| richardhutnik said: On the first point, I would say the breakdown of morals leads to the later problems, and if you lose that, you lose society. If you also foster a culture where everyone is led to believe they are supposed to get the best of the best, all you have to do is just "try hard enough" and if you are "good enough" you are guaranteed, or that such is a right, then you will have problems. On the second point, the issue isn't to make it a great hassle, but to recognize that individuals using drugs can royally mess up their lives, and just like you would have with the ability to drive a car, if you want to do drugs, you need to agree you fully are aware of the consequences, and how you can get addicted and ruin your life, and you assume full responsibility for doing such. Idea is to take just enough funds to make sure the negative externalities are covered for and people are responsible if they are going to do it. I would also look to extend the license to the use of alcohol also. Funds from taxes of it would also cover paying for needed law enforcement anfd so on. What is happening is people verify they know the risks involved and you still end up making sure the funds covered make up for idiots who happened to get themselves addicted, so they can get off it. Want to have the free market manage this, so that it is run more effectively? Fine, but you make sure it is covered by society, and people fully understand what they are getting into before engaging in it. |
Maybe. Consumerism isn't a replacement for an actual culture, after all, and in the day of multiculturalism, there is very little other culture left. But I don't think the approach of "work hard and get nice stuff" is nearly as bad as "society owes you, and rich people are screwing you over". Both may be consumerism, but at least the one produces a work ethic, while the other only breeds resentment and eventual class warfare of a very literal sort.
As for drugs, the problem is this: there already exists a well established and very efficient black market. If drugs are legalized but the prices are too high and regulation is too troublesome, that black market won't suffer one bit. Furthermore, drug dealers will cease being seen as predatory scum in the bargain. They'll become something cuter and quirkier instead, kind of like modern day bootleggers: cranks dealing in a product that was once stupidly prohibited in a more puritanical and less enlightened time, whose only real crime is dodging the kind of onerous government regulations we all hate. It's not that I worship the free market or think it's God or anything; it just works because its principles work. Government, meanwhile, has to be properly administrated, but these days it has reached an incredible level of bloat and incompetence precisely because it is so big that it and all its armies of bureaucrats are utterly unaccountable to anyone. It is literally impossible for the left hand to know what the right hand is doing in such a clusterfuck.
