justice – Page 65

The Case For Cannabis: Prohibition Raises Prices But Also Raises Incentive to Supply

One of the most common arguments for cannabis prohibition is a microeconomic one. The idea is that making cannabis illegal makes it more expensive, which means less people can afford to use it, which means the harmful effects of cannabis use are minimised. The logic is that people won’t be able to afford to harm themselves. As this article will show, this argument, common though it is, is mistaken.

If one assumes that cannabis use is inherently harmful, then one appears to have a clear-cut case for reducing the amount of suffering in the world by making it illegal (that cannabis is not inherently harmful is another argument, and will not be considered here). Making it illegal means that only the black market is able to supply it, which means that the end user has to pay a risk premium that takes into account the cost of Police harassment of the cannabis grower, and the inefficiencies that this harassment introduces into the growing process.

This risk premium makes cannabis more expensive, because the end user has to pay for all of the product confiscated by Police, or stolen by other criminal actors, or which was never grown because the size of the grow room was limited by the need to keep it clandestine. All of these factors serve to drive the price of cannabis up, which – according to the law of supply and demand – serves to reduce cannabis use.

The mathematics checks out. However, the core economic argument that cannabis prohibition reduces harm by disincentivising people from buying cannabis falls down, for a number of reasons.

It is true that prices fall sharply when cannabis becomes legal. The average price of an ounce in Colorado is NZD259, which means that it has fallen almost by half since legalisation took place. Websites that track the price of cannabis across various American states show that the price has fallen as low as NZD100 an ounce in places like Washington, where it is both legal and where the ability to supply is relatively unconstrained.

It isn’t true that this fall in prices leads to more use. Surveys in Washington have found that teen rates of cannabis use remained the same after cannabis legalisation. It is also noteworthy that teen rates of cannabis use in Holland are unremarkable in any sense. These surveys reveal that cannabis prohibition does not deter use.

In any case, the most important question to be asked about the high prices of cannabis caused by prohibition is this: who is getting all the money? In the same way that alcohol prohibition made Al Capone and his fellow Chicago gangsters rich, so too does cannabis prohibition funnel consumer wealth into the hands of the black market. This inevitably means criminal gangs, most of whom are deeply unpleasant people who are using the money to fund enterprises that genuinely do cause mass human suffering.

Once criminal gangs start getting involved in the cannabis trade, it means that there is going to be a lot more violence than if they weren’t involved. The black market means fighting for drug turf, which means intimidating other members of the black market away from certain territories through violence and the threat of violence. It means murders, kidnappings, gun violence, and all manner of other low-rent behaviours that lower everyone’s quality of life.

High cannabis prices incentivise all of this. The higher the cannabis prices are, the stronger the pull of the black market for cannabis on the various shady operators out there. Not only that, but the higher the stakes, the more ruthlessly people are willing to behave in order to secure a share of the profits. No-one is going to kill anyone else over the right to sell cannabis for $75 an ounce.

So the fact is that, in the final analysis, the economic equation balances out. The higher the price of cannabis, the lower the demand, true – but the higher the price, the higher the incentive to get into the black market opportunities for cannabis. If you are a criminal, and you don’t want to work, then growing some cannabis to sell to 15-year olds at $400 an ounce seems like an attractive proposition. If those 15-year olds are happy to wait until they’re 18 to buy it legally at $150 an ounce, well then you’re shit out of luck.

Cheap, legal cannabis would take a large slice of the black market, and render all criminal action in that slice uneconomic. This has several advantages, the foremost of which is that criminals can’t make as much money out of cannabis as before and therefore do not dominate the market. Another advantage is that people will be consuming a much higher grade of cannabis once it’s grown by professional horticulturalists and not gang members, and they will be able to do so more safely.

Cannabis ought to be made legal in order to disincentivise criminal actors from moving into the black market for it. Cheap, mass-produced, high-quality cannabis will take away the profit from what is currently a black market enterprise, which will have the effect of removing most of the criminal element from the cannabis trade. This will have the overall effect of reducing crime and suffering, because the criminal element causes more suffering than is prevented by cannabis being too expensive for some people to harm themselves with.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

Do We Need A National White Guilt Day?

Pressure on white people to acknowledge their collective racial guilt continues to grow. Various people in New World countries are agitating for their respective nations to have a day of remembrance for settler massacres or other colonial atrocities that took place in their nations. Suggestions like the one to ditch Columbus Day for Indigenous People’s Day in America or to mark a Parihaka Day in New Zealand are becoming more common. This essay suggests a more radical solution: that we institute a national White Guilt Day to take place once a year.

There is a large, and growing, ethnomasochistic sentiment in the modern West. Many leftist Westerners derive an almost sexual pleasure from heaping crap on other people on account of their supposed complicity in racial crimes – a kind of non-consensual symbolic salirophilia. Mostly this movement is driven by the same people whose sexual frustration morphs into other mass expressions of hatred, such as those behind alcohol, cannabis and speech prohibitions. Let’s acknowledge this, and agree to get it out of our systems with an orgiastic celebration of it once per year.

National White Guilt Day can be the day in which all white people are reminded of their collective racial guilt, which they carry on account of that white people are racist. On this day, all white people are to be reminded of their collective guilt in all of the crimes of slavery and colonialism, up to and including the Holocaust. Schools and government offices will have special ceremonies to mark the crimes of white people and how white people have failed to pull their weight in making a contribution to humanity.

It doesn’t matter if any white person’s ancestors also fought to stop those things. On White Guilt Day, white people will be told that their ancestors didn’t do enough. If you are white, you are guilty for slavery, even if you have ancestors who died opposing it. If you are white, you are guilty for colonisation, even if your ancestors brought prosperity, medicine and an end to tribal warfare to the places they settled. If you are white, you are guilty for the Holocaust, again even if you have ancestors who died opposing it, because they should have died sooner by opposing it harder.

On White Guilt Day, the white side of the narrative is not permitted to be heard.

No-one is permitted to mention that the life expectancy among Maoris is now forty years higher than it was pre-colonisation, or that the average Maori is five times wealthier than the average Tongan, whose nation was not colonised. No-one will be permitted to mention the proportion of Jews among the Bolshevik leaders who starved to death ten million people in the Ukraine. No-one will be permitted to mention the Musket Wars, or the the Holodomor, or Unit 731, or the fact that Black Americans commit murder at four times the rate of others, or any other atrocity that was or is being committed by non-white people.

On this day, the television will be forced to recount a litany of white crimes, perhaps going all the way back to Alexander. The narrative will leave listeners in no doubt that the white race has conducted a sustained campaign of hatred against all the other peoples of the world, who were purely innocent and lived non-violently in a state of harmony with all other living beings. All the evils in the world, on White Guilt Day, will be blamed on the scheming of the white race.

Perhaps we could even go as far as having street parades to mark particularly terrible acts of white evil. Willing white people can march in the street flagellating themselves with jumper cables, while onlookers pelt them with rotten eggs and excrement. Local churches will no doubt choose to march and be seen in such a parade. At the end of this day, all the people who worked themselves up into a saliromaniacal frenzy by going on about how evil white people are can go home and jerk themselves off, and then we can all continue as normal until next year.

Of course, White Guilt Day will have to take various forms based on the location. So as to not create resentment it will be necessary to minimise the free speech restrictions, so that no-one in America is allowed to mention that American slavery was stopped by white people, but people in other countries are. Likewise, Kiwis will not be allowed to mention that Parihaka was used as a base to conduct raids on nearby settlers, but people in other countries will be.

The most important objective is to have a day to signal to all humanity that white people are uniquely evil, among all the races of the world, on account of the unprecedented level of racism upon which all of their all-gotten gains have been made, and that all of their innovations and advancements would have been made by other races anyway so they deserve no credit. Then we can get all the resentment, envy and displaced class hatred out of our systems and spend the rest of the year being polite and normal.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

The Case For Cannabis: Cannabis Does Not Lead to Crime

One of the reasons offered by prohibitionists for keeping cannabis illegal is that that cannabis leads to crime, by way of some quality inherent to itself. This is a favourite reason trotted out by people whose livelihoods are dependent on government funding for cannabis prohibition, people who are often pigs at the trough in more than one sense. The truth is not only that cannabis is not criminogenic by itself, but that cannabis prohibition is what has caused criminal behaviour to become related to the substance.

One common line of horseshit that people often hear with regard to cannabis use is that it warps people’s brains and makes them impulsive, and thereby criminal. By means of some nebulous kind of brain damage, people who use cannabis lose their ability to control their own inner malice and naturally come to start abusing themselves and other people, both mentally and physically. They come to commit crimes of opportunity when they would normally have resisted the impulse to do so.

Another stupidity is that cannabis addiction leads to stealing to service the cost of the addiction. Confusing cannabis users with the worst kind of crack or heroin user, this stereotype has it that legal cannabis would lead to a large number of people becoming addicted to it and then stealing from other people to get the money to buy more cannabis. Ignoring the fact that finding a dealer who has a proper supply is many times harder than getting enough money to buy the weed in the first place, this idea suggests that prohibition is good because it leads to fewer burglaries and muggings.

The fact is that neither of these glib just-so stories is true.

There is indeed, a link between cannabis and crime, and it comes from the criminal associations that have to be made in order to maintain a cannabis supply. Because cannabis is illegal, the only people that can supply it regularly are professional criminals. So a person who has a need for medicinal cannabis has to deal with professional criminals on account of that they are forbidden by law to deal with a pharmacist.

It is true that, when a person who needs a regular supply of medicinal cannabis comes into contact with a professional criminal, this can lead to crime. What is also true is that this criminogenic effect is a consequence of cannabis prohibition, and has nothing to do with the nature of cannabis itself. The professional criminal might expose the cannabis user to other drugs, or to illegal firearms, or to stolen goods, or even to blackmail. This is a result of the fact that only criminals deal in cannabis when it’s illegal.

Cannabis doesn’t make people stab and rob other people by itself. Going without cannabis, much like going without other psychiatric medicines, mostly just puts people in shitty moods and carries a risk of psychosis. But if you’re the sort of person that does stab and rob people, then its almost a certainty that either you are involved with cannabis or that you move in the same circles as someone who does.

So it’s true that there is an association between cannabis and crime. But this association can be explained by the fact that both are illegal, rather than that involvement with cannabis inherently causes criminal conduct. In places where cannabis is legal, as it (sort of) has been in the Netherlands for some decades now, people who want small amounts of cannabis – even if they want it regularly – can get it without coming into contact with the criminal underworld.

As a result, cannabis does not lead to exposure to harmful criminal activity in places where cannabis is legal at the same rate as it does in places where it is illegal.

Because of all this, we can state that the truth is really close to the opposite of what’s commonly said. A Forbes article from earlier this year showed that crime had fallen in Mexican states that border America, on account of that cannabis law reform had taken the cannabis trade away from the black market. Homicides related to the drug trade were believed to have fallen 41% because of cannabis law reform, as incidents of turf wars over illegal cannabis sales essentially vanished.

These statistics reveal a couple of things. Not only does cannabis not inherently lead to crime, but cannabis prohibition itself inherently leads to crime. Prohibiting cannabis is to move it onto the black market, which is to ensure that organised crime will fight over territory and distribution profits. Once there are large, black market profits to be made in the trade of an illicit substance, ensuing violence is all but guaranteed.

The laws against cannabis prohibition can only be supported if a person understands nothing of the crime wave that followed in the wake of alcohol prohibition. Cannabis prohibition takes all the legitimate demand for the substance – and the demand for it is legitimate, not “drug addiction” – then gifts all of that demand to the black market, who are the only people willing to supply it. This means that it’s prohibition itself that causes the crime that is associated with cannabis, and not the cannabis itself.

Cannabis law reform is necessary so that people who want to engage in the cannabis trade are not exposed to the criminal underworld. This will reduce crime rates by keeping citizens who would otherwise be law-abiding away from the sort of professional criminal who might take advantage of them, or who might bring their criminal influence into other areas of the cannabis user’s life.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

How A New Zealand Nazi Party Could Eliminate All Competition Through Existing Mechanisms

Suprisingly few understand that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party came to power by winning democratic elections. Fewer still understand that the subsequent march from liberty to totalitarianism was made in a small number of entirely legal steps. This essay suggests something original: that a New Zealand equivalent of the German Nazi Party could assume dictatorial powers by exploiting current New Zealand law.

The German National Socialist Worker’s Party won 33% of the party vote in the November 1932 federal elections, which was eventually enough to get Hitler, the leader, appointed German Chancellor. From there, the Nazis succeeded in having all opposition banned by means of the Reichstag Fire Decree and then, later, the Enabling Act. The effect of these two pieces of legislation was to make Germany into a one-party state, with all political power held in the Nazi Party.

But wait! you cry. The New Zealand system is different to the Weimar Republic. Our Mixed Member Proportional system is designed to prevent extremists from taking power, by making it impossible for parties to get representation unless they get a proportion of votes above a predetermined threshold. This is true – but there’s a catch. The fact is, this threshold is both a precedent and a mechanism for totalitarianism.

A party needs to get at least 5% of the party vote before it is allowed to have any seats in Parliament. Any party that gets less than 5% of the vote gets no seats at all (unless they also win an electorate seat). The logic is that if you cannot command at least 5% of the vote, then it is best to exclude you (and your voters) from Parliament entirely, on the grounds that you represent a radical extremist movement.

This logic is essentially the same logic that Hitler used to ban the Communists, only wrapped up in prettier packaging.

A hypothetical New Zealand Nazi Party that knew that they were going to get, for example, 33%+ of the vote, could simply raise the MMP threshold to 30%. This would mean that a party needed 30% of the total party votes in order to be allowed to have democratic representation. This New Zealand Nazi Party would then be the only party that got over the threshold, and consequently be the only party allowed to have a seat in Parliament.

Some might object this would be undemocratic, on the grounds that it would exclude too many people from having a say. But there are already enormous numbers of people who are excluded from having a say. It is an obscenity that a party can currently get 4% of the party vote and not be allowed any representation, especially when a slimebag like David Seymour can get in with a little over 10,000 votes.

After all, if it’s permissible for a hundred thousand people to have their democratic voice silenced because of some arbitrary threshold set by anti-democratic forces, then what does it matter if that threshold is raised a bit by slightly less democratic forces? The precedent has been set, by the status quo, that such conduct is acceptable. The only question, then, is what proportion of people are to be silenced.

Raising the threshold to 30% would only change the degree of disenfranchisement. There would be no categorical change.

Effectively, those parties that could get over 5% now have colluded, and they have made it impossible for anyone who can’t get over 5% to get into Parliament. It has been decreed that any movement with fewer than 120,000 or so members will have no voice at the table. This is borderline criminal, as it makes it impossible to oppose the political class through the democratic system. If your problem is with neoliberalism, then there’s no point in voting, because the entire political class is neoliberal.

A party has to be neoliberal to get enough attention from the neoliberal mass media to get 5% of the vote in the first place, because electoral financing is doled out in proportion to how many votes a party received in the previous general election, so without already being big enough to get over the 5% threshold it’s impossible to get enough media coverage to get there. The game is completely sewn up.

The major parties can’t even point to the relatively small “wasted vote” count and say that the small size of this voting bloc is evidence that few people are dissatisfied with the system. The fact is that many, many more people might vote for alternative parties if the threshold was low enough for them to have any chance of being allowed to have representation. But when even 100,000 votes isn’t enough to get a single seat in Parliament, the will to start new parties is massively, and artificially, suppressed. So we don’t know how many voters would vote for the National-Labour-New Zealand First-Green Establishment if there was a fair threshold.

The way to get around this is simple. Not only should the 5% threshold be removed, but it should be clearly stated that the presence of such thresholds is undemocratic. As such, not only will there no longer be one but precedent is set for there never to be one in the future. Even better, we could scrap the farce that is democracy entirely – but that’s a topic for another essay.