Job Lock

During the course of discussing Health Care reform, Ezra Klein took up Job Lock, where an employee stays with a firm longer than they would because of health care coverage and that this is a bad thing. Among other things, he cites an MIT report that found that "studies find that mobility is much higher when workers do not have to fear losing coverage; job-to-job mobility is estimated to increase by as much as 25 percent when alternative group coverage is available."

To restate, health care requirements, such as persistent illnesses or existing conditions, or caution in the face of possible health care requirements causes employees to stay in jobs where they might otherwise leave for better positions or follow their own entrepreneurial instinct into business for themselves. Let's suppose this is a fact. On the one hand, those who would leave for better positions are not really relevant to our capitalist scheme, of course, because they're still operating in the finite world. There might be more movement in the confined capitalism of already existing companies, the corollary for the corporation now free to fire employees without causing unproductive fear of disease (assuming of course an economic reason for all capitalist behavior; it's entirely possible I suppose that a business wouldn't fire an employee who is just underperforming because they have several children or a sick spouse or something, but it should be obvious that these behaviors are not enough to produce systematic results), a shuffling of actors into slightly better positions. But this gain should be relatively minimal because in both cases, the subject who remains is relatively economcially satisfied, even if much of that satisfaction comes from the health care itself. The real advantage is going to be in, as Klein points out, the entrepreneurs who would be able to escape their subservience and produce the small-business engines for the economy.

The problem with this analysis is that it holds health coverage as an external payment beyond the natural wage relationship. It is the second part of this formula which is incorrect; wages themselves enact the same behaviors in subjects who receive them; the macroeconomic cost is employees remaining in locations which stifle their ability to contribute fully to the economy, not the mechanism by which they are trapped. To paraphrase Anthony Weiner's proposals, we might suggest a Social Security for Everyone or Unemployment for All Time, a base salary adjusted to relative income production which frees our brilliant entrepreneurs from their slavery under the thumbs of existing capitalists. Why am I tied to this shitty company, just because they pay me the money I need to buy food?

Ah! You might scream. You might suggest that there are some more capitalist forms this payout could take, something like seed money for everyone, but this is too punctuated I think. Suppose my business fails, even after the seed money, because I am not willing to risk my future earnings on this venture. Ah! You might scream, this disincentivises work, because my basic needs are simply taken care of! Of course this is true, but we need to see this instead as a certain level of necessary disincentivisation. For instance, you have huge incentives if you're starving but if we care about the quality of work, you're terrible. We disincentivise all the time in order to reframe the boundaries of the plausible work and cause different effects. What I'm proposing then, is if we are willing to shift toward this particular form of disincentivisation ostensibly to promote entrepreneurial investment, we should look at the entire economic regime and move more decisively in that direction.

Issue 7: Banality is Boring

If I hear the term "banality of evil" one more time, I'm going to get angry. Perhaps in the 1950s and 60s we could still be shocked by mass murder's concealment within state bureaucracies, could still pretend this wasn't the precise function of those state bureaucracies, could even accuse liberal democracies of violating their own terms by enacting state violence or reenacting the state murder by less liberal societies...but aren't we grown up yet? Aren't we about done with being shocked that the state apparatus is a tool for, holy shit, enacting state policy? Where in liberal democracy is their some mystical source of ethics within the government? If we're going to be more exacting in our claims, couldn't it even be said that a liberal democratic apparatus, one that doesn't need to justify its rule beyond election results, that is believed to embody the people's will, might be particularly suited to enact such violence? Because there is no banality of evil, not anymore. There are only state functions, the senseless forward motion of a perpetual paper pushing regime, one that must file and re-file and process every claim that governments before had the good sense just to do, just to act, not to justify, because they could be the Law in themselves. Yes, we've lost the unbanality of evil, the simple act that could be pointed at as an excess of state violence, because the apparatus is not alone, but acting in concert with our wishes of it and demands on it. We have made them write down their crimes, tortured out of them their confessions, their justifications and now we claim to be shocked because they're never as evil as we assumed, and that under threat of state violence and incarceration, even the state's foot soldiers will succumb.

Now let's say we're adults. Can we drop the impotent anger, the feigned shock, the Arendt quotations? Can we see that excising the particularly disgusting rhetorical flourishes, by hounding their authors, by exposing their intellectual sources, by attacking the propulsive, vice-presidential source of their action, we become that banality ourselves? Not of evil, no , but of the banality of banality, the pointless repetition of what has already been said, the Human Quotation. The consenting refusal to be moved from without, to produce in ourselves always again the single, simple codes we've cracked long after they've been discarded by the enemy. Empty as it cycles throughout itself, just another Cancerous possibility, what, a Body without Organs?

We are all quotations, then. But some are better than others.

Issue 6: The Active Conservatism of Threatened Conservatism

In the above article, the underbelly of Emeriti largess is apparent, but so is their insistence that their liberalization is a justification for it's inverse. Here Dubai stands, self-righteously, as the exception to global capitalism's ability to spread other freedoms, where than tenuous thread connecting free capital and free people breaks. It also stands opposed to the Hitchensian dialectic of a Free(ing) West(ernization) and an illiterate violent religious Middle East.

Why? Both these models are excessively reductive, sure, but both are legitimate expressions of dynamics. However 1) We are facing an illiberal geographically located threat nourished on dangerous ideals like blood-loyalty, racialism, anti-secularism, etc. and 2) Traditionalism, a state antithetical to human experience, requires the capture of money through capital market interference in order to pay for that action, while the spread of ideas and identities has been commodified to the point where the exercise of money-spending is a political act (whether this is the ideal or acceptable situation, it is our current one.) just as the exercise of money control always has been. Here, I think an answer lies in a Dubai that is transformed into our cartoonish mirror. The depressing underclasses are hidden, the political radicals are sated with enough money to demand minimal (and ultimately crypto-traditionalist) reform, the state is adopting measures once opposed to western values in order to preserve them, but their attachments to wealth are predicated on an outward hatred, therefore fear of a looming other that must be subdued in slavery or killed. It's very difficult to analyze this situation without becoming another crypto-traditional moralist, and so I draw no conclusion from this other than the contradictory nature of these two dialectics when they reside in the United States or Dubai have related material processes somewhere in their genealogy. But here we are again: why? How can the measures of liberal secularism be so entwined with their opposite?

I propose four theses. First, liberal secularism has not been adopted by the west. Second, outward expressions of liberal secularism exist in order to prevent it from occurring. Third, these same expressions exist in order to prevent the worse unknown future from occurring. Fourth, the complicity for this runs throughout the critiques of Islam, the West, Capitalism, and Modernity that supposedly manifest some higher form of liberalism, not bound to the political realities in which it is currently manifest (cf. Kant, Marx).

First Thesis:
Liberal Secularism evades description, intentionally. While its theoretical underpinnings may be more explicit, they are the product of illiberal ages and thus muted or distorted by those ages. As the underpinnings had consequences and more liberal societies were produced, new areas for liberalization opened, and the ephemeral dream was realized beyond the point established by the philosophical designers. Race is the obvious example, where nearly all proponents of liberalism were racists, yet the principle of racial equality is foundational to any contemporary notion of a fair society. More importantly, the premise of liberalism is necessarily outside the state. While the bourgeoisie claimed to better inhabit the post of King, to enact state power more efficiently, those who framed secular liberalism were carefully attacking state power itself, not paving the way for populism. The principles of a state limited to exact its moralistic revenge on its own citizens, prevented from establishing social unities that are as powerful as police state, if sometimes less physically painful. This principle has never been established, inasmuch as a participating state is not enough in the face of a counter-equal economic system, and the state's obvious role in resettling that equality interferes with individuals.

Second Thesis:
Here the claims to liberal secularism become weapons against its existence. Its ties to capitalism's bourgeois freedoms and commitments to human equality create dialectics without propulsion, Masters without Slaves, where the arguments for liberalism's dissolution become as equally justified as the claims to liberalism. Dubai models this claim: liberalism is set against itself, not to stagnate into a conservatism or propel itself toward the Bavarian Nation State, but to cynically manipulate that instinct spoken so beautifully, naively, whiggishly by Martin Luther King, that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." They're biding their time, content to allow the future to realize the liberalism that is unachievable now, content to satisfy liberalism's claim on the intellect with their PhD's, capitalism, liberalism's tolerance for outsiders, but only because this tolerance can be traded away in order to satisfy immediate needs.

Third Thesis:
The trading of these freedoms is justified by a liberal theology of the infinite value of human life. The spectre of the terrorist becomes the mechanism that Dubai employs in order to reduce liberal democratic reform, though they presume their behavior to be preventing the collapse of liberalism's advance itself. So-called Western societies are aware of these three thesis and employ them more expertly than their recently indoctrinated Emirati brethren; they accept that Liberalism is headed toward a goal, and that therefore liberalism's advances must be preserved. They accept that their relative levels of liberalism give them a bank account of freedoms to spend on reducing freedom. For instance, the United States claims the greatest level of free speech (by criticising Islamic countries for their lack of freedoms) only in order to justify the less liberal elements of its regime. The Emirati are claiming that their greater level of liberal freedoms is exactly that which allows them to limit their liberal freedoms.

Fourth Thesis:
Critique is, by virtue of Kant's definitively liberal character, the ultimate in liberalism. It is the point at which the individual escapes the unnecessary moralized reality being peddled by the State when the social values that brought it to power are failing to remain instinctive. The tool of the state is always some notion of cultural essence, the "true" form of a national value-, aesthetic- or political-forms. The problem with liberalism is that since the bourgeoisie insisted on a teleological history to their virtues, critique was distracted to exactly that same conservatism of platonic thought-forms, and critique became of the existent in comparison to the not-existent, the critique of the failure of democracy to live up to an absolute purity, the critique of capitalism as never capitalistic enough, the critique of the equality never finally accomplished, etc. This critique causes the logic of the third thesis to become inevitable, that liberal traditions exist, they are also flawed and tradeable (after all, who could give away perfection?) in return for other tradable goods (either literally in neo-market capitalism or Stalinism, or figuratively in the body-bag state of Saudi Arabia). Simultaneously, critique presumes that it is challenging the conservatism of the contemporary by pointing out the failure to achieve itself. While it does so under the signs of truly conservative absolutes, more terrible is the inevitable conclusion that liberalism unrealized is liberalism under attack by reality. The recipient of the critique is then left with a fractured liberalism that can be salvaged only by sloughing off the less important elements to preserve the body, manufacturing the raison d'être at conservatism's empty bottom.

Issue 5: Torture and The Person

Now that the torture memos have come out, the question is what to do. A thread that seems common in every good piece of journalism done on Bagram or Abu Ghraib, Taxi to the Dark Side or Standard Operating Procedure, and is underneath these memos, is that requiring soldiers to know the rules of war, and to disobey an illegal order, not only doesn't work, but provides cover for those who give those illegal orders (de facto if not de jure, and as far as I can tell, de jure anyway), and would, if it were implemented, actually endanger prisoners and soldiers by forcing them to second guess themselves in non-second-guessable locations like battlefields.

I'm not even arguing we do away with all culpability of soldiers or operatives, just eliminating the pockets of absolute prohibition that rings false in the act of warfare. This is a common mantra from infantry, and I'm convinced. As ideals, concepts like uniforms and Geneva seem easily asserted because they're framed as a preventative technique, a safety measure for our troops (cf. Joe Biden), when they're not, really, they make life much more dangerous and fraught for soldiers, intentionally. We're trying to endanger them so they can never become as safe as the Nazis were in their camps. But they've been put in a situation where even that logic is unworkable, as every conflict since Geneva has shown. I've been looking for it, but a CIA agent came out a couple of moths ago and said that we need to make torture illegal, but retain the cultural understanding that those who torture in ticking time bomb scenarios will be pardoned if they turn out to be correct. If a soldier or agent finds the situation so dire that they feel the need to torture, we can presume that the situation is serious or the soldier is seriously incorrect but well-meaning. In the first case, if the soldier can provide evidence, it seems that the principle of preventing greater crime would eliminate his direct culpability, in the second, his mistake would justifiably cost him. But sadism, the principle ostensibly being curbed by troop-level prosecutions doesn't seem like a common behavior to me.

Also, on top of this, I don't think that the traditional sense that punishments deter crime makes sense within a war. Training works, as I understand, "promoting a good culture", which just sounds to me like being in charge of your shit, supposedly works. But if we're talking about the military in violent, or seemingly violent, arenas, the plausibility of command failure seems too high to be effective. So shouldn't we just eliminate the culpability of soldiers, make it clear that they will be punished for acts they commit without an order, but instead instituting the death penalty for issuing torture memos?

Lastly, I think the Bybee memo, which is the only one I've read all the way through and the one with the most fireworks, reveals the flaw in the utilitarian arguments against torture, that it doesn't work or that it should only be done to save more lives. Bybee goes out of his way to restrict the repeated use of waterboarding and insect torture not because it's a violation of American law, but because its not as effective the fifth time around. They've been working, these deviant bastards, to create a torture that is effective, that does get positive results. It's the same thing they did with the ticking time bomb thought experiment; as soon as everyone had to consent to ticking-time bomb torture, it because the justification for every instance, even though there is no recorded instance ever. Even if it works, it's wrong, even if it's a ticking time bomb, it's wrong. A tragedy caused by due process is rare enough that we can swallow it when it happens; I can't swallow reading that the official position of the United States was to torture a wounded man.

So; End prosecution of agents and soldiers on the ground, raise the stakes for those who issues the orders? Why keep this archaic image of personal culpability?

Issue 3.5: Weed Will Make You Angry, and Demand Facts

That Puritanism conforms to the standards of social advantage set up by Puritans shouldn't come as a shock, nor should it be any argument in its favor. If you're suggesting that there is a “verifiable, socially advantageous manner” of behavior, that is the essence of Puritanism, the conjoining of Anglo-Saxon social empiricism and moralistic standards. What you fail to account for is the apparatuses of the state enforcing the result you suggest is verifiable, therefore creating the realm in which their rules and antique morality can be considered successful.

To back up your assertion, two strains of state power are unleashed. The first is the obvious; criminalization, the capture, detention and torture of drug users and peddlers within a state operated or state condoned prison, in a way more violent than the worst drug war.

The second is the conjuring of mythical notions of drugs in the social consciousness by the state. The preponderance of harm or negative social affects that land on a drug user come out of fictions: that smoking weed makes you worse at your job, that smoking weed is a legal violation that singularly demonstrates an anti-social personality, that violence is inherent to the drug trade, etc. None of these are true, in the real sense, but they all manufacture the supposedly verifiable detriments you've “measured”.

Regarding your suggestion that Medical Marijuana de-emphasize it's organized character and become a pressingly true notion being ignored by politicians: while decriminalization has only recently gained a majority and a significant one at that; 55 to 43 you claim those numbers are shallow because they haven't effected legislation. Except that it has, explicitly in Massachusetts and less explicitly elsewhere:



Regarding Medical Marijuana, its “shallow” support has been the most effective means of Marijuana decriminalization. To suggest that the campaign has been other than wildly successful is absurd. Nearly as absurd, however, is to claim that political issues are ever dealt with by inertia, or that a public information or political campaign on an issue where you already have a majority of public opinion is a bad idea. The problem with this issue isn't the lack of movement, it's that the speed of that movement remains so out of proportion to the public support on the issue and that those opposing the shift in policy have for so long failed to come up with a coherent and ethically justifiable response.



Regarding your stereotyping, I'm going to propose two arguments. First, what makes marijuana use a more significant measure of deviance from social norms than any other criminal behavior? It seems like a pretty safe crime to me, relative to some other crimes like drinking in public or running a stop sign. It also seems more social, in that it often occurs in groups. It is, on the level of use, also not anti-social, not intentionally violating other people's rights like, say, not disposing of motor oil properly, or driving excessively or in excessively low-mileage vehicles. It's also not a violation of typically conservative structures like the heterosexual family unit, in the way that pre-marital sex, divorce and homosexuality are. And why aren't gay people, Divorcées, careless home mechanics, people who drink on their porch and asshole SUV drivers not more anti-social than marijuana users? What mystical trait does marijuana have, then, that would make it so perfect a marker of anti-social tendencies?

Second, I'm curious what verifiable evidence you have of this stereotype's existence? Maybe it's logically clear, to you, but what empirical data do you have that shows a significant correlation between marijuana use and anti-sociality? And if there is, is it causal? Does smoking weed make you more anti-social? And if it doesn't, then these pot-smoking sociopaths would sociopaths anyway, right, so marijuana as a marker of criminality only works on people who, by your definition, are interested in breaking laws because they're laws, anarchists of some kind, not because they enjoy any of the results of their criminal behavior. So many questions. Do you think this person exists? Has ever existed? Is a remotely plausible description of anyone you've ever met, much less the people you know who smoke weed? Would you describe a majority of them as “dysfunctional”? Couldn't we make something else, something with no valuable characteristics, be the slighty-illegal litmus test for their sociopathic tendencies? Where you work, do they have people who smoke weed? Do they fit into your claimed “deduction” that interest in civil processes are lessened by people who smoke weed?

Regarding your claim to drug dealer's necessary violence: So, drug dealers lack the ability to turn to the police to right wrongs, to prevent theft and robbery. Agreed. But so does everyone else. Do the cops give a shit if someone steals a couple hundred dollars of your stuff? Is, therefore, your only recourse to attack those people who have wronged you? Seeing as Minneapolis and St. Paul together haven't been able to scratch up a verifiable drug murder so far this year, we should probably suppose that there were no disagreements between drug dealers. Right? No, they have many recourses beyond violence. Different distributors, different partners, different parts of town, different drugs, there are a hundred responses to drug violence other than more drug violence. The “only response” seems absurd when you count the actual number of homicides related by the DOJ to the drug trade; 4.8% (in 1998, the last year I could find data, but pretty stable over the previous decade) or what would be around 730 murders related to the actual trade of drugs per year. Which is a phenomenally small number. The number of murders, on the other hand, committed by a domestic partner is hovering around double that.

Regarding Scalability, perhaps it isn't scalable. Remember, I'm concerned about a drug war in Juarez, over the cocaine and marijuana traffic. Cocaine use doesn't have any of the structural characteristics of marijuana use, nor does heroin. Alcohol does, though, and I'd argue it works admirably within that context. You said that I “had to pick marijuana because this would not work for any other drug”, where you also could have said that I “had to pick marijuana because that's the only one that would make any sense at all”. I'm not making a case for broader legalization of all drugs. I leave that to the libertarians who live on impossible principles and delight in getting nothing, though a pure nothing, done. So I have no reason to show you a socially responsible heroin user, just as I have no reason to show you a socially responsible soy-bean farmer or any other such thing unrelated to the issue at hand.

So, are you willing to continue to justify your claims about those crazy potheads and their ineffective social movement?

Issue 3.4

In response to a few of your points. I see what you are saying about Puritanism as it is perceived in our popular culture. However, I tend to think of Puritanism as a restriction of sundry behaviors because they are perceived as immoral through a religious perspective. Asking people to redirect their behavior in a verifiable, socially advantageous manner does not seem Puritanical.

Maybe the problem with medical marijuana and decriminalization efforts is making it a campaign. It makes it too big of an issue. They ask politicians to do something with a small upside in increasing support among their constituents, while those same politicians face the real potential of a downside in constituent support. This does not make it impossible to change marijuana policy but it needs to be done differently. You can't make a public campaign out of it if public support is narrow and shallow. It means legalization is out of the question you have to change the policy so it is not visibly different. I would say decriminalization and medical marijuana are the best options. It would be easy for people not to see a noticeable difference in their day to day life. However, it would have dramatic effects on the expenses of the state in enforcement and incarceration, not to mention the positive impacts on the lives of people who choose to do this. It should be approached in the same way that companies have regulations and laws changed, they do it quietly in the middle of the night in a huge omnibus bill. In this instance, it should also be vague because it such a public issue thanks to NORML. Make it so the press can not say for certain whether is has been decriminalized.

To your question about me applying a stereotype to marijuana users/ dealers, it is not a stereotype. In a democratic society, when you break the rules that everyone agreed upon you are stepping outside of society. This is the definition of criminal. If you disagree with the behavior you work to change the rules, except in extreme circumstances. I don't think marijuana or any other illegal drug falls into the category. We have a whole process for doing this. So it is not a stereotype, rather it is the application of a definition. To then make the leap that these dysfunctional members of society would not have an interest in participating in a throughly civil process is more like a deducation and less of a stereotype.

The fact that drug users/dealers are operating outside of societal boundaries brings up the other problem with this idea. Violence is inherent in drugs. They have no recourse for their wrongs. There only option for righting a wrong is violence.

Yes, I will admit it was a knee-jerk reaction to protests. This is certainly a siuation that makes sense for a protest. You don't have to rub it in.

Finally, in the end the problem with this is it is not scalable to other drugs. You started this with saying that you were going to talk about Marijuana because it is the easiest. In retrospect, you had to pick Marijauna because this would not work for any other drug, because marijuana is not addicitive. At a certain point in most drug users experience they have to get high. There only concern is scratching their addiction, not violence in Juarez which is related to the cocaine and heroin trade. That is my challenge to you how does this idea scale. Show me the socially concerned heroin user.

Issue 4

2007 USA Population 301,621,157

2007 USA population under 18 years old (24%) 72,389,077

2007 USA Population over 18 years old 229,232,080

Federal Budget 2007 $2,800,000,000,000

2007 USA population 2007 tax bill per person $9283
(Decide it would be great for little bobby to have a sibling, too bad you tax bill just went up $9283. No one forced you to have another citizen)

2007 Federal Budget Minus non-discretionary spending $1,543,000,000,000

2007 Tax bill per person minus non-discretionary spending $5115


2007 budget minus everything that fair taxers don't like (big assumption but I am feeling pretty confident)
* $586.1 billion (+7.0%) - Social Security
* $548.8 billion (+9.0%) - Defense (actually 699 billion including those pesky wars)
* $394.5 billion (+12.4%) - Medicare
* $294.0 billion (+2.0%) - Unemployment and welfare
* $276.4 billion (+2.9%) - Medicaid and other health related
* $243.7 billion (+13.4%) - Interest on debt
* $89.9 billion (+1.3%) - Education and training
* $76.9 billion (+8.1%) - Transportation
* $72.6 billion (+5.8%) - Veterans' benefits
* $43.5 billion (+9.2%) - Administration of justice
* $33.1 billion (+5.7%) - Natural resources and environment
* $32.5 billion (+15.4%) - Foreign affairs
* $27.0 billion (+3.7%) - Agriculture
* $26.8 billion (+28.7%) - Community and regional development
* $25.0 billion (+4.0%) - Science and technology
* $20.5 billion (+0.8%) - Energy
* $20.1 billion (+11.4%) - General government

2007 "truly fair taxers wet dream" tax bill per person $ 3684.7
(Getting Better. With all that money you save on your taxes you will have no problem paying the tolls on every single private interstate highway, paying for more expensive food, paying for air traffic controllers, paying to clean up the toxic waste site that a company created under your home before they built your subdivision but now they are out of business, live on the hope that nuclear power plants are operating safely. I am sure the private sector will deal with all of these things. )

2007 Household of 2.59 tax bill $9543.37

2007 USA median household income $50,233.00

2007 Minimum wage annual pay $9888
({[5.15 X 40Hours]x4}x12 Although I am pretty sure we cut the department that enforces this.)
At least, when you walk past the person making 100,000 you can look them straight in the eye because you paid exactly what they paid.

Issue 3.2: The Puritans Are Coming

First, regarding your question over "puritanism". I would consider any marijuana policy that attempts to inhibit marijuana usage, to dissuade users or even encourage them to use less, to concede the fundamental point that the ill or positive effects of marijuana are unrelated to attempts to legalization. Were they not the only successful (while entirely dishonest) programs, I would be opposed to medical marijuana as well. Too often those who would work for decriminalization or better come, hat-in-hand, sorry to bother you nice people but this drug isn't so bad, really, or it's not as bad as these other ones. Every time a NORML lawyer proudly boasts that he personally has never smoked pot, someone should ask him why, make him justify the idiotic dissonance that proudly claims never to have used a harmless product as a badge of credibility. Marijuana has harmful effects. It has positive effects. Neither are reasons for it's

Your first point is significant. Regarding marijuana policy, there is a certain elitist complacency regarding moral or ethical arguments about legalization. Of course it remains settled among this elite constituency, but its continued criminal status suggests that something more important is holding it back. I don't think it's the opinion of a non-elite majority, either; there already exists a plurality in favor of legalization and a significant majority in favor of decriminalization programs.

The problem seems to lie in the attitude that you expressed, that the issue is minor or meaningless. The President gave the same glib response in the online town hall. As long as those who have an ethical commitment to decriminalization continue to roll their eyes when asked to make any movement on the issue, it will remain illegal.

Not to be moralistic about the political issues you choose to support. There are many reasons not to focus on it, the implausibility of real change in policy being foremost among them, but I don't think that implausibility is the problem; it's a simple coalition building issue. This debate has always been framed around three poles- 1) the libertarian "lost liberty" argument to libertarians, 2) the leftist "social justice" argument regarding the race and class of drug war victims, and 3) the "it's-not-as-bad-as-____-which-is-legal" argument.

In turn: The first argument has proven, on this and any settled "violations" of abstract liberties to be completely unconvincing. At best it can be said to be good for recruiting libertarians, though I'd be skeptical of that as well. The second argument fails just as routinely, either because of a latent racism among those opposing the change, or more likely because the "victims" are still criminals; it makes more sense to argue for color-blind enforcement of existing laws than to succumb to a lobby of self-identified criminals. The third appeals to a prohibitionist instinct which has only increased calls for the criminalization of tobacco.

All of these attempt to create coalitions out of existing supporters, and their worst excesses only damage forward progress. There has been no movement, that I'm aware of, where drug companies or agribusiness has been brought on board to capitalize the market. Too often this is dismissed as a dangerous mix of market/consumer capitalism in order for traditional leftism to prevent the co-optation of another issue (they were sure this was going to be the one to bring down the fat-cats). The rare potential for a legitimate liberal unity between free-markets and free people exists here, and it's too easy to dismiss it as an impossible situation while doing nothing to raise it's profile or advance the realm of the politically possible to include that which already has popular support.

But actual legalization wasn't really the issue. Whatever steps toward decriminalization are taken in the next decade, they're not going to prevent hideous violence.

Regarding your criticisms of the "Buy Canadian" program, I'd like to know what evidence you have of this "rule breaker" category that all pot dealers/users fit into. You're absolutely applying a stereotype- justify it. Marijuana use is commonly categorized according to market demand, for quality, for certain strains, and toward locally grown product; this is simply suggesting an attempt to make those claims more uniform, inject social-consciousness reasoning in a population with a noted affinity for social justice issues, and increase the amount bought from non-violent drug producers. The size of the drug market even small changes in buyer's attitudes causes a significant and immediate change in behavior.

Number 2, fine, it's easily dismissed as pointless. But unlike the tremendous majority of protests, this is one area where increased awareness is 1) possible and 2) helpful. So how is your rejection not glib knee-jerking? If you agree that the problem in Juarez is caused in some part by the marijuana trade, and a problem, what solutions would you propose?

UPDATE: Also, notice how you find the attraction of marijuana policy debates so mysteriously strong, and yet it's the first issue you've chose to post or respond to.

Issue 3.1

Why is the drug debate so tantalizing?

Reading your post on Issue 3 my immediate thought was, "Is there anything more to say about the drugs?" Anyone who has given thought to drug policy seems to side with decriminalization. Honestly, I remember in a college class on applied ethics we looked at the best arguments on either side of this issue and the supporters' arguments for our current approach to drugs were incredibly weak. The strange thing is how unbelievably low the public's' appetite for dealing with it is. Yet, we love talking about it. Even though we seem to all agree on the solutions we just love talking about it.

Back to your ideas.

1) I think it runs into a problem that people who are rule breakers, even at such a minor level as dealing marijuana might not have a problem applying a "Certified Canadian" stamp to their product. I am not trying to apply a stereotype to drug dealers but they do not have a problem walking outside of societal norms. Setting this aside it is interesting in the same way that La Cosa Nostra is fascinating. People who have stepped outside of society creating a sub-society. This is the same thing you want drug dealers and consumers to show social awareness for the violence in Mexico.

2) Ditto for idea number 2, but slightly more pointless. Sorry that was harsh but my disdain for protests has no loyalty.

I will agree that these two ideas step away from Purantinism but I am not sure how any discussion in which "just say no" is not the only answer could become Purantanical? Could you explain what you mean?

Issue 3: Marijuana Terrorism and Bleeding Juarez

I.

I remember the campaign mentioned in the first video. It was not too long after 9/11 and, just like the economic crisis, everything had to use the attacks as a reference point. Negative wasn't negative enough unless it was terrorist negative. So the ONDCP put out these ads and were ridiculed; whatever truth there was to the claim, it was obvious their intent wasn't to prevent drug money from funding terrorism. It was an attempt by people who were philosophically anti-drug before anything else to ride the wave of sentiment, and it was just these attempts that devalued the event's currency, that created this sickly anti-Americanism that rises in me with the words "nine-eleven", the artificial callousness of an event perverted.

But the point stands, I think, and is illuminated by the continuing drug wars in Ciudad de Juarez over the last year or so, where 2,000 people have been murdered in a drug war unparalleled in its viciousness. This war is funded by wealthy nations' drug habits, and marked by Hezbollahan terrorism (beheadings and behandings) while contributing cash to the continued destabilization of a pluralistic, vital Lebanon.

I want to qualify this first, before it becomes a moral or absolute issue. I want to make it clear that I would dispute any claim to responsibility on the part of any drug users for the actions of their dealers, as well as any attempt to lay it on the shoulders of the Government's prohibition. In the first case, individual culpability within any economic sphere is limitless and marked by an all-too-common tendency toward distortion. In the second, I don't see the resolution of appetites or a capacity for substantive policy change, and so I see no point in discussing abstractions or impossibilities.

Having said that, there is a need to move beyond glib and reactionary dismissals of Bush Era rhetoric. There's nothing about either the violent and theocratic belligerence of Hezbollah or our specific case of a city gone mad with drug murder or the criminalization of soft drug users that is acceptable to any working notions of justice or ethics. Which means that we have an oppotunity: we can begin to be driven by an ethical dedication to human life above right-wing rhetoric, while retaining the legitimacy to speak to those communities that have an effect on the issue (i.e. drug users), above all avoiding juridical or authoritarian solutions to the problem.

My first set of questions concerns this issue. Do we you agree that we have a need to respond to the problem, or is this only a more insidious version of the same old rhetoric? Can we consider the problem of Hezbollah in the western hemisphere without being drawn too far onto a certain side in the foreign policy debates, namely that of the neo-conservatives, and therefore we should avoid involvement in the issue? What, if any, is the ethical responsibility of the American drug user to the issue?

II.

I'm proposing two ideas (and relating both of them to marijuana use, for ease and scale):

1) Certified Canadian
Some form of loose self-regulation that verifies the nation of origin, and sets a premium on the drugs that come via less violent trafficking routes. In this case, Canada seems an ideal example because of a greater laxness in marijuana enforcement (which the cooperation of drug dealers within the more punitive United States seems unlikely). A loosely organized verification system could be set up, with enough holes to prevent law enforcement tracking back up the chain but enough legitimacy to ensure that a large percentage of the product is accurately labeled. Here my ignorance of the chains of marijuana distribution shows, perhaps too seriously to consider this other than the barest sketch of an idea and the actual mechanisms or possibility of the idea are beyond my ability to judge. Perhaps this means the idea is equivalent in abstraction and uselessness to "legalize it", but I'm not so sure. In any case, if possible it could operate as a market-driven pressure against the violence of the cartels, so far the only type of pressure that appears to have an effect.

2) Rest Up for Juarez
This one is more plausible. A single day where all Americans would stop buying or smoking marijuana. Like the Earth Hour, the effect would be negligible, but it would raise awareness of the violence of the Mexican market. Ideally, we could pair it with 4/20, something like "Save It For Tommorow/Juarez", actively associating any non-puritanism with a heightened awareness of the violence.

Do you think these are plausible? Do they avoid the trap of puritanism? Is this the way the problem should/could be dealt with? Do you have any alternative ideas?