Marijauna Legalization on California Ballot

Post Reply New Topic

If prohibition is futile, then the argument you posited is fatally flawed and one can only wonder why in such circumstances you posited it.


That is not realistic. Those costs and associated loss of productivity with impact on the ability to trade for fair value items do exist, as do the costs from the loss of industry both from trading directly in this substance, and from the loss of a potentially very valuable, economic and ecologically friendly manufacturing material. Any argument about productivity must take these things into account and still demonstrate a net productivity benefit. Further any such net gain in productivity must be more than could be gained by other restrictions on freedom that are eskewed because it is not considered that criminalization is an appopriate response to the potential losses of productivity, if the law is to be held to any standard of reasonable consistency. Many people consider that consistency is not just a desirable goal in law, but an important measure of its balance, fairness and the minimalisation of arbitrariness.


I have no idea why you think anyone would assume that public policy actually can be decided without some reference to subjectivity, or why you assumed anyone thought that this would necessarily be simple in every case. It is simple in this case because the lack of direct and immediate harm to persons or property other than the consenting adults who may endanger their own health (and therefore the lack of any clear and immediate infringement on the rights of any other) is really rather obvious. While we might invent all kinds of imaginative ways to construe harm, these do not stack up with the kinds of harms the law usually recognizes as meriting criminal sanctions.


And the fact that people are consuming cannabis does not infringe on this liberty anymore than the existence of individual variation does. Employers get a choice about who they employ, but not necessarily a choice about the options they get to pick who they will employ from. The rights of employers to choose from the pool of labour available to them does not entail a right to hire people who do not want to be hired, even if they would give better value for money than hiring those people willing to work for the employer, so why should or would it entail a right to restrict the consumption of butter (as a fit work force is better value for money), or place restrictions on how late people can stay up (as being overly tired at work will reduce value for money on the labour of the tired individual.) or restrict the consumption of cannibas?

Why do we not allow employers to dictate who may breed (as doing so might ensure that future people born will give better value of money in respect of their labour)? I suggest because the right to choose for yourself whether you will employ somoene, and who to employ, does not extend to forcing your values or preferences on others who do not work for you, might never work for you, or even to overly control the out of work life of those who do work for you. Plenty of employers loose productivity to their employees becomming pregnant. Should we criminalize pregnancy too? Or perhaps only allow women to become pregnant if they can prove that they are not the most productive workers in the population, but also are sufficiently productive that their progeny are likely to have good productive potential?


It is also an externalized social, cultural and political concept, in addition to being a philosophical concept.

As a cultural, social and poltical concept it can be externalized, examined, negotiated, and widely agreed on. Most people in the US agree that even though employers have the right to freely buy labour, they cannot force people to work for them at the price they wish to pay, and they cannot force the particular person they might want for the job to work for them, nor do they get to engineer the pool of labour they may choose from through eugenics, through mandating diet and exercise regimes, or by criminalizing going to bed too late.

The same reasoning that maintains that liberty is to choose who of those willing to work for you, will work for you, but it is not forcing someone to work for you whether or not they want to, is the same reasoning that prevents us from allowing employers to mandate the diet of every person in the US, or to dictate who gets to breed or not, and applies to cannibas prohibition just as well as it would to prohibitions on eating McDonalds or consuming too much high fructose corn syrup, breeding with other consenting adults even if the progeny produced is unlikely to be optimized in terms of productivity potential, or staying up too late. It's not that complicated really, and we have plenty of material to go on in respect of the cultural, social and political concept of liberty as it is most widely accepted in application in the US.

It could equally be argued that until and unless employers show that they maximize productivity in respect of all their employment choices, that they have no right to restrict the freedom of others on the basis of a goal that they themselves defeat any prospect of achieving. Employers do not all universally and provably maximize their productivity through employment choices. Some employers would rather a slightly less productive worker who is none the less a better fit personality wise for their workplace. They would have to loose the right to do so before they could claim a right to have a pool of potential workers with optimized productivity potential to choose from on the basis of some right to freedom of trade in labour. Unless employers are required to only choose the most productive potential employee, they are reducing productivity and according to your argument this should be illegal as it restricts their own liberty and the liberty of other employers, along with the liberty of consumers to buy things at fair prices. That's not how it works and the concept of liberty as a social, political and cultural concept of the society known as the United States of America does not entail such convoluted machinations, nor should it.

Nothing about liberty (the social/political/cultural concept as it applies to the modern nation known as the United States of America) states that one will have every single option that one might want. If you want to flap your arms and fly to the sun, or turn into a werewolf, it is not a lack of liberty (referring again, in case it is less than contextually clear, to the social/political/cultural concept as it applies to the modern nation known as the United States of America) that prevents you from achieving such wishes.


Of course there is an appropriate state role in the US for such.

Children (legal minors) are the special province of the state as the state owes a particular and special duty of protection in respect of them and this is recognized in the right to restrict minors and to intervene in respect of minors in ways that would not be acceptable in respect of a legally competent adult. This gives the state both a mandate and a duty to initiate all kinds of restrictions in respect of legal minors and it is very likely appropriate that such restrictions include restrictions in respect of the consumption of narcotics.

Making a free choice actually entails some requisites that specifically can be described as "being sufficiently informed with respect to the pertinent facts". As such the state may have a mandate to ensure that where individuals are invited to choose to take a risk, that they have some reasonably accessible means of accessing and assessing sufficient information to be reasonably informed, such that they are making a free choice in respect of potential consequences. This may entail a mandate to require that someone (be it individuals who wish to consume cannibas or those who trade cannibas as a commercial exercise) meet informational standards. Regulation then could require that those who wish to consume cannibas demonstrate their understanding of the risks and their competency to make informed decisions, or it may require that traders supply consumers and prospective consumers with information, or fund the supply of such information to potential consumers.

People have a right to not be placed at undue risk as a result of other people. As such the state may have a mandate to instigate rules and regulations that seek to limit the risk people are non-consentingly placed at by the conduct of others. For example the state may mandate that people not operate motor vehicles on public roads while significantly impaired as a result of consuming narcotics. Additionally, the actual consumption itself of some narcotics can present a risk to others who have not consented (or cannot competently consent) to that risk. As such the state may have a mandate to regulate with rules that limit such potential risks to those who are not consenting and informed adults, for instance requiring that where toxic air born particles are a by-product of consuming a substance, that this not occur in enclosed spaces where legal minors or non-consenting adults have a right to be present, and/or requiring that paraphenalia used to consume narcotics that present a potential health risk to others (such as syringes), are safely disposed of.

Some individuals might demonstrate that they consistently violate the rights of others as a by-product of consuming narcotic substances. The state may have a mandate to reasonably regulate such individuals, requiring for instance that at their own expense they provide adequate supervision and potential for restraint when they consume the kinds of narcotic substances that tend to result in their violation of the rights of others.

Since health risks occur in respect of a number of narcotics, the state may have a mandate to require people applying for health insurance to disclose the consumption of narcotics where this is a regular habit of the individual applying, and the state may also have a mandate to regulate the extent to which insurers can charge a premimum for additional health risk (for instance to prevent such premiums from being unreasonable or unfair, to encourage insurers to recognize less risky methods of consumption and risk reduction measures, and also to limit the cost to those insured people who do not take the particular risks concerned). The same kind of regulations could be used to enhance the freedom of employers (currently while someone might admit to smoking cigarettes or consuming alcohol in a job interview, people are very unlikely to admit consuming illicit narcotics and this in fact interferes with rather than promotes the liberty of employers to hire the most productive candidate).

Just as the state is generally viewed as having a mandate to control the quality of goods that are physically consumed (such as edibles) the state would probably be reasonable in assuming a mandate to control the quality (for instance regulations about the maximum strength, standards in respect of the kinds and levels of impurities etc that might be included) of narcotics commercially traded and to set standards in respect of labeling (for instance giving clear information at point of sale or on packaging with respect to the strength and how to understand what this rating/measurement means)

In fact there are probably numerous other restrictions the state has a mandate to employ in respect of the consumption of narcotics. Certain tests should be applied to any such restriction. It must be necessary to achieve the desired goal, it must be sufficient as measured by the achievement or semi-achievement of the goal taking into account the costs of enforcing the restriction, including the costs in lost liberty, it must be the least restrictive means of achieving or semi-achieving the goal to such a standard, it must be consistent with wider notions of liberty and with other areas of regulation and social practice, and enforcement must be appropriate to the goal (if the goal is to minimize harm to individuals, instituting criminal sanctions against someone who is not directly harming anyone other than themselves is probably counter productive to the goal rather than a necessary and sufficient means of achieving or semi-achieving it).


I do not think ideas will get any clearer if we employ obviously absurd notions of common political/social/cultural concepts such that we suggest what is widely accepted in the particular society concerned as the opposite of liberty while pretending that these notions might actually be sensibly construed as liberty within that particular society.

In the US the things that would be entailed in providing what you have posited as being a kind of liberty, would include mandating peoples' diet, mandating their reproductive activities, and mandating what time they go to bed. I think it is very obvious that whatever the social/political/cultural concept of liberty means in the society concerned, it does not mean a right to engineer the available pool of labour by instigating restrictions on what anyone in the country (including retired people) may consume, or what time they may to bed, or with who, or even whether or not (and additionally when) they may breed, and as such the rejection of the justificatory argument you posited is a rather simple and clear matter.

My argument does not posit prohibition. I favour legalization. What part are you failing to understand.

My argument does posit that notions of personal liberty are too slippery to be capable of serving as the foundation for public policy making. A vastly different issue from prohibition in se.

[Skipping the irrelevancies]




All of which empty rhetoric serves to demonstrate that the State has a role, here, and your particular notions are no more valid than anyone else's as a foundation for the exercise of state authority, whether that be in the nature of regulation or criminal sanction.



Which serves nothing more than to further demonstrate my point that the conception of "liberty" entails satisfying connotations--but any attempt to introduce it in to the framework of lawmaking, or the interpretation of law is going to, perforce, confine it, and render it illusory.

You are neither free, nor at liberty, except in so far as the organs of government choose to allow you to be so. This is as true in the republic in which you live as the constitutional monarchy in which I live. The sooner we give up the foolish rhetoric, and get down to the brass tacks of how we function in a society, the sooner than public policy will serve a public interest, rather than the interest of an oligarchy.

No kidding.


Why do you imagine I think otherwise?


Your argument seeks to pretend that liberty is a difficult value to uphold and apply in respect of this particular issue by positing a fatally flawed argument and trying to pretend that it has any bearing or relevance. It does not. The subject of this thread is prohibition, not some wider philosophical abstraction of your choosing (you can start your own thread for that).

The State has a role!? Really?! Oh no, do not let the sky fall!

Your argument is now "the state has a role to play therefore your particular notions are no more valid...."
You realize that makes no sense whatsoever?


At no point have you communicated anything remotely resembling such a point. If you intended to make such a point, maybe you should not have relied on me randomly making it for you.
Just to be clear, "liberty" in this context is a social good. The thing about a social good is it is good because the people in the relevant society associate good connotations with it. So a social good is in part something that satisfies the connotations of "good" that people in that society have. I hope you did not think you had discovered anything that is not self evident in observing that the conception of liberty in this context entails satisfying connotations.
The fatally flawed argument you posited (in your attempt to make liberty look difficult to apply in this context in respect of this particular issue) does not meet the good connotations people in the US have of liberty, and that matters when we are talking about a social good.

No one said running a complex society was going to be easy. It's not actually that hard in this instance (as I believe I have pointed out). One person's right to not be murdered is everyone else's constraint on murdering them. But again, laws against murder are not hard to justify even though there is some trade off in liberty. Liberty is not an absolute universal be end all trump card because we are discussing reality not some philophical/ideational extremism.


I do not live in republic, but never mind.

This thread is not about your deeper naval gazing about the meaning of liberty. As a social/political/cultural concept in the US it happens to be a significant and valued social good that is expected to be a factor in decisions about public policy, however imperfect the results may be either in your view or in reality. That we are only as free as the organs of government allow, and that is only as restrictive as the people allow is actually the reason for the importance of the concept of liberty in the US evidently.

As to getting down to brass tacks, you only know what you mean by that, and I suspect it is outside the scope of this thread. Humans actually are unlikely to easily fit with a system that does not recognize and entail "fuzzy connotation laden" concepts, so if that's what you are on about, I consider your expectations naive. I also consider that this thread was started about a subject and your attempt to turn the conversation entirely away from that subject borders on hi jacking.

If your arguments are not specific to this thread's subject, then maybe consider starting your own thread.

The main role of the State is the screw things up royally and make our lives harder than they have to be. If the State would restrict itself to maintaining a constabulary we would all be better off.

ruveyn

can't we all just hitabong?

Awww CockneyRebel, you made me laugh, I needed that today, thank you