[Peace-discuss] let's put marijuana referenda on the November ballots

Wed Jan 22 02:43:21 UTC 2014

[1] If you want to stop drunk driving, prohibit drunk driving. Don't try to limit the amount of alcohol offered for sale, by tax or regulation, as a round-about way to do it. 

Alcohol in any form like any other food/drink offered for sale must meet standards of purity. 

And it's reasonable to prohibit some substances' - gasoline, alcohol, etc. - being sold to minors. 

[2] If you want to stop deaths from tobacco, prohibit the commercial sales of tobacco. (But don't bust people for possession - or growing their own.)

A great number of people die from tobacco each year, but no one dies from marijuana; therefore the commercial sale of the latter should be permitted. 

[3] If you tax something, you get less of it: that's the theory behind sin taxes. Therefore income and consumption should not be taxed: you don't want less of them.

But you do want less differential wealth. Wealth has concentrated in fewer and fewer hands at an accelerating rate for more than a generation. Tax it, not income.

What should be taxed is investable assets - the money people don't need to live. Roughly a 15% tax on investible assets (not net worth) over $1 million would erase the deficit - and 99% of American would not be affected by the tax, because they do not have investible assets over a million dollars. 

Then we should turn our attention to a guaranteed annual income at the level of a living wage, as proposed by Martin Luther King and the Nixon administration. 

A negative income tax (NIT) - adumbrated by the slow growth of the EITC over the last 40 years - is perhaps the easiest way to establish a guaranteed annual income (GAI). 

A greatly expanded WPA is the proper concomitant to GAI and NIT. See now Alan Nasser, "Why FDR Did Not End the Great Depression – and Why Obama Won’t End This One" <http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/08/why-fdr-did-not-end-the-great-depression-and-why-obama-wont-end-this-one/>.

--CGE

On Jan 21, 2014, at 8:06 PM, Robert Naiman <naiman at justforeignpolicy.org> wrote:

> 
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 6:34 PM, "E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森" <ewj at pigsqq.org> wrote:
> Do you think that alcohol and tobacco should be regulated?
> 
> Yes.
>  
> 
> If so, Why?
> 
> If you answer yes, it implies that you believe that people
> are individually unable to make right decisions for themeselves,
> and the people need a nanny state to take care of them.
> 
> 1.:While I agree that the bar for "protecting people from themselves" should be very high, I don't think it should be infinitely high. If you saw someone preparing to jump off a bridge, wouldn't you try to talk them down? The odds that a person standing on a bridge has an airtight case for ending their life are extremely low, probably less than 1%. Why not try to assist such a person in subjecting such a momentous decision to additional scrutiny? What's the downside?
> 
> 2. All these things have "negative externalities," and society has a right and an obligation to protect people who had no say from people making choices that negatively impact them. Drunk driving kills people who had no say. Here's the CDC page on "Secondhand Smoke":
> http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/secondhand_smoke/general_facts/index.htm
>   
> 3. As a practical matter, regardless of what I think, the pure libertarian view on these issues has little social pull and little prospect of attaining more. I could hold my breath until I turn blue, when I wake up tomorrow, the legal drinking age in Illinois is going to be 21 and likely to remain so in the future that we can see. 
>  
> But laws, policies, and attitudes concerning marijuana control are clearly approaching an inflection point in the United States. It could well be the case that the next five years will see as dramatic a change in laws, policies, and attitudes concerning marijuana control as we've seen in the last five years on gay rights. When you're approaching a possible inflection point like that, a humane activist wants to speed up the change, because a lot of unnecessary human suffering could be prevented.
>   
> It seems reasonable to run experimental societies but 
> it is tyrannical and immoral to impose experimental ideas on unwilling
> masses of the society.
> 
> I suppose that if you answer yes, you might also believe that
> the "sin tax" on alcohol and tobacco benefits the government
> who needs the money for its programs of social good such 
> as militarism and the police state, but actually such taxes are
> regressive and you ought to think that is not good.
> 
> It's true that such taxes are regressive, as all taxes on consumption are regressive, in the sense that poorer people spend a greater share of their income on consumption and therefore will be taxed more highly by a consumption tax as a percentage of their income. But: 1) while I think it is quite reasonable to demand that the system of taxation be sharply progressive overall, that does not require that every single tax be progressive; and 2) given that most local governments are unable to levy progressive taxes, a demand that there be no taxes which are not progressive, in the absence of a deep systemic reform in the national system of taxation, would mean a demand for no local taxation at all, which would mean the collapse of all local government and services. Which, again, even if one thought that would be a good thing - which I most certainly do not - is not on the cards in any event.
>   
> It's certainly true that governments use a lot of the money raised from taxation for evil things. But I don't think it's likely that a general attack on taxation will lead to less evil. In the absence of effective activism which distinguishes good things from bad things, governments don't seem to have any trouble spending tax money for evil things while claiming they don't have money for good things. I don't think an anti-tax magic wand is going to help matters. We're going to have to slog it out on the details of where the money is being spent. 
>  
> 
> On 1/22/2014 7:44 AM, Robert Naiman wrote:
>> 
>> let's put referenda on the November ballots saying that marijuana should be regulated like tobacco and alcohol. 
>> 
>> http://news.yahoo.com/obama-speaks-marijuana-why-now-174217311.html
>> 
>> -- 
>> Robert Naiman
>> Policy Director
>> Just Foreign Policy
>> www.justforeignpolicy.org
>> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
>> (202) 448-2898, extension 1.
>> 
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>>   
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Robert Naiman
> Policy Director
> Just Foreign Policy
> www.justforeignpolicy.org
> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
> (202) 448-2898, extension 1.
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss

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