Money Grab

“It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.” Mark Twain

NYC is having a difficult time enforcing the law decriminalizing marijuana, specifically the rampant increase of unlicensed pot shops. What’s frustrating the government is something called the free market, even if in this case it’s free as long as you don’t get caught. The trafficking of pot has been around for thousands of years, both legally and illegally, and like now, often simultaneously. Like the product itself, its cultivation, distribution, and use are extensive, organic, and spontaneous, like what free markets are supposed to be, but in this case “underground”; pot distribution is a $34B industry, 75% of which is not government licensed. Recent polls show 90% of Americans support decriminalizing pot, yet the government criminalizes those that participate in that market outside of its control.

Then we have congestion pricing, the professed purpose of which is to reduce traffic congestion by making it financially punitive to drive in the central business district of Manhattan and thereby increasing the use of public transportation that has not been maintained, increasingly unsafe and grossly mismanaged. Despite the outcry from many whose means of transportation and employment require driving to work, or are businesses and residences within the area, it’s now the law. The revenues from this law are estimated at $3.4B/yr., which is actually more than the $1B/yr. the MTA is required to raise from its operations by law.

Both these laws are money grabs, coercing it from people without actually providing anything of real value. What benefits the government professes are cloaked in such generalized and ambiguous terms that Will Rogers accurately characterized when he said, “The difference between a bandit and a patriot is a good press agent.” Both are opportunistic motives to tax without the danger of it being called as such; the problem for the government is that it’s also obvious, except to those who live in the echo chamber of the greater good narrative.

In both cases, and there are many more like minimum wage, student loans, education reform and trade protection, politicians first raise the issues by framing them as crises that need government action; what is omitted is that whatever the crisis claimed may be, it was first created by the very same politicians. The “War on Drugs” and the failure of government run and/or regulated transportation are the causes for which politicians propose even more of the same. Those that call these same corrupt politicians out are labeled radicals, marginalized like heretics for simply observing the obvious.

“The heresy of heresies was common sense.” George Orwell, 1984