| Mr Khan said: I for one am one of those stick-in-the-muds who is opposed to legalization, but that could be my lingering resentment from living in the same campus-house as a bunch of potheads my freshman year Part of it is certainly cultural, as it is in many cases (like the righties who screech about a babies right to life and then cheer when criminals get zapped), but i think there is a bit of logic there, at least as far as marijuana goes. Aside from lung cancer possibilities, weed might pose less of a social burden than obesity, which leads more imminently to public bads (and these would be public burdens even if government were removed from the healthcare equation entirely, an unhealthy society would raise costs of healthcare across the board for raising demand, while the supply of health care is reasonably static, and pouring more resources into health care is nonproductive from an opportunity cost standpoint), so free-market or regulated, we have incentive to make sure people are healthy. Obese persons are more limited in the range of jobs in which they could engage as well, moreso than someone who smokes weed Harder drugs i would certainly oppose having legalized, certainly not ecstasy, meth, or heroin, and i'm on the fence about marijuana That being said, i'm also opposed to food bans. I'd rather see incentives in place for better access to healthier food, or straight incentives or disincentives for healthier living imposed on the people |
I see. While I don't trust the legal system enough to support the death penalty myself, I can at least see a logical consistency to being anti-abortion and pro-death penalty: the baby is innocent and could turn out to be a valuable member of society, while the criminal has already blown his chance and ruined someone else's life in the process. But the left's enthusiasm for drugs - and its stuffy disdain for cigarettes and junk food - has always struck me as being entirely based on an "anything my mama don't like" philosophy. Ditto its stance on abortion. If we're going to centrally plan our economies, we damn well need people. Below replacement level birthrates will be ruinous for Europe and will strangle the much vaunted "Chinese century" in the crib, so allowing people to go around terminating future taxpayers willy-nilly seems imprudent!
