Once They Buy You they Own You

[Jccarlton]

At least with the devil there is a nullification clause in the contract:

http://mises.org/daily/2293

[MSimon]

At least with the devil there is a nullification clause in the contract:

http://mises.org/daily/2293

But with the Devil you have to be clever. I have yet to see much cleverness in America lately.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwEqEBimjy8

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrnsiQu2soI

[choff]

I miss getting the signatures in blood! It's all done with touchscreens now.

[Teahive]

A very interesting read. It raises the big question of how such a change of attitude, among businessmen and others, could be brought about. The incentives seem to be pointing the wrong way...

Offer the typical businessman the opportunity to escape the constant pressures of market competition, and few of them are able to withstand the temptation.

I wonder if a lot of free market advocates are hurting the cause by seemingly putting competition above all else, to the point that the market is perceived as hostile and undesirable. Or made so by those which take this philosophy to heart.

I'd like to see a free market where collaboration not competition is the dominating mindset.

[MSimon]

I'd like to see a free market where collaboration not competition is the dominating mindset.

Competition is good. So is collaboration. I see both. It is all good. As long as government doesn't put its fingers on the scale.

[Teahive]

I'd like to see a free market where collaboration not competition is the dominating mindset.

Competition is good. So is collaboration. I see both. It is all good. As long as government doesn't put its fingers on the scale.

I'm not saying competition is bad. It's a good driver of human ingenuity. It's bad, however, when it's taken so far as to prevent collaboration, which is even more important as a motor of innovation.

Too many people look at short term gain for themselves, when sharing their ideas would make everyone better off - including themselves, because they, too, benefit from the refinements others come up with.

[Diogenes]

I was wanting a place to post this. This seems as good a place as any.



The Snare of Government Subsidies

Younger physicians today do not recall what it was like to practice medicine in the good old days. But the good old days of 1977 were not all that good. From the era preceding World War I, when the Rockefeller Foundation promoted the government-licensing system that restricted entry into the profession by controlling medical education, the march into the trap of tax-funded medicine began.

The expansion of political power in the market process has been going on in the West for about a century, at least in the modern form of interventionism, starting with the social security legislation of Bismarck's Germany in the 1870s. Governments have evolved a strategy by which whole industries or professions are captured by the bureaucratic state.

http://mises.org/daily/2293

[MSimon]

And yet you seem fine with government subsidies (prohibition) for the illegal drug cartels. Which are also in fact subsidies for the legal drug cartels.

Who is going to buy anti-depressants at the cost of A dollar a dose when you can grow your own for less than a tenth of a cent a dose. In fact a grow your own supply should run about $10 a year - tops. If grown like hot house tomatoes.

When I checked 10 or so years ago anti-depressants represented a $42 bn a year business in America. A very significant part of big pharma income. Probably even more now.

[Diogenes]

And yet you seem fine with government subsidies (prohibition) for the illegal drug cartels. Which are also in fact subsidies for the legal drug cartels.

Next you will be trying to tell me that not taxing them enough is the same thing as a "subsidy."


No, a subsidy is a direct payment to an entity for the purpose of encouraging their production of whatever. By your logic, we were "subsidizing" the Nazi War machine by giving them an opponent to fight.

Who is going to buy anti-depressants at the cost of A dollar a dose when you can grow your own for less than a tenth of a cent a dose. In fact a grow your own supply should run about $10 a year - tops. If grown like hot house tomatoes.

When I checked 10 or so years ago anti-depressants represented a $42 bn a year business in America. A very significant part of big pharma income. Probably even more now.

I do not believe that opposition to Marijuana (Which you strangely invoke as a substitute when *I'M* trying to discuss HARD DRUGS) is based on it's impact regarding the pharmaceutical industry. Most of the people that *I* know who oppose it, oppose it for two reasons.

1. It starts people thinking that using drugs is acceptable, therefore leading them to harder and more dangerous substances.

2. It tends to turn those who smoke it into lazy good for nothing morons that want to lay around and mooch off of others.


My personal feelings are that if you already have a means of support and do not have to work for a living, then you have the wherewithal to indulge. Even so, it is not good to influence others who are NOT FINANCIALLY INDEPENDENT to try something that might cost them their job or their life.

[MSimon]

In this particular case taxing them is a subsidy:

Let me explain to you how it works. Fear rules the black market. If the authorities crack down - tax - the market then sellers just raise their prices to more than compensate. Thus the crack down increases profits. Drawing more sellers into the market. Kind of the opposite of what you had in mind isn't it? And you know - none of those sellers check ID.

The freebooters of old understood it:

The Opium Trade
"If the trade is ever legalized, it will cease to be profitable from that time. The more difficulties that attend it, the better for you and us."
-- Directors of Jardine-Matheson

http://www.ctrl.org/boodleboys/boddlesboys2.html

Unfortunately - fear at the level most western governments are willing to apply will not keep the Star Systems in line. Have you considered agitating for Communism? Those boys knew how to keep people in line. For a while.

[MSimon]

My personal feelings are that if you already have a means of support and do not have to work for a living, then you have the wherewithal to indulge. Even so, it is not good to influence others who are NOT FINANCIALLY INDEPENDENT to try something that might cost them their job or their life.

Spoken like a true aristocrat (who will be exempt - except they already are). Just looking out for the little people - the main targets of Prohibition enforcement. Your kindness is finally showing through.

“Political tags–such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth–are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.” – Robert A. Heinlein

[Diogenes]

My personal feelings are that if you already have a means of support and do not have to work for a living, then you have the wherewithal to indulge. Even so, it is not good to influence others who are NOT FINANCIALLY INDEPENDENT to try something that might cost them their job or their life.

Spoken like a true aristocrat (who will be exempt - except they already are). Just looking out for the little people - the main targets of Prohibition enforcement. Your kindness is finally showing through.

I hate to break it to you, but the rich get away with things the poor cannot. I don't make the rules, I'm just pointing them out. I doubt you are going to get any sympathy for trying to turn it into a class warfare issue. The stuff is bad for rich folk too, but other than wrecking their life and/or killing them, they can better afford to pay for a drug habit.

“Political tags–such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth–are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

I hate to contradict Robert Heinlein, because the man really was extremely intelligent, but in this he is wrong. Everyone wants people to be controlled, including Him. He wants people to not steal from him. *Controlled*. He wants people to not threaten him. *Controlled*. He wants people to behave in a civilized fashion and obey the normal requirements of a society. *Controlled*.

He is in FAVOR of people being controlled, he is just against forms of control HE disagrees with. Again, as Edmund Burke said:

Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.” – Robert A. Heinlein

Till their lack of self control gets your throat cut.

[Diogenes]

In this particular case taxing them is a subsidy:

Let me explain to you how it works. Fear rules the black market. If the authorities crack down - tax - the market then sellers just raise their prices to more than compensate. Thus the crack down increases profits. Drawing more sellers into the market. Kind of the opposite of what you had in mind isn't it? And you know - none of those sellers check ID.

So the orders and prices for new munitions from Axis Factories go up when we fight back? Therefore we are subsidizing them? Got it.

The freebooters of old understood it:

The Opium Trade
"If the trade is ever legalized, it will cease to be profitable from that time. The more difficulties that attend it, the better for you and us."
-- Directors of Jardine-Matheson

http://www.ctrl.org/boodleboys/boddlesboys2.html

Oh, there is no question that free competition will drive the prices down till profit = 0. That's a basic tenet of economics. That applies to any product or service. The profit may be important to the dealers, but the addiction is more important to the society.

In a legalized drug society, the profits would move towards zero, while the addiction would move towards 100%.

[MSimon]

the addiction is more important to the society

Quite so. And since people take pain relievers to relieve pain - what are you doing to cure or prevent the underlying causes? Genetics and PTSD.

Susceptibility to PTSD runs in my family. My Dad was an alcoholic. I was an alcoholic at age 16.

The first mate and I started having kids some 30 years ago. And most of what I know now with intellectual underpinnings I knew then on a gut level. And I did my best to see that none of my kids had inflicted on them what my Dad and I experienced during our respective childhoods. It seems to have worked.

To get an "addiction" in a pleasant place like America you need two things - genetics and trauma. In the short term not much can be done about genetics. But we could do something about the trauma - if people weren't so obsessed with the manifestations of that trauma - the taking of pain relievers - chronically.

And what is your proposed cure for the "problem"? Inflict enough pain on people until they give up their vile chronic taking of pain relievers. It is to laugh. You support the perfect method for getting the opposite of what you want. As do quite a number of people.

Fortunately I have been educating people on the subject for quite some time and I'm beginning to get a little political traction. Most of what you know about the subject was emotionally imprinted on you. As the cohort so deeply imprinted dies off my understanding will prevail and we will change the laws to conform to our new understanding.

My friend the detective (retired) thinks 4 or 5 more years.

[MSimon]

In a legalized drug society, the profits would move towards zero, while the addiction would move towards 100%

That is quite impossible in a pleasant country like America. Heroin use rates haven't budged for 100 years. Legal or illegal about 2% of the population dabbles with opiates and something like .3% are chronic users.

Of course if you keep doing as much as you can to make the country unpleasant I believe you could move those numbers some.

Your idea - inflict so much pain on the users of pain relievers that they give up on pain relief - is non-sense on stilts. And the problem is that the terrorism (battering rams at 3 AM) is just random enough (got to make the numbers) that innocents are being terrorized and killed. Bad mojo if you want to keep the war going. And it is having a spill over effect in that government is now using the terror mechanisms to collect student loans. Among other things. Because of that I confidently predict we will give up the whole vile mechanism of punishing people in pain. And we will look on our flirtation with terror with the disgust it deserves. A viler habit than chronic drug taking by orders of magnitude.

In the mean time I'm giving serious thought to campaigning for Obama in '12. My slogan for that effort? "The President We Deserve." or maybe "A Stupid President for a Stupid People" but that one being a little too obvious might work in reverse.

And of course - if you have money you get different treatment. But if it gets too blatant people rebel. And it is starting to get way too blatant. The rich man goes to rehab. The black man goes to jail. People are beginning to notice. And some of them don't like it. Enough to move elections? Not quite yet. But soon.