal does that imply that one has to smoke?
Likewise, just because drugs and prostitution are illegal, does not stop anyone from becoming a drug addict or a prostitute.
The real problem with drug legalization is that we do not want to produce an insentive for drug companies to figure out more and more highly addicting drugs.
@ feeblemind,
Actually, the social costs will be much less than feared, and will be similar to the ones we pay now. The great thing that returning our drug laws back to where they were before the Harrison Narcotic Act(1914) and its successors is that our society will be more moral and can better deal with the saner pattern of social costs than the corrosive pattern of social costs we have now.
Drugs were made illegal by using the same tactic of demonization now being used to squelch debate over “Global Warming” and to criminalize political disagreements. Hate Speech laws today are what the Drug laws were in the early decades of the 20th Century. Intoxication is intoxication, and we should handle the harms proportionate to the state of intoxication; not by exaggerating the “dangerousness” of the intoxicant. Principles of pharmacology and toxicology should be the basis for handling the social costs, not the desire to create criminals simply to control “undesirables” or “dissidents” as it is so often done by our soft tyrants.
“The question then: Who wants their child to be treated as a resource to be milked by the government for revenue? Who wants to offer up their child’s body to be used for that?”
Well gosh!. Taxpayers are, and have been for some time, little more than a resource for the government. It has been determined what we are. It sounds like we are just haggling about the price.
@cdquarles
Actually, feeblemind has an excellent point. Of course legalized drugs will create the incentive for even more dangerous drugs. Drugs, like gambling and prostitution, feed on peoples’ misery and pain and could not exist without it. This should be kept in mind.
Here in Texas the lottery was supposed to do two things – provide a steady source of public revenue while giving the public a legal way to satisfy its gambling itch. It has done neither, as this article shows. Other states are forced to use pricier (not to mention riskier) ways of luring gamblers.
But the problems of legalized gambling are overshadowed by legalized prostitution. In Amsterdam, human trafficking in sex slave and children as sex workers has increased rather than decreased since prostitution was legalized there. One of the “benefits” of legal prostitution was supposed to be a reduction of these type of sex crimes. Instead, they have increased as customers seek bigger and bigger thrills. And this does not even include areas of the world where “sexual tourism” – notably in children – is going on, and authorities look the other way.
One could make the argument from libertarian grounds that drugs, prostitution and gambling should be legalized, and I have some sympathy for that point of view. Certainly the government has too much influence as it is.
Given all of this, we need to put the calls for relaxing drug laws in perspective. Unless we can live with the consequences (which will almost certainly be all bad) we should not start down the legalization road. If certain drugs that are currently illegal are legalized, the “street” will produce even more dangerous and deadly drugs to compete with them. We will still have a drug trafficking problem, except that we will then have a certain percentage of the population that has been hooked on only slightly less dangerous drugs – legally. The advocates of legal prostitution in Amsterdam almost certainly had no desire to see women and children forced into the sex trade, yet that is exactly what they got. If the rest of the world cannot escape these consequences, how can we?
kids like balloons. maybe we can tax them also