4 ms·

Reporters are getting their heads chopped off in Mexico. How about the morality of propping up violent drug cartels?

• spacemanmatt 12y ago
  How about the morality of BofA laundering billions for the same violent cartels?
• mike_hearn 12y ago
  The Mexican cartels don't only engage in drug related crime; the idea that Mexico would become a peaceful utopia overnight if only you could buy crystal meth at your local supermarket doesn't have much evidence to support it.
  • smokeyj 12y ago
    Could you try making a principled argument in favor of prohibition? I haven't seen much evidence to support it.
    • tptacek 12y ago
      That's a dramatic shift of the goalposts, isn't it? His argument was that ending prohibition wouldn't immediately make Mexico a safer place. It wasn't that prohibition was itself an intrinsically good idea.
      • smokeyj 12y ago
        A dramatic shift of goalposts would be equating not having your head chopped off with utopia. His argument was not that prohibition wouldn't end immediately, it's that "The Mexican cartels don't only engage in drug related crime". This is a correct statement. Cartels also profit from sex prohibition, but I'm not sure why this justifies anything. Hence my request for a principled argument. Maybe you can help out.
        • tptacek 12y ago
          That's a very uncharitable summary of the comment you replied to, and also a stretch, since you're the one introducing "utopia" in the the discussion. I have an easier time mounting a principled argument against prostitution than for drugs. Here it is: Adults in western societies compete with other adults in the market (in its broadest sense). You can see this, for example, in every job interview. Usually, competition is benign. Some forms of competition are not benign. We've decided for example that the competitive tactic of cornering a market and using that position to fix prices is malignant. As a public policy matter, we allow the market to operate freely except in those cases where the competition becomes malignant. As a public policy matter, we've decided that it's malignant to allow the form of competition where the winner is the person most willing to compromise their sexual integrity. We can do that even while understanding that different people have different notions of what comprises "sexual integrity". That's because we recognize that if you allow competition based on sexual compromise, the market races to the bottom, and we operate at the lowest common denominator of "sexual integrity". The market punishes people for not compromising. That emergent property takes on the coercive force of public policy. In the same sense as there's no intrinsic moral problem with buying a specific amount of, say, lysine, but there is with buying all the lysine and fixing prices, there's no intrinsic moral problem with exchanging money for sex, but there's an emergent problem with allowing people to compete based on their willingness to sell sex. Put more simply: legalizing prostitution would be at least in some sense (and I think probably in a very powerful sense) coercive of poor women, and particular poor single mothers who have an extraordinarily powerful obligation to finance the upbringing of their children. Not selling your body would become a luxury. It's terrible public policy that allows that to happen. It happens, obviously, regardless of the policy levers we pull. But society as a whole doesn't create the expectation that people can/should do that. That would stop being true if we allowed red-light districts in our cities. Preemptively: you asked for a principled argument, by the way, not a dispositive one.
          • smokeyj 12y ago
            "the idea that Mexico would become a peaceful _utopia_ overnight if only you could buy crystal meth" - Mike_hearn Mike didn't just shift the goal post, he packed it up, shipped it via fedex, and had it smelted.