by sandy82 » September 12th, 2005, 8:47 pm
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LOL, aeroue, my fantastic notion was never meant to work. Only to bring up ideas, reasonable or not, and--one hopes--cause people to think about the issues. You have a good knowledge of economics: you can't price a commodity at zero unless you have an inexhaustible supply. How many pages of A1 graph paper to draw those supply and demand curves? :)
I agree with you that the government would have to be heavily involved.
The bottom line, I think, is that relatively soon marijuana will be have to be decriminalized on a broad scale--whether moralizers like it or not. There's a simple reason. Governments can't afford to lock up the marijuana users anymore. The social benefit is almost zero; the monetary cost is huge.
We have a war in Afghanistan, a war in Iraq, the Goddess Shiva pointing fingers in and at Washington and New Orleans, an aging national electric grid, a large number of illegal workers that nobody seems able to find, that good old reliable fund-raiser Ken Lay who is yet to be tried, a White House being investigated for exposing an employee who liked her anonymity, an anthrax mailer is still at large....
With all this, and the rebuilding of houses for about 400,000 people, we're supposed to spend money on additional prison space for people who smoke marijuana?
I don't smoke it, but I can't get excited about people who do.
Perhaps we could solve the whole matter at little or no cost. We can ask Bill Clinton how to smoke the stuff without inhaling. :wink:
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