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The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

cato.org

161–170 of 274 posts

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#161

I would express the same sentiment about illegal immigrants. This is to all the people who support Donald Trump's rhetoric about deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants. These people fled the drug gangs and violence that our war on drugs helped create (think fleeing ISIS) and came to work jobs no one else would take and make a better life for their family. Yes technically they broke a law. If you're going to…

The trend is that more Mexicans have left the US rather than entered it. http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-...

Then, you used Mexican immigrant and illegal immigrant interchangeably. Not all Mexican immigrants are illegal or financially distressed, or seeking to do jobs that no one else wants to do.

This pisses me off.

The US entertainment industry is hostile towards Mexico in a very passive aggressive way. It spends significant resources reinforcing the idea of Mexico being poor and unsafe, as well as Mexicans being poor, violent and unattractive by designing characters and casting for actors with substantially different traits.

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#162
post #73
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libertarianism, as envisioned by the Koch brothers, is AMAZING when you're rich. You simply remove all government functions that protect the poor from the wealthy, and re-create feudal Europe. What's not to love???

> all government functions that protect the poor from the wealthy Like the police, who, due to smart phones, are finally being held accountable for the brutality they've been getting away with for decades? Or maybe you mean civil asset forfeiture, which the police use to steal money from people accused of criminal activity, with no effective mechanism for non-rich people to get it back? Or maybe the current public sc…

> Feudal Europe wasn't libertarian at all. Feudal lords had legal privileges that everyone else didn't. Libertarians believe in a legal system that doesn't afford special privileges to anyone [...]

"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread."

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your quote nails my sentiment on the matter of drug legalisation. The conversation shown here within HN is fascinating, from an outliers perspective. The benefits and effects of the legalisation of Marijuana I would assume, have been well documented by now though the quantity of these reports, I would assume to be small in number. Surely it's a benefit if the number of these reports and articles were increased. Surel…

Canberran here - not to detract from your point, but possession of cannabis plants here isn't legal, it's merely "decriminalised", which in this case means for small quantities that are for personal use, police have the power to issue a "Simple Cannabis Offence Notice" which can be discharged by payment of a fine similar to a traffic ticket. The plants will still be confiscated.

Thank you for the correction :)

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#164
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you failed to read the one paragraph conclusion. both pro and cons arguments were wrong. absolutely nothing relevant has changed. crime didnt go up nor down. neither did taxes. etc. nada. also, ted is only relevant to rich pot heads ;)

I think that the fact that nothing changed is literally proof that it is bad law. If prohibiting something doesn't help anything, even if it doesn't hurt anything, then we shouldn't prohibit it. I would like to hear an counter example, I can't think of one.

I agree, the law just makes things worse by increasing the number of people we call criminals.

However as a counter example, even if the murder rate didn't change by de-criminalizing murder, I'd still argue that there should be a law against it.

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#165
post #51

Someone was telling me recently that all the cheap heroin influx into the country from Mexico was the result of drug cartels losing market to marijuana and needing to come up with a cheap competitor substitute. Not sure if that was accurate or not but sort of sounds intuitive in an economic sense. I'm still surprised how marijuana posts are so frequently pushed in HN. My take is that the effect is negative, I've seen…

I can't find anything on the Internet to explain what this Daniel Hannan guy might have meant by "philo-generative culture."

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#166

I would express the same sentiment about illegal immigrants. This is to all the people who support Donald Trump's rhetoric about deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants. These people fled the drug gangs and violence that our war on drugs helped create (think fleeing ISIS) and came to work jobs no one else would take and make a better life for their family. Yes technically they broke a law. If you're going to…

I actually think it would be a great idea to explicitly start a company that only wanted to hire immigrants especially Syrian refugees:

- they're more motivated (they have people lives depending on them making money and sending it back, they actually want to move here rather than just being born here)

- they're often richer (i.e. they don't come to live off the state) than those that stay in their own country as they have to have the money to pay the people to get them across [1]

- the fact that they got through demonstrates a level skill and intelligence. It's not just luck that means people survive 5,000-mile, 2-month journeys illegally

I'd say any of these tasks are way above what would be asked on The Apprentice.

  [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160305124312/http://www.rescue.org/blog/mapping-syrian-refugees-danger-filled-journey-europe

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#167
A contrasting report: http://www.rmhidta.org/html/2016%20FINAL%20Legalization%20of...

There are indeed significant changes in some marijuana-related statistics. The Cato institute report has selected indicators that are relatively stable and do not show these effects. It does not discuss the limitations of the data, discuss data sources that were considered but not used, or include illustrative anecdotes. It can be summarized as "we carefully picked these graphs that didn't show anything, and we still can't rule out any effects of legalization".

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> came to work jobs no one else would take > If there are jobs that are structured such that only an illegal immigrant, who by definition exists outside the normal labor pool and its protections, will take Typically, that statement also refers to jobs that are perfectly legal, but most Americans wouldn't take anyway. For example, many of the experienced people reading this wouldn't drive a cab, deliver pizzas, work…

It's just not true that Americans wouldn't take these jobs. If Americans won't take jobs at $2 an hour that doesn't mean Americans are big assholes who leave food on the table, it means that companies are big assholes that want to profit seek at the cost of legal employment. If you actually noticed a shortage of employees in these jobs, their salaries would necessarily go up to attract more. This is the natural proce…

I live in a house with a lawn. I don't like maintaining it, but I'm required to. I looked into the cost of having it done by a legitimate service, and found that the least I could pay is about $100 to have it serviced twice a month. That's not worth it to me, so I continued maintaining it myself, begrudgingly. Then I heard around the neighborhood that there's a guy who will touch it up every weekend for $50 a month.

Miguel does a really good job. I didn't know my hedges could look this good. I didn't know the rosebushes were supposed to be cut at a 45 degree angle.

The way I see it, everyone is better off here. I don't have to mow the lawn anymore. Miguel is better off than he was in Mexico. My $50 is going to the real economy instead of sitting in some account inflating the price of some shitty bond. This transaction is raising global GDP, improving global unemployment, creating consumer surplus, lowering the global Gini coefficient, and raising everyone's utility. What's the problem?

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#169
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the fact that nothing changed is literally proof that it is bad law. If prohibiting something doesn't help anything, even if it doesn't hurt anything, then we shouldn't prohibit it. I would like to hear an counter example, I can't think of one.

I agree, the law just makes things worse by increasing the number of people we call criminals. However as a counter example, even if the murder rate didn't change by de-criminalizing murder, I'd still argue that there should be a law against it.

You just demonstrated the bias that the guy against legalisation is affected.

If the murder rate didn't change by de-criminalizing murder at all, then it would be more rational to spend the resources on other ways that could help lower the rate or help deal with the facts that they are happening.

Re: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations

#170

A contrasting report: http://www.rmhidta.org/html/2016%20FINAL%20Legalization%20of... There are indeed significant changes in some marijuana-related statistics. The Cato institute report has selected indicators that are relatively stable and do not show these effects. It does not discuss the limitations of the data, discuss data sources that were considered but not used, or include illustrative anecdotes. It can be s…

Looks like this report deliberately chosen negative stats and use of non zero y axis in some graphs made me cringe as well.
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