3 ms·

"does not lead to any number of doomsday scenarios envisioned by legalization opponents"... of course the real doomsday scenario - poorer employment prospects f

by ojbyrne 12y ago

"does not lead to any number of doomsday scenarios envisioned by legalization opponents"... of course the real doomsday scenario - poorer employment prospects for Law Enforcement - hopefully will happen.

Zigurd 12y ago
It's not just that cops make a huge number of useless, insignificant arrests for drugs, there's a whole industry built on top of those arrests: All the prosecutors, judges, clerks, bailiffs, parole officers, prison guards and the whole prison infrastructure. Then add all the retired CJ employees teaching the current policing doctrine in community colleges. That's the edifice that has to be razed to avoid the situation in Ferguson. All of those pseudo-professions have been massively inflated and is a kind of last refuge for men with strong necks and weak reasoning skills. It's subculture, and that subculture doesn't have a beneficial effect on the nation's culture as a whole. All of that employment and wasted activity also shows up in the plus columns for productivity and GDP, warping our ability to compare our economy to other industrial nations.
- jschwartzi 12y ago
  Plus, because we have a finite number of police, they have zero time to do anything traditionally associated with police, like proactively walking beats. I would be all for adding more police if it meant that each one had a patrol area of less than 1 square mile and they could actually get out and walk it. You see so much more when you walk.
- jonah 12y ago
  "Think of the jobs" is almost as bad as "Think of the kids" as far as excuses for things go. We see it a lot in the realm of energy production too. LEO or Roughneck can't be the only job these folks could possibly get if there were fewer of those positions.
  - Pxtl 12y ago
    I'd say that "think of the jobs" is generally a damned sight worse than "think of the kids" as rationalizations for bad policy go. Jobs defense is often protecting an explicit waste of resources, while kids at least are worth protecting and tend to break libertarian models of the universe.
thezilch 12y ago
That's OK; they can now go, with their education of illegal drugs, and now setup shop and sell those drugs now legalized. Seems to me these employees would know the ins, outs, does, and donts of the business. Or they were just brutes and learned nothing while incrementing the weekly/monthly incarceration counter.

by ojbyrne 12y ago

Zigurd 12y ago

It's not just that cops make a huge number of useless, insignificant arrests for drugs, there's a whole industry built on top of those arrests: All the prosecutors, judges, clerks, bailiffs, parole officers, prison guards and the whole prison infrastructure. Then add all the retired CJ employees teaching the current policing doctrine in community colleges. That's the edifice that has to be razed to avoid the situation in Ferguson. All of those pseudo-professions have been massively inflated and is a kind of last refuge for men with strong necks and weak reasoning skills. It's subculture, and that subculture doesn't have a beneficial effect on the nation's culture as a whole. All of that employment and wasted activity also shows up in the plus columns for productivity and GDP, warping our ability to compare our economy to other industrial nations.

jschwartzi 12y ago
Plus, because we have a finite number of police, they have zero time to do anything traditionally associated with police, like proactively walking beats. I would be all for adding more police if it meant that each one had a patrol area of less than 1 square mile and they could actually get out and walk it. You see so much more when you walk.
jonah 12y ago
"Think of the jobs" is almost as bad as "Think of the kids" as far as excuses for things go. We see it a lot in the realm of energy production too. LEO or Roughneck can't be the only job these folks could possibly get if there were fewer of those positions.
- Pxtl 12y ago
  I'd say that "think of the jobs" is generally a damned sight worse than "think of the kids" as rationalizations for bad policy go. Jobs defense is often protecting an explicit waste of resources, while kids at least are worth protecting and tend to break libertarian models of the universe.

thezilch 12y ago

That's OK; they can now go, with their education of illegal drugs, and now setup shop and sell those drugs now legalized. Seems to me these employees would know the ins, outs, does, and donts of the business. Or they were just brutes and learned nothing while incrementing the weekly/monthly incarceration counter.