badgenome said:
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. |
On this note, I want to discuss a bit about black markets. For those who advocate totally free markets, unregulated by any sort and without any sort, where NO ONE can go to the authorities to blow the whistle, how well do they work, particularly regarding something like drugs? Does having no government oversight, which would come from legalizing them, make them superior to legal products sold?