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But this is just very interesting. They deserve a “link to them” as Google sees it.
Normally I find the freakonomics people are a little off (including the book..) but what I read of this (most of it) I found was very interesting, and the comparison of our heavy traffic to bread lines in Soviet Russia was… well very good.
Thought this was interesting. I’ll repost it so you can (as always) spare yourself the YouTube comments after the clip.
With all of the talk of Obama’s “Economic Stimulus” bill, which I’ve heard called many things from Rush Limbaugh’s “Porkulus” bill to Hannity’s “End of Capitalism As We Know It” and at least on the right, there seems to be a pretty general consensus that the thing is a bad plan.
Besides tax cuts, however, I haven’t heard much of an alternate idea from Republicans, and one of the problems with the laissez faire approach is that the American public has demonstrated through previous depressions and recessions that they want the government to do “something” to alleviate the problem. Unfortunately, “something” is often worse than nothing, but I have an idea that no one is talking about.
I’m talking about drug legalization. Let’s start with marijuana, which is less addictive than tobacco and has caused zero deaths due to overdose (unlike alcohol) and has no long-term mental health effects, so the issue becomes more black-and-white. The debate over whether marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco has been fought, and the consensus is in: it is. If it was legal, along with hemp which is also illegal, there would suddenly be an income outlet for the thousands of unemployed, a cash crop which can be grown small scale on bad land and even in cheap PVC hydroponics in the cities. The demand for the non-addictive drug has already been demonstrated, and hemp has many industrial uses which I won’t enumerate here but are easy to find on the Internet.
Now, because marijuana is easily grown there aren’t really drug wars fought over it. The drug wars now ravaging Mexico between the drug cartels and the Mexican government are caused by “hard drugs” like cocaine and methamphetamine.
Coke, meth, and opium derivatives are harmful and addictive. Heroin addicts often lose their teeth, and meth has been known to destroy lives. So why would anyone try either of these horrible drugs? The answer: marketing. Meth costs a fortune on the street, and so does heroin, because they are illegal and addictive. This combination causes an extremely high demand as junkies try to get their fix and a very high scarcity so the cost skyrockets. With high prices and high profits, the drug lords have the money to fund pushers to find more vulnerable users and fight the police and militaries that dare stop their trade.
These laws are put in affect to “protect us,” but they end up costing the government billions of dollars, cause gang wars in the inner cities (gangs, like the cartels in Mexico, are funded by drug money), and even the sovereign state of Mexico is under threat of toppling due to the unstoppable flow of drug money. Are we safer now?
The only way to end these wars, this senseless violence, is to legalize drugs. All of them. But marijuana is the first step. If marijuana becomes legal, we will be well on our way to the legalization of all drugs and the end of drug wars, and will benefit from an economic stimulus as an added bonus. This legalization will birth a trillion-dollar industry, clean the slate of over a million Americans who were found guilty of possession, and save the government several billion dollars yearly.
Obama should listen to this advice. I’m not the only one giving it; recent surveys show that marijuana legalization is the #1 most wanted gift from the president his voters are hoping for. So let’s get a bullet list. Legalize marijuana and what does the American public (and Obama) get:
- Happy constituents
- Lower cost of prisons (fewer inmates)
- Economic stimulus
- A step toward the end of gang violence
- Plummeting usage of very hard drugs such as meth as pushers vanish
- Help for addicts will become more available (like AA for alcoholics)
Seems pretty simple, doesn’t it? Then why, I wonder, doesn’t anyone ever bring it up?
This is scary stuff. Some parts of the Bush Administration I’m more unhappy with than others, and one of my least favorite parts is the Department of Homeland Security. Check this out.
In short, a Dell customer found a hardware keylogger in his laptop, and when he asked the police about it they sent him to the DHS, and when he asked them, they said they were not obligated to tell him why it was there. What?
Combine that with Obama’s “civilian national security force” and 1984 might be very short in coming.
Obama’s speech, for those of you unfamiliar with it:
This was going to be a long post. It’s a complicated subject.
But for now… http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/news/2664/professors-indoctrinating-students-not-in-our-university
I find that this article sums it up pretty well. Maybe it’s not apolitical enough or something but I think that it’s got the gist of the situation.
Today the United States swore in a new president. There were celebrations that were lavish beyond all previous occasions and for about 24 hours before the inauguration there was hardly a channel on TV that wasn’t celebrating the end of the Bush regime and the beginning of the Obama Age.
There was no longer any pretense of nonbias; it was a blatant celebration. Bush was undoubtedly the worst thing that had ever happened, a war criminal, and a delusional leader, and now Obama was coming to save us from ourselves. This is despite the fact that all of the aforementioned assumptions are opinions and not fact and hardly taken as a general consensus by the large part of the American public.
This is combined with a general expression of hate and discontent for those who disagree, especially in academia. I know from personal experience that when someone said “I’m a Republican” they were met with looks and statements of disbelief and disgust. How could anyone be so stupid as to be a conservative?
This is because Academia is liberal, and the reasons of that go far beyond what liberals assume. Liberals want us to believe that Academia is liberal because smart people are liberal. But Academia is liberal because of a much more complicated reason (I’ll write about that at some other time) and because of the browbeating that takes place.
It is much harder to defend a conservative position than a liberal position. If a liberal says “should anyone have to sleep on the street?” and a conservative says “no,” and the liberal interjects “then we should provide welfare!” in order to defend the conservative position, the conservative has to launch into an extended explanation including market economics and always ends up sounding callous and uncaring despite the belief that fewer people will sleep on the street through his approach than through his opponents.
Most of those picking a fight like this don’t have the desire to learn or the attention span required to understand, much less consider, the conservative’s line of thought. So they blank out. They stop thinking, they stop arguing, and move on with their lives.
Now I don’t care what your political beliefs are. I don’t care if you love Obama or you hate him. If you love him, please, by all means, enjoy your victory. But know WHY you like him, know WHAT you voted for, and THINK about every issue you support or attack long and hard. Because there is no greater sin than the refusal to think.
At first I was kind of irritated when I saw it…
But I thought back a few years…
And a few more…
Oh what the hell…
Apparently getting elected is criteria for being Time’s “Man of the Year,” or being a future mass murderer ( Hitler was Man of the Year in 1938 ) or even past mass murderer (Stalin was Man of the Year twice).
So never mind. Obama can enjoy that title with the rest of us.
Yeah, the rest of us.
Bunch of cop-outs.
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if, only, by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.
– Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, pages 965-966
