doubtingthomas wrote: ↑Thu May 19, 2022 9:29 pm
Res Ipsa wrote: ↑Thu May 19, 2022 8:04 pm
C'mon, which logical fallacy is that?
What is the solution Res Ipsa? The cartels are killing and raping innocent children. For the cartels, the younger the better
https://youtu.be/SyuUGY4OlbE?t=630
And the biggest ally of the cartels is the Mexican government.
And it is not appropriate to compare Mexico to Afghanistan. The culture and the circumstances are not the same. What didn't work in Afghanistan doesn't prove it won't work in Mexico.
Missiles and bombs don’t have a culture. Doing what you propose will inevitably kill innocent Mexican civilians, including children. Not only that, the strategy of destroying marijuana and poppy fields has been tried for decades without effect. It’s a failed strategy. Doubling down on a failed strategy is rarely successful.
Read something recent about Mexican cartels. They have shifted away from marijuana to opioids and fentanyl, which they import from China. Why? More money!
And that’s the real problem about organized crime: it will always shift to wherever the most money can be made. You’re not just fighting the cartels — you’re fighting the market forces of supply and demand. And market forces are some of the strongest forces around.
Step back. Why are cartels in the drug trade? Answer: it’s really, really profitable. Why is it so profitable? Because drugs are illegal. One of the effects of a free market is that it drives all profit making activity to the same rate of return in the long run. When the profit margin on growing and selling marijuana becomes the same as running a bakery, there’s no incentive for organized crime to be involved in the drug industry.
One of the inevitable effects of making drugs illegal is that it creates an artificial shortage — there’s not enough supply to meet the demand, which results in higher street prices. Now there’s of proof to be made for anyone who is willing to break the law. Burn a few fields, the drugs get scarcer, the price gets higher, and the remaining fields are more profitable. That’s the perverse economics of trying to eliminate the drug problem by reducing the supply.
From a market perspective, the most effective (and perhaps the only) solution is to take the profit out of the drug trade. How do you do that? You can raise the supply (not reduce it), you can reduce the demand, you can raise transaction costs (the cost to produce and sell the drugs). And that’s it. I don’t think you’ll ever win the drug war by working against market forces. They’re just too strong.
Everything you try will have secondary effects that you have to consider. Why are cartels so violent? One market based explanation could be that monopolies are more profitable than open markets. So, violence is the answer to keeping competitors out of the market. And, likely, to efforts by government to reduce the profit margin by increasing costs.
The easiest way to take the profit out of the drug trade is to remove the thing that made drugs so profitable in the first place. Legalize them. That’s certain to have secondary effects, like increased usage. But, as the price falls, the need for users to commit crimes To be able to afford them falls.
Then, take the money we are spending on our failed war on drugs and invest it in science based treatment for addicts. Reducing poverty would also help. When selling drugs on the street becomes no more profitable than flipping budgets, there’s no incentive to get involved in the drug trade.
Last I looked, there was some good research out of Europe showing that the demand for drugs is reduced when people feel they have something to live for. People trapped in poverty don’t have that. There was also good research showing that, say, heroin addicts are able to hold jobs and do just fine, so perhaps we need to rethink some of the drug testing employers do.
The two strategies we’ve tried for most of my life — mass incarceration (reducing demand) and attacking supply (destroying fields, border enforcement, etc.) have been complete failures. We need to take the moral panic out of the drug issue and adopt measures that market forces will render ineffective.
That’s it.
That won’t eliminate organized crime. But taking away its most Profitable line of business may help.