How the Government Can Be Rolling In It
by Johnny DebacleThe US has been fighting a quixotic war against drugs for ages now, focusing on tougher penalties for both dealers and users and targeting the supply in a global game of cat (e.g. DEA) and mouse bigger cat(e.g. drug dealers). The only things which have been accomplished are hollow political “victories”, a huge expenditure of public money and an epic waste of limited police resources. A persistent suggested alternative is to legalize drugs (and tax the sh*t out of them) since they don’t hurt anyone but the user anyway and most of the violent crime related to the drug trade only exists because it is illegal. It might also counter-intuitively reduce the use of drugs. Cigarettes have had so much sh*t taxed out of them that their use has been declining consistently — see it works!
Why stop with cigarettes and drugs? Everything illegal should be made legal and have the sh*t taxed out of it.
Suicide? Who does it hurt but me? Let me do it whenever I get that feeling, but be sure to tax the hell out of it. This is called turning a cost center (all the government expenditure associated with oppressing consumers who want to enjoy some suicide in the confines of their own home or the public’s bridges) into a huge profit center.
Murder is a crime and a horrible thing….but at what price is it a great deal for the Government? I work in a high stress environment and I would pay a tax to let me kill a homeless man with a shiv when the blood urge compels me. A human life has an assignable dollar value — tax me that value for taking one. This would better allocate murderable resources with murder demand.
Plus think of all the job creation which could come about! A whole new industry would be created because in order to collect the tax revenue generated by legalized crime, you’d have to be able to account for it. Governmental life valuations agencies, third party appraisors, a whole new subindustry would have to be built to support this initiative, leading to job creation.
Recommendation: This concept is still in the infant stage, and we are working internally to see how this can best make Government provide greater freedom and greater choice to its citizens.
Editor’s Note 10/31/2006: This is in state of revision due to constructive reader feedback, bear with us as we make this idea better and basically make it work.
First point is strong, the rest gets off topic and the spelling is suspect. Try to use the phrase “tyrant in waiting” much, much more.
An old draft got retained and posted. My b. Mostly fixed, all other problems are the entire responsibility of JD and his endowment of inadequacies.
Somewhere after suicide, you sort of lost the idea that nobody else is getting hurt. It is kinda critical to the analysis …
Some people need to read more Johnathan Swift. The slippery slope in this progression is that drug use is (arguably) a no-victim crime while suicide and murder have a victim. Also, lumping together all drugs is unfair–why are tobacco and alcohol legal (and in fact often subsidized) when they cause vast number of deaths for well-known reasons and are highly addictive while cannibus has been shown to not be addictive in the medical sense (anything can be ‘psychologically addictive’), while causing less impairment and aggression (indeed probably reversing it) than alcohol. “Argument by satire” can be a good attention getter as long as it points the reader towards, and not away from the facts.
But what if I wasn’t making an argument? Or what if I was distracting the reader from the fact that I was pointing the reader towards the facts some of the time and AWAY from the facts the rest of the time?