The War on Drugs

Let me count the ways I loathe it....

As a society we elect a government in order to keep our streets paved and get our mail delivered, not to tell us what we can and cannot put into our bodies. As such I object to the prohibition of marijuana and other drugs on the standard libertarian “stay out of my business” grounds. But you don’t have to be an anarcho-capitalist to see the fundamental folly of prohibition, and the practical considerations are more compelling than any philosophical argument. 

First, if government officials want to spend our resources butting into our privacy, they at least need to get some bang for our buck. While we can’t even begin to estimate the resources being plowed into the fruitless enterprise of stopping people from consuming drugs, it’s easy to see that the impact has been negligible; the positive impact that is. What the war on drugs has done is inconvenienced importers and caused a spike in prices, driving money out of the domestic economy and pouring it into the pockets of the dealers. It’s also packed our prison system with non-violent drug offenders (over half of all inmates fall into this category). Since our $50 billion prison system is quietly becoming privatized, rich people are profiting from all these people doing time. More time means more money, which in turn means lobbyist jackals will descend on Washington to advocate for any legislation that throws and keeps people behind bars at $35k a year. Bravo. The war on drugs is flunking its cost-benefit analysis.

No matter what you think about drug use or drug users, if you can’t stop it, legalize it. Why? First, because then you could tax it.  Taxes on tobacco and alcohol yield tens of billions annually in local, state and federal revenues. Second, because then you could regulate it. Pharmaceutical companies can be held accountable for distributing dangerous drugs because the industry is by law transparent. Johnson & Johnson settled a Texas lawsuit out of court this year for $185 million. They had been accused of illegal marketing practices pertaining to an anti-psychotic drug that may not have been as safe as J & J said it was. But what happens when street dealers distribute heroin laced with fentanyl and people get killed, as they did in Pittsburgh and other cities in 2006? Nothing but funerals. Because black market drug dealers don’t register with the SEC and FDA. A corporate whistle-blower can produce research and accounting documents but a snitch on the streets can only offer a nickname and a burner cell number.  Pharmaceutical executives also don’t accidentally shoot children in a botched drive by. So there's that too.

The entire exercise would be somewhat excusable if we hadn’t experimented with the prohibition of alcohol less than a century ago and gotten a lucrative black market for our trouble, enriching a gangster class who put its money in a safe instead of paying taxes and investing in the stock market. The lesson we should have gleaned is that strict drug and alcohol laws are a lot like strict gun laws- the people we’re worried about will get them anyway. It’s the tax-paying, law-abiding old lady with glaucoma who goes without.

What is harder to quantify than potential tax revenues or the costs of enforcement are the innumerable negative consequences, financial and otherwise, felt by society due to the countless people contending with addiction. These are often the same people who place an additional financial burden on this country through our social programs. Drug addicts often struggle to hold a job and frequently develop health problems related to their use. Hello food stamps and hello Medicare. It’s well established that going to prison simply makes the cycle permanent. If we’re going to spend $35k on incarceration, why not direct that towards the kind of true rehabilitation that can get at least a portion of these people off the social safety nets and back into the work force? We have to be practical.

In summary, the American taxpayer spends huge sums on law enforcement and the incarceration of non-violent offenders, while at the same time missing the boat on tax revenues and ceding dominion over the marketplace to the dealers.  Those who choose to consume (they pay taxes too) cannot be protected from shady suppliers and have minimal options should they seek treatment.

I know that for many people it just feels like weed and other drugs should be illegal. And it feels like legalization would intensify what is already a gigantic problem. But that’s just the point- drug use has become a gigantic problem in spite of this massive assault by the federal government and its agencies. It isn’t working. If you can get past the stigma, the correct path for the government here is clear. Step one: legalize and levy a tax on recreational drugs. Step two: insert itself into production and distribution; ensure the (relative) safety of the supply and generate additional revenues. Step three: use those revenues to treat addiction and the mental health issues that so often contribute to elicit drug use in the first place.   

To Drill Baby Drill, or not to Drill Baby Drill

The off-shore drilling debate became incredibly polarized and over-simplified by both sides during the last presidential election. (I know, what else is new.) Two things are clear. Oil spills and oil prices both suck. Otherwise, neither the pros nor the cons of an expanded domestic drilling program have ever been adequately quantified. In 2009 the democrats did their self-satisfied environmental protector routine while republicans were in take-no-prisoners drill mode.

On one hand it’s standard liberal operating procedure to champion a noble cause with zero regard for the tradeoffs. The downside of refusing to drill domestically was largely and predictably ignored by anyone on the left. But the flip side of that charge sticks for republicans too- what do we really stand to gain if we take the oil companies off their leash?

Who can forget the chants of “drill baby drill” emanating from their convention in ‘09; all those supporters drunk and delirious with petrol-lust? But how much did prices drop when drilling commenced in the Gulf of Mexico? Did every American get a fuel-perks card good for dollar gasoline? The only people who benefit when a new area opens up for drilling are those who own the leases. That oil hits the open market like all the rest; it doesn’t get routed to American pumps at a discount. Prices in general might drop a penny per supply and demand, but that doesn't justify the mess unless you were a BP stockholder. How can we change that? And if we do, how much will that change things, given that we have fewer reserves in this country than Qatar or Kazakhstan? There may be answers to these questions. If there are, we want hear them. So conservatives need to expand the message this time. If they want to risk a giant disaster in another region, we need to hear more than a rabble of blithering idiots screaming “drill baby drill” and “we’re sending money to people who hate us!” 

Take the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, for instance. What quantities of proven, probable and possible reserves are present? How much time and resources are required for primary, secondary and tertiary extraction? Who will be given the drilling rights? What mechanism is in place to ensure that the American people will genuinely benefit? And how much impact at the pump can any of this ultimately have if we have less oil than the backwards country they made fun of in Borat? Keep asking these kinds of questions and it begs another- has this issue been all style and no substance all along?

I don’t excuse democrats from these types of demands, but the larger burden of proof falls to republicans in this case because their position is the one that risks further environmental catastrophe. And, in the political arena, because they are the ones seeking to win back the White House. They cannot simply rely on slogans and quick-hitter talking points again, not just on this issue but with regard to the assault on Obama in general. They can do it, and through primary season they to a large degree have. But it won’t be good enough to get general election votes from those who think critically.


EDIT (to clarify my personal thoughts):


I am all for more drilling in theory. But like a lot of issues I feel that voters on both sides of this particular fence are too busy root-root-rooting for the home team to hold the politicians accountable. Since there are major left wing staples like alternative energy and the environment that, on the surface, don't mesh  with *anything* relating to drilling, you can forget about those guys. So we're left with independents and mainstream republicans. And since independents are ignored until the general election, it falls on the party faithful to demand from its leaders answers to the questions I posed above. Yet it largely remains an echo chamber. This is my beef.

Let's Talk Taxes

A favorite stance to take among many on the left is that the wealthy in this country should “pay their fair share” when it comes to taxes. 

Here’s a quick scenario- you and three friends plan a vacation together. You charge the hotel room, which costs $400 a night, to your credit card. Do you then…

      

A)    Collect $100 per person for the room.

or

B)    Compare tax returns and conclude that, to be fair, the friend making $100,000 should pay $200, the two making $60,000 should pay $85, and the one making $35,000 should pay $30.

Naturally you’d go with option A.  A person's “fair share” of anything is based on what it costs and how many people are splitting it. It has nothing to do with how much money people make. That doesn't mean that a well-off friend can’t hook up his buddy if he's going through a rough patch. But we call that generosity, not an obligation. Self-righteous liberals would do well to remember this.

It’s convention to say that the government provides us with things- safe roads, police departments, military protection. But the reality is that we, as societies, provide ourselves with these things. Your town has firefighters because the townsfolk pitched in and hired them, not because the government was generous enough to go get them for you. The government is a glorified middle man, and societies elect government office-holders just like your group of friends nominates its most anal-retentive member to book a hotel room.

The governments of the United States, including the federal, state and local levels, collected $4.9 trillion in total taxes in 2011. With a population of 313 million that comes to about $15,000 per person. That’s how much the things Americans have agreed to pitch on (via our representative democracy) cost last year (to keep it simple let's ignore our staggering debt). Your town pitched in for schools, your state pitched in for highways, and your country pitched in to blow shit up in Afghanistan. Everyone’s fair share of all that stuff and more came out to about 15 grand.

Obviously most Americans can’t afford to fork over that kind of money every year. But we can’t kill only the terrorists who plan to bomb an affluent area, or fix potholes only for those above a certain bracket. And nor would we want to. But that means that regardless of how you feel about concepts like supply-side economics and trickle-down theory, those who have the most must pay more than their fair share.

Naturally we’re not always going to agree on exactly how much more the most fortunate (or most clever, or hardest-working, or most devious, or whatever) should pay. That will always be a conversation. But instead of starting that conversation with indignant demands, let’s start it with “thank you.” Thank you for paying more than your share so the children of alcoholics have clean water to drink and safe food to eat. Thank you for paying more than your share so the children of dropouts have a chance to escape the poverty cycle. Thank you for paying more than your share so that working class kids can borrow money for college.

And after that we can all go back to boldly chucking around uninformed opinions on fiscal and monetary policy. Entitlements! Job creators! Job destroyers! Special interests! Pork barrel spending! Blah! Blah!! BLAH!!!

The Afghan Question

The absence of a clear finish line continues to complicate any discussion of what to do about Afghanistan. Our justification for going in initially was based on a widely accepted tenet of international relations. If a government is unable to prevent its territory from being used as a base for attacking another country, that country is justified in going in to address the threat. Well address the threat we did, in typical badass American fashion. I watched it on TV and loved it. But since victory was never defined and an exit strategy was never articulated, we need to make several determinations before settling on the best course of action.

There is no question that we have managed some successes in the traditional military sense of driving back enemy forces and assuming control of contested territory.  And few would argue that those gains won’t be lost without American boots on the ground. But this isn’t a traditional military campaign. In WWII the allies drove the Germans out of France and forced their surrender by penetrating Germany itself. In the American Civil War Lincoln knew that by destroying Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia he would cripple the South’s ability to wage war and defend its bid for independence. Both cases resulted in the unconditional surrender of America’s enemy. But there will be no total victory in Afghanistan. In the absence of a clear end-game we need to answer the question- are the tactical gains we've made worth defending, and if so at what cost?

While I generally agree with following the advice of the commanders in the field over the whims of politicians, I limit that to after the decision has been made that there is a job to be done and the army is the right tool for that job. Because just like a carpenter is apt to see a solution to a dilapidated house involving hammers and nails, a general is apt to see a solution to a country in flux involving troops. Especially in the case of Afghanistan, where so much effort and so many lives have been invested in the victories we’ve won, our generals could be forgiven for having a hard time accepting that those victories may be pyrrhic.

Unfortunately that’s just what they are. While our initial retaliation to 9-11 was just and effective, the nation-building campaign that followed is doomed. The institution of democracy has been favorable for mankind but it doesn’t make a good export- particularly to the third world. Assistance from abroad can aid the process (France’s role in the American Revolution and NATO’s role in the Libyan conflict are instructive) but the revolution must be internal in origin if the new democracy is to sustain itself. It makes sense in the same way that a man who earns a fortune is more likely to retain it than a man who inherits one. Totalitarianism in the Arab world has concerned the west for decades. But it took the uprisings in Tunisia in late 2010 to inaugurate the chain reaction of civil disobedience that has toppled regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya, and triggered significant fundamental changes in several other countries. These populations are earning their democracies. The Afghans have earned nothing. The west has tried valiantly to hand it to them, but until they earn it themselves they will never keep it.

This hasn’t come as a surprise to anyone with a discerning eye on history and current events. Historians, philosophers and political scientists have long explored the link between the development of democracy and factors such as wealth, education and the accessibility of information. In the case of the Arab Spring experts have also been quick to note the contributions of social media to the spread of the movement. Take a close look at Tunisia, where the first uprisings began. 33% of the population has access to the internet and 85% have a cell phone. One in six even has a Facebook page- not as shocking when you consider that the median age is now 24. 57% of Tunisians enter the workforce with a college degree, though high unemployment persists and is blamed largely on the government. The people of Tunisia are young, educated and socially connected. And they’re pissed off. They were ready to rock. Now turn to Afghanistan. Afghanistan has one tenth the per capita GDP of Tunisia ($900), and one tenth the internet access (3.4%). They were not ready to rock.

Unfortunately no amount of territory seized by our armed forces and their allies can change that right now. Regardless of our intentions, nation-building is a fruitless enterprise if the domestic ingredients aren't in place and the populous isn’t ripe for revolt.  The good news is that unlike the days of Voltaire and Paine, the messages of the modern heroes of democracy can spread across the Arab world quickly. But for America, as much as I hate to say it given the friends of mine who have served over there, the right move is to withdraw from Afghanistan, and quickly. Our focus should be on the safety of our troops and the local population, and only secondarily on the strategic interests of the Afghan security forces. The Afghans will have democracy when they are ready to take it.

College Football Quick Fix: No Rematch

There are layers and layers of conversation to be had about the state of college football. But let’s start with one easy fix- no conference rematches in the title game.

There is a quick, clean, two-step explanation for voting for the LSU-Alabama rematch. Step one, LSU is the most decisive number one in recent memory. In addition to going through multiple top-five and -ten competition to win their conference, they took out the champs of two other BCS conferences. Step two, after four quarter of football both the scoreboard and the eye test told us that Alabama and LSU were essentially equals. LSU needed four missed field goals by the Bama soccer players to survive. From that perspective it’s pretty straight-forward: if LSU is a decisive number one, Alabama must be an equally decisive number two. That rationale was satisfactory for a lot of voters.

And sure, Alabama may very well be the 2^nd best team in the country. For that matter Arkansas may be the 3^rd best team, and Georgia may be the 4^th best team, and South Carolina may be the 5^th best team. Who knows? More relevant, who cares? When it comes to picking a title game, I don't, at all.

This brings to my mind the original Ultimate Fighting Championship. The purpose of that first tournament was to put representatives of the world’s great fighting styles in a cage and see which champion, and which style, was supreme. Chances were that if the Olympic gold medalist in Greco-Roman wrestling could beat the Thai kick-boxing champ, then the silver and bronze medalists could too. But a rematch of the Greco gold medal match sure as hell didn’t headline that first pay-per-view. We already get to see wrestlers compete with wrestlers and boxers compete with boxers on a regular basis. The essence of the UFC is inter-sport competition. Like the kick-boxer to the Olympic wrestling champion, Oklahoma State offers to LSU the compelling contrast in style that made bowl games so appealing in the first place.

Arguments can be made that the traditional conference system has outlived its usefulness. But for all its faults this system provides a landscape of arguments unique to college sports. Is grimy SEC football superior to the spread offenses of the mid-west? How will the physical Big East style translate to tournament basketball with unfamiliar refs? Are the women’s power forwards of the Big Ten more butch than those of the Big Twelve? If we’re going to have these arguments then let’s get some resolution,otherwise what’s the point?

NFL Trade Deadline

Fixing Earth is about more than criticizing glaring problems. It's also about making great things greater.

The NFL is King of American sports and stays so by getting better all the time. Despite a very conservative, corporate image, the NFL always stays aggressive, and never settles. Colossal contracts with the networks didn't stop the advent of the Red Zone channel for example (one of the truely fantastic concepts to come to fruition in the history of sports-on-television, by the way). Whether its something tremendous like Red Zone, or just a tiny rule change we barely hear about, the NFL remains vigilant and proactive when it comes to opportunities for increasing it's awesomeness.

Such an opportunity exists right now that I hope will quickly be siezed, and that is that the league is sorely missing out on a compelling and fruitful trade deadline.

There's an easy argument in favor right off the bat: Everyone loves the human resources side of sports these days. Cases-in-point are fantasy sports, rivals.com rankings, and the NFL Draft itself, a bonanza that's become a sport within the sport. A toothless trade scene costs the league an opportunity to claim yet another date on the sports calendar for football. This is low-hanging fruit.

Beyond the excitement of the rumor mill is the opportunity to improve the caliber of playoff football. Parity is an essential part of the model, but only in the grand scheme of things and only in the summer and fall. A level playing field across the league, legitimate hope in all 32 cities, and 16 competitive games each week are all good for business- in September. But ultra-high quality football and the clashing of titans for a place in history are good for business in January. Unfortunately there will be at least a couple playoff contenders moving forward with no way to replace theur injured quarterback, hurting the quality of play in what should be bigtime games. Perhaps more disturbing, I DO NOT want to see a petrified young soccer player decide a playoff game. Like it or not, place kicking is still a part of the game, and the 2011-2012 playoffs would be (marginally) better off if Adam Vinatieri participated and Shaun Suisham did not. Such a swap would seemingly be pleasing to the Steelers and Colts as well. But it won't happen.

Like all those relief pitchers and 4th outfielders who got shipped this July, there are plenty of kickers, nickel backs and return men (Josh Cribbs to the Pats?) who belong in the postseason. But we never see player movement similar to baseball. I don't know what the roadblocks are, and I'm not inclined to look into it.  I do know that the NFL could sweep them away, whatever they are. And, being the forward-thinking, opportunistic juggernaut that it is, I hope it will sometime soon.

NHL Overtime

Let’s take a break from re-alignment.

One of the more glaring stupidities in sports is the way the NHL handles the scoring of overtime and shootout losses. A normal regulation victory has always been worth two points. If two teams tied they split the two points. When the brief overtime and shootout were introduced it was decided that it was unfair to come away empty handed if you battled to a tie and lost in the admittedly gimmicky 4-on-4 or shootout. While the winner would get the full two, the loser would still get a point for the regulation tie.

You don’t want to treat the overtime/shootout loss the same as a regulation loss? Fine, but only if you adjust the points for the overtime/shootout win accordingly. Instead, under the current system, a game that goes to overtime is worth more points than one that does not. Not only is this random and stupid, but it gives teams an incentive to sit on a tie in regulation rather than pulling out the stops to secure the fleeting two points- because those two points aren’t fleeting at all. Teams know that extra point will still be there in overtime, when they’ve already locked up a point. Why risk that point to go for it in regulation when they can risk nothing to go for it in overtime?

The English Premier League has gone the opposite direction. A clean win is worth three points. A tie is only worth one point apiece. If two teams split a two game series they are better off than if they tied twice. This puts pressure on everyone to gun for the win even if it means risking the point from the tie. In the NHL the reverse is true. Splitting a series on two shootouts earns each team three points. Splitting in regulation only earns them two. As a result, if two teams put on an exciting, aggressive final few minutes of a tie game they are making a strategic blunder. The optimal strategy, in fact, is to sit around for three periods doing nothing in unspoken collusion. Plain and simple, this system is idiotic. If you want to be equitable, while also inducing aggression and excitement, make it three for a clean win, two for an OT win, and one for an OT loss.