people i know keep showing up in the nytimes, lately. like chris francese, marion winik and nick gillespie. but i have to say that gillespie's proposal - legalizing, regulating, and taxing all vice - is not groovy. i just want to start out by pointing out that such policies lead to bizarre ironies, like the gov working to stop smoking, and running on tobacco taxes and settlement money. indeed, i could see a state that depends utterly on the illness of its citizens and also provides them with healthcare, which is cool in its ironies, but senseless. in a way, this makes it perfectly clear that the state is a parasite and a faction of society - an independent group of people with a set of common interests, as opposed to a bunch of public servants - and i guess eventually that would just make anarchism obvious. so that would be good.

i think all these vices should be legal and, um, unregulated. but a government that's your pornographer and pimp and bookie and supplier of meth is caught in an infinite moral loop, a perfect cycle of hypocrisy, even more than it is now. the state of pennsylvania currently asserts a monopoly on gambling and booze, and seeks to ban or control or tax up the wazoo most other forms of vice. well that makes our bureaucrats exactly as good as our bookies and moonshiners (if any remain). that is a blow for reality, but hardly a formula for improving our wretched little lives.

pa funds education in part through gambling. i remember when there was a set of ads that tried to connect drugs to terrorism, and say that if you were using drugs you were supporting terrorists. that was ridiculous, but in these circumstances, it is an act of public service to gamble, and the most addicted are the most generous. if we fund education through tobacco, or booze, or pot sales, then we're making our children's welfare vary proportionately with our illness and addiction: it suggests the shape of a whole human life, from eager, well-resourced kindergartner to vice-ridden middle aged schlumph whose slow descent into degradation and death is an act of charity.

the same things that make addictive substances, activities, and services excellent commodities, make them excellent targets for taxation.people will tend to keep using them almost no matter how expensive they become, and anyone who objects to your raising the tax is apparently in favor of vice. no one wants to be the state legislator favoring cheap tobacco or whiskey. on the other hand, it puts you straight into the sickness and death biz.

i actually think a thriving black market economy is ok. it gives much of the population a stake in crime, and hence a basic anti-statist stance. it allows many people to make a living who might otherwise be starving etc. it encourages resourcefulness and self-reliance. on the other hand there are drawbacks, such as very high rates of violence. but every rose has its thorn. in an era in which every single segment of our lives is permeated by state power, we ought to try to keep the bureaucracy off our vices.

Comments

[Andrew Dobbs]

As far as I can tell the "very high rates of violence" in the black market are still way behind the rate of violence involved in the state. The Crips and the Bloods don't have cruise missiles, nuclear weapons and have never set up a prison camp. Above-the-boards capitalism and the liberal state it produces are certainly as guilty of crime, perhaps more guilty.

I saw a piece at http://www.prostitutionresearch.com a while back that studied Nevada's legalized brothels. They found that legalized prostitution actually makes it HARDER for women to leave sex work, essentially making the state a superbly well armed and unopposable pimp. Women would escape from brothels that were effectively holding them captive and the sheriff would pick them up, and take them right back. Their (and a lot of feminists') policy is to decriminalize sex work while increasing the penalties on johns. This was done in Sweden a while back, also in South Korea. In both places prostitution dropped dramatically (I think like 75% or so) and the women who stayed in the business were safer, had more resources and protections avaliable to them.

I <3 Nick Gillespie and I really love Reason, but I always sigh when it comes to libertarians. They are so close, yet so far away. They know that the state is the bad guy, they can see the evil in the thing but they never take the plunge and just say "to hell with it." Even when they do, I'm very skeptical of anarcho-capitalism. I think it might just be an oxymoron.

[crispy]

that's very sharp, andrew. and i agree about libertarians and anarcho-capitalism. one problem with the latter: it's based on an anachronistic or neverwas vision in which state and economic power, public and private sectors, are conceived to be opposed or as separate spheres.