"New Zealand does very well in amplifying its homegrown gang problem"

"Lately there’s a lot of noise over the deported 501s and their contribution to escalating gang and gun violence.
    "But New Zealand does very well in amplifying its homegrown [gang] problem through strong welfare incentives and weak child protection services....
    "Over an examined twenty-one year period 92 percent of gang members received a benefit at some point with the average duration of receipt at 8.9 years.
    "Their rents are often paid through the accommodation supplement if not through income-related rents and emergency housing in motels etc. And their food is often paid for through hardship grants.
    "Gang partners are also paid single parent benefits and child tax credits. Their weekly ‘package’ can amass more than $1,000.... it is important to gang members to father children, and they do it more frequently than non-gang members - 2,337 gang members had benefit spells that included 7,075 dependent children."

~ Lindsay Mitchell, from her post 'Why Luxon Can't Win the War on Gangs.' She notes that in 2014 there were 3,960 adult gang members known to police; 5,343 at the end of 2017; and as of June 30 last year there were 8,061! As I said back in 2016, 'Don’t like gangs? Then legalise cannabis.'

"The purpose of a gang..."

"It has often been thought that by many who analyse gang membership that belonging to a gang offers young people the family experience that they have been deprived of.... If this were true, everyone who lives in an impoverished, decaying or otherwise brutal environment would join a gang....
    "The purpose of a gang is not to provide a stable, nurturing, caring, family environment. It is ... a group of warriors who ruthlessly pursue their objectives, and who readily dispense with anyone who betrays them. In the family of gangs, anyone is expendable."

          ~ Stanton Samenow, from his book Inside the Criminal Mind

Ifyou want to know how to vote this weekend, ask a gangster

If you want to know how to vote this weekend on legalisation, then ask yourself how the gangs would like you to vote.

Politicians regularly talk about going to war on gangs. But you can’t talk sensibly about a War on Gangs without also talking about the politicians' ongoing War on Drugs. Because, as the prohibition of alcohol proved so conclusively in America—coinciding with the birth of big criminal gangs there – where you have prohibition, you have a ready income stream for criminal organisations. 

Drugs provide the gangs' primary income stream. If you want a real war on gangs, then rip away this secure income stream. (And if you'd rather not have gangs deciding what drugs your children are going to dabble with, because they will, then vote "legalise" to remove this secure monopoly.)

Challenged on this point a few years ago, Judith Collins accepted that gangs monopolised the drug trade, from which comes their primary income, yet bizarrely insisted that if marijuana were legalised they would instead get into legalised prostitution and harder drugs like methamphetamine.

But this is nonsense. First, a Justice Ministry study found that during the in-depth interviews of 656 sex workers “there was no mention of gang involvement or coercion.” Overseeing the research, the Ministry’s Prostitution Law Reform Committee considered “could not find any evidence of a specific link between crime and prostitution.” Legalisation has removed gangs from this trade, without offering any mechanism for their return.

And as thousands of current and former policemen who support drug regulation rather than prohibition argue—including Scotland Yard’s former head of drug policing: it is prohibition itself,  they confirm, that leads to more potent drugs. Whereas legalisation does the reverse. The argument of these on-the-ground experts can be quickly summarised:

• prohibition doesn't get drugs off the street. The government can't even get rid of drugs in the controlled environment of a prison, so they certainly can't get rid of them from the relative freedom of our streets. Which means…. 
• outlawing drugs doesn't make them go away; it simply puts them in the hands of outlaws, and the in the hands of the soft targets on whom the outlaws focus. Which means… 
• the quality of drugs is set by the outlaws, at a price premium set by Prohibition; and because ...
• prohibition limits demand a little, but it limits supply a lot, then as every economics student knows this pushes up prices a lot, and gives remaining dealers a profit on a plate. 
• So: prohibition means people don't stop consuming drugs they just change the drugs they're consuming. And the price they're paying to consume them.

Here, Collins and other could benefit from getting to grips with what Milton Friedman called The Iron Law of Prohibition: which says that the more you actively prohibit drugs, then what you are actively encouraging on the streets is the more virulent, the most dangerous, drugs.

Friedman proved, for example, that prohibition changes the way people use drugs, making many people consume stronger, more dangerous variants than they would in a legal market.

Consider this: During alcohol prohibition, moonshine eclipsed beer. For the same reason, during drug prohibition, crack will always eclipse coke. Friedman gave a name to this phenomenon, calling this curious historical fact “the Iron Law of Prohibition”: the harder the police crack down on a substance, the more concentrated the substance will become.

Why? If you run a bootleg bar in Prohibition-era Chicago and you are going to make a gallon of alcoholic drink, you could make a gallon of beer, which one person can drink and constitutes one sale – or you can make a gallon of poitin, which is so strong it takes thirty people to drink it and constitutes thirty sales. Prohibition of alcohol encourages you to produce and provide the stronger, more potent drink. 

This is why, during Prohibition, gangs were not selling watered-down beer -- they were making their fortunes through sales of bathtub gin.

And just as bathtub gin eclipses beer, under Prohibition, so crack eclipses coke. If you are a drug dealer with a kilo of cocaine, say, you can sell it to casual coke users who will snort it and come back a month later – or you can microwave it into crack, which is far more lucrative, and you will have your customer crawling back to you for more in a few hours! Prohibition encourages you to produce and provide the more harmful drug.

For Friedman, the solution was stark: take drugs back from criminals and hand them instead to doctors, pharmacists, and off-licenses. 

Legalise. 

Chronic drug use will be a problem whatever we do, but adding a vast layer of criminality, making the drugs more toxic, and squandering millions on enforcing prohibition only exacerbates the problem, and helps raise the profits for gangs.

If politicians want to talk about a war on gangs, then start with a war on their income.

After all, it’s working exactly that way in Mexico, where legalising American weed has been killing off drug cartels.

In fact, as both Ethan Nadelmann of the N.Y.C.-based Drug Policy Alliance and Richard Branson, the chairman of Virgin Group point out: drug legalisation is pretty much the worst thing that could happen to organized crime.*

So if you want to know how to vote this weekend, ask a gangster.

PS: for those not familiar with Uncle Milt’s Iron Law of Prohibition, here’s a handy summary below. 

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"For we do have rather a lot of evidence that the State itself is worse at protecting children from abuse than families." #QotD

Given what Oranga Tamariki is accused of -- abuse of power, racial profiling, armed police uplifting a baby --  Tim Worstall's latest (from the UK) is directly topical:

"GUARDIAN: 'Vulnerable children are being left at risk of sexual abuse from within their family by the failings of state agencies tasked with keeping them safe, according to a damning report into child protection.'
    "For we do have rather a lot of evidence that the State itself – the evidence from all those Northern cities and the grooming gangs – is worse at protecting children from abuse than families.
    "It’s a rather nice example of the larger point about market failures. Sure, they exist, as does evil. But to say that market failures exist is not to conclude the argument for state intervention. It still has to be proven that the state intervention leads to a better outcome."

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In honour of Helen Clark ...

In honour of Helen Clark, I am reposting an old blog about Milton Friedman. Specifically, about what he called his Iron Law of Prohibition:

Johann Hari from London's Independent newspaper is surprised that ten days after Milton Friedman's death he's been eulogised for his monetarism, praised for his proselytising on small government, and buried with his errors ... but few have raised the "one issue [on which] Friedman applied the forensic brilliance of his brain to a deserving purpose. Over forty years," notes Hari, "he offered the most devastating slap-downs of the 'war on drugs' ever written":

He once told Bill Bennett, Bush Snr’s drugs tsar, “You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. Your mistake is failing to recognise that the very measures you favour are a major source of the evils you deplore.”

    Friedman proved, for example, that prohibition changes the way people use drugs, making many people use stronger, more dangerous variants than they would in a legal market. During alcohol prohibition, moonshine eclipsed beer; during drug prohibition, crack is eclipsing coke. He called his rule explaining this curious historical fact “the Iron Law of Prohibition”: the harder the police crack down on a substance, the more concentrated the substance will become.

    Why? If you run a bootleg bar in Prohibition-era Chicago and you are going to make a gallon of alcoholic drink, you could make a gallon of beer, which one person can drink and constitutes one sale – or you can make a gallon of pucheen, which is so strong it takes thirty people to drink it and constitutes thirty sales. Prohibition encourages you produce and provide the stronger, more harmful drink. If you are a drug dealer in Hackney, you can use the kilo of cocaine you own to sell to casual coke users who will snort it and come back a month later – or you can microwave it into crack, which is far more addictive, and you will have your customer coming back for more in a few hours. Prohibition encourages you to produce and provide the more harmful drug.

    For Friedman, the solution was stark: take drugs back from criminals and hand them to doctors, pharmacists, and off-licenses. Legalize. Chronic drug use will be a problem whatever we do, but adding a vast layer of criminality, making the drugs more toxic, and squandering £20bn on enforcing prohibition that could be spent on prescription and rehab, only exacerbates the problem. “Drugs are a tragedy for addicts,” he said. “But criminalising their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike.”

Read on here for more. Challenge yourself. Or just watch Friedman interviewed:

RELATED POSTS:

• Another iron law of prohibition - Not PC
• Don't like gangs? Then legalise cannabis. - NOT PC
• Legal US Weed Is Killing Drug Cartels – Jonah Bennett, DAILY CALLER 
• The Only Thing Drug Gangs and Cartels Fear Is Legalisation – Johann Hari, THE WORLD POST 
• Prohibition Caused the Greatness of Gatsby – NOT PC 
• Friedman's "Iron Law of Prohibition" – Clark & Watkins, SUN LIVE 
• Portugal’s Experiment in Drug Decriminalisation Has Been a Success – Mark Thornton, MISES INSTITUTE
• The Economist explains: The difference between legalisation and decriminalisation- THE ECONOMIST
• More drugs, less crime - Not PC
• "Skunk killed my beloved son" - or did it? - NOT PC

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Want tax cuts? End the War on Drugs.

 

So, strangely, just as a $1.8 billion government “surplus” is announced* a billion-dollar need for more prison beds is discovered (or will it really be a $2.5 billion bill?) to bed down 1800 more prisoners in our already swollen prison population.

With a prison population of just under ten-thousand, New Zealand’s incarceration rate is not yet among the world’s highest – America’s 693 per 100,000 makes our 202 look positively like a land of the free – but it’s still a lot more than otherwise comparable countries like the UK (143), Australia (152) and Canada (115), and fewer than two-thirds are there for sexual or violent crimes.

But here’s the thing. The War on Drugs is not just a failure, not just a formula for easy profits for gangs, not just a violent crackdown on a victimless crime, it’s also one way the prison popuation is much greater than it would be otherwise.

End Prohibition and you don’t just take away profits from gangs and reduce the violence around drugs, you also get to reduce the prison population by around fifteen percent.

Which is frighteningly close to that figure of 1800 beds the government reckons it needs to lock up the victims of victimless crimes.

So end the War on Drugs and (if the surplus is genuine*) then you have a legitimate argument for tax cuts without commensurate spending cuts. Don’t, and you won’t.

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* Or is it really even a real surplus when net Crown debt increased by $1.3 billion? You tell me.

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Q: What’s the difference between decriminalisation & legalisation? A: Gangs. One funds them, one doesn’t. [Updated]

 

The Herald’s sensational poll on Monday has put ending the War on Drugs in Enzed right back on the agenda. The shackles of prohibition have been coming off around the world, and the poll says most New Zealanders (whether they imbibe or not) would like to see that new dawn here too.

But the poll shows some confusion.

It shows almost 65 per cent of NZers want personal possession of cannabis either decriminalised or made legal. While a similar proportion think selling cannabis should still be illegal.

Here’s a quick question for everyone: if you can legally possess but not legally buy, will this encourage or discourage those who supply illegally?

Yes, right answer: it will hand certain profits over to every outlaw who suppies outside the law.

So bad news then.

A similar confusion exists between those who favour decriminalisation instead of simple legalisation.

They see it as a peaceful halfway house instead of the recipe for gang funding it really is.

So what’s the difference between decriminalisation and legalisation?

Legalisation means it’s legal to enjoy, sell and (perish the thought but pass the peaceful joint) even tax the blessed weed. Whereas decriminalisation means it’s legal to enjoy drugs but still illegal to sell them. Spot the contradiction a gang truck can drive through.

Portugal, for example decriminalised every imaginable drug, from marijuana, to cocaine, to heroin in 2001, to discover that to discover that drug use went down rather than up, that the drugs being consumed were far safer than they were before, and most importantly Portugal now enjoys the second-lowest death rate from recreational drugs in all of Europe (after experiencing one of the worst rates with prohibition)

Almost all good news then.

But because the selling of those drugs in Portugal is still illegal (drugs were only decriminalised, not legalised), it is still largely in the hands of gangs – who are certainly being nicer than they were, but are still at heart just gangsters. “Decriminalisation’s flaw,” notes the Economist (which even our Prime Minister is known to read),

is that it does nothing to undermine the criminal monopoly on the multi-billion-dollar drugs industry. The decriminalised cocaine consumed without criminal consequences in Portugal is still supplied by the gangs who cut off heads in Colombia. Washington, DC’s version of legalisation is similarly flawed: although possession has been legalised, Congress has prevented the city from legalising the buying and selling of the drug. The capital’s pot business will therefore remain a criminal monopoly. [Decriminalisation] is good news for the people who harmlessly get high. But unless it is followed up eventually by legalisation of the supply-side of the business, it is [still] good news for the crooks who sell it.

So remember Richard Branson’s observation that drug legalisation is pretty much the worst thing that could happen to organised crime. Still true. But only legalisation, not merely decriminalisation.

Remind your MP. And don’t forget to suggest they pass a copy of that Economist to the PM.

UPDATE: The support and the facts supporting legalisation being so clear, the Prime Minister has resorted to fear-mongering in response. “Obviously, this wild scaremongering is intended to attempt to defuse popular momentum and support for a law change. And the manifestly fact-free nature of Key’s rhetorical stabs are revealed by the logical contradictions between them.”

In other words, says Curwen Rolinson, Key is Being Disingenuous on Dope Decriminalisation.

..

Amy Adams is an idiot

 

Amy Adams argues that cannabis is a gateway drug for meth. Amy Adams is an idiot. It is not …

What is true however, and what the minister in charge of prohbition needs to realise, urgently, is that prohibition of cannabis is a gateway policy in encouraging production and dristribution of meth – Milton Friedman pointing out many years ago when the War on Drugs was born that prohibiting all drugs encourages drug suppliers to supply and produce the most potent and toxic drugs per kilo. (You know, if you’re going to carry risky illegal substances around as a supplier, then you’re better to carry around less in quantity but the most potent substances for that weight. He calls this an Iron Law of Prohibition.)

It is also true that beer and wine are a gateway to whiskey and rum – although RTDs themselves are probably a gateway to the sort of idiotic childlike comments made by the minister.

It is true that the Dunedin life-study for example finds that heavy use of cannabis in teenagers correlates with mental health problems, but neither this study nor any other shows that heavy use of cannabis causes problems like schizophrenia any more than heavy drinking causes depression – indeed, it is more likely that those who are depressed feel like a drink, and so on.

Moreover, synthetic cannabis, which Adams and her ilk make legal from moment to moment, is arguably among the very worst of the recreational drugs found so easily around towns and cities; and just like the incentive towards more potent drugs, virtually all the many “harms” Adams and other cite as being due to cannabis – encouraging gangs, increasing toxicity, inconcistent products – are due instead entirely to its prohibition (as Portugal for example discovered so benevolently in overturning its prohibition policies and seeing crime and drug abuse both fall.)

Adams herself cites no studies at all in making her claim, relying instead only on her own studied ignorance and the fatuous stupidity of her interviewers.

Examples of studies concluding the gateway theory to be false however include a 2002 study based on recent survey data on nearly 4,000 children and young adults which finds:
        ● No significant impact of soft drug use on the risk of later involvement with crack and heroin.
        ● Very little impact of soft drug use on the risk of later involvement in crime.
    Add to this the peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of School Health which found that cannabis is not the gateway drug, but instead the most commonly used legalised drug in New Zealand, alcohol, is the precursor to use of much harder drugs like amphetamines.
    ‘While it may not settle the debate over how drug use begins, researchers found that alcohol, not marijuana, is the gateway drug that leads teens down the path of hard drug use, according to a new study that will be published in the August edition of the Journal of School Health.
    Researchers looked at data from over 14,500 students from 120 public and private schools in the United States to evaluate whether students had used any of 11 substances, including alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, LSD, amphetamines, tranquilizers and other narcotics. They found that more often than not, alcohol was the first substance students tried before moving on to other drugs.
     “I am confident in our findings and the clear implications they have for school-based prevention programs. By delaying and/or preventing the use of alcohol, these programs can indirectly reduce the rate of use of other substances,” Barry said in a statement.
    Alcohol was also the most commonly used substance, according to the study. More than 70 percent of students reported using alcohol at some point during their lifetime, compared to only 45 percent who reported using tobacco and 43 percent who used marijuana.
    Researchers also found that students who used alcohol were up to 16 times more likely to use illicit drugs.’

Not that this represents any case either to prohibit responsible adults enjoying alcohol – all the evils of that most famous prohibition being obvious to all but the most abjectly ignorant.

Meanwhile, Wake Up NZ point out that

Cannabis use in New Zealand registered 14.6% of adults in 2007 compared to methamphetamine use at 2% in 2009. With this in mind, wouldn’t we expect to see a much higher corresponding figure of people using meth if according to Amy Adams, cannabis users progress on to smoking meth?
    It is widely known that the large majority of people who smoke cannabis do not progress to using dangerous drugs such as amphetamines, just as the large majority of people who drink alcohol also do not then move on to hard illicit drugs. The current National government however won’t let facts get in the way of publicly spreading misinformation to keep the war on drugs consuming more victims in New Zealand.

Amy Adams is an idiot. In continuing to cause harm by continuing prohibition, she is a very harmful idiot – a gateway to all the harms that Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs has caused and will continue to under the ignorance of all the deluded drug warriors who maintain it.

Mind you, at least Dick Nixon’s advisors knew they were lying. I wonder what excuse Adams et al have.

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“But when was the last time that the police needed to do raids, armed or otherwise, on a brewery or a distillery?”

 

The armed standoff in Kawerau began with a police raid on someone growing marijuana. A peaceful drug attracting violence only because it has been made illegal.

An armed standoff only begun because this harmless drug has been made illegal.

Meanwhile, while the police ride helicopters to pluck harmless leaves from the countryside, they manage to resolve only 10% of the burglaries inflicted upon New Zealanders – 164 unresolved burglaries a day -- not because they can’t, but because they don’t want to. Why don’t they want to? Eric Crampton offers one reason: Priorities.

If it puzzles you that the New Zealand Police can find resources to run raids on marijuana growers, which sometimes turn into armed standoffs, but cannot find resources to solve burglaries, remember this:

The Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act enables police to seize assets believed to be the proceeds of crime, with or without a conviction.
Since it came into effect, $382 million worth of assets has been restrained (which means the police hold on to it during an investigation), while $85 million has been forfeited altogether. The funds recovered are used to fund law enforcement initiatives.
Police Minister Judith Collins says police have been “extremely successful” in investigating and seizing the “dirty money” of criminals and gangs since the legislation was introduced.
About 96% of forfeitures and 86% of restraints are linked to drugs and organised crime.

What profit is there in solving a home break-in? Anything you seize has to go back to the property's owners. But if you go after the folks who only commit victimless crimes, well, there's nobody who has to be compensated out of the seizures.
    I hate saying I told you so, but I did tell you so.
    The cops will tell us that the standoff's lesson is that police should be better armed. But when was the last time that the police needed to do raids, armed or otherwise, on a brewery or a distillery? Or on the Petone cigarette plant?
    The better lesson is that legalised markets are less violent and have less need for armed cops.

Update: Commenter Ben rightly notes that the funds don't go directly to the police. Here's the NZ Drug Foundation on that:

The lion’s share (70 percent) has gone to Police, Customs, Justice and Corrections. Health gets the rest.

Don’t like gangs? Then legalise cannabis.

 

Ever the populist, Police Minister Judith Collins has announced what she calls “a multi pronged attack on gangs” and a plan to “tackle drugs, illegal gains and firearms.”

But you can’t talk sensibly about a War on Gangs without also talking about the government’s War on Drugs. Not properly. As the prohibition of alcohol proved so conclusively in America—coinciding as that sorry period did with the birth of big criminal gangs there – where you have prohibition, you have a ready income stream for criminal organisations. (It was prohibition, if you like, that caused the Greatness of Gatsby.)

You might have thought then that ripping away their secure income stream would have been the obvious “prong” with which a police minister might begin attacking gangs. Even the most obvious.

Challenged on this point on Morning Report this morning however, Collins airily dismissed the notion. Accepting that gangs’ "primary income is from selling drugs," she was Asked by Espiner what would happen to gangs’ finances if marijuana were legalised, Collins rather bizarelly insisted that they would then get into legalised prostitution and harder drugs like methamphetamine.

But this is nonsensical. A Justice Ministry study that Collins could easily have read in her previous post found that during the in-depth interviews of 656 sex workers “there was no mention of gang involvement or coercion.” Overseeing the research, the Ministry’s Prostitution Law Reform Committee considered “that the links between crime and prostitution are tenuous. The Committee could not find any evidence of a specific link between crime and prostitution.”

The notion is as bizarre as her claim that legalising marijuana, for example, would see an explosion of methamphetamine being sold on the street. As thousands of current and former members of law enforcement who support drug regulation rather than prohibition argue—including Scotland Yard’s former head of drug policing—prohibition doesn’t mean people stop consuming drugs, they just change the drugs they're consuming.

Here, Collins could benefit from getting to grips with what Milton Friedman called The Iron Law of Prohibition: which says that the more you actively prohibit drugs, then it is the more virulent drugs you actively encourage. 

    Friedman proved, for example, that prohibition changes the way people use drugs, making many people use stronger, more dangerous variants than they would in a legal market.
    During alcohol prohibition, moonshine eclipsed beer; during drug prohibition, crack is eclipsing coke. He called his rule explaining this curious historical fact “the Iron Law of Prohibition”: the harder the police crack down on a substance, the more concentrated the substance will become.
    Why? If you run a bootleg bar in Prohibition-era Chicago and you are going to make a gallon of alcoholic drink, you could make a gallon of beer, which one person can drink and constitutes one sale – or you can make a gallon of pucheen, which is so strong it takes thirty people to drink it and constitutes thirty sales. Prohibition encourages you produce and provide the stronger, more harmful drink.
    If you are a drug dealer in Hackney, you can use the kilo of cocaine you own to sell to casual coke users who will snort it and come back a month later – or you can microwave it into crack, which is far more addictive, and you will have your customer coming back for more in a few hours. Prohibition encourages you to produce and provide the more harmful drug.
    For Friedman, the solution was stark: take drugs back from criminals and hand them to doctors, pharmacists, and off-licenses. Legalise. Chronic drug use will be a problem whatever we do, but adding a vast layer of criminality, making the drugs more toxic, and squandering £20bn on enforcing prohibition that could be spent on prescription and rehab, only exacerbates the problem [and helps raise the profits for gangs].

Collins talks about offering “a path out of gangs.” If she’s serious, then most obvious is to make them unprofitable.

After all, it’s working exactly that way in Mexico, where legalising American weed has been off killing drug cartels.

In fact, as both Ethan Nadelmann of the N.Y.C.-based Drug Policy Alliance and Richard Branson, the chairman of Virgin Group point out: drug legalisation is pretty much the worst thing that could happen to organized crime.*

Are you listening, Judith?

---

RELATED POSTS:

• Don’t like drugs? Then legalise cannabis. – NOT PC
• "Stop arresting people for drugs and start offering help" – NEWSHUB
• Legal US Weed Is Killing Drug Cartels – Jonah Bennett, DAILY CALLER
• The Only Thing Drug Gangs and Cartels Fear Is Legalisation – Johann Hari, THE WORLD POST
• Prohibition Caused the Greatness of Gatsby – NOT PC
• Friedman's "Iron Law of Prohibition" – Clark & Watkins, SUN LIVE
• Portugal’s Experiment in Drug Decriminalisation Has Been a Success – Mark Thornton, MISES INSTITUTE
• The Economist explains: The difference between legalisation and decriminalisation- THE ECONOMIST

*   Note that they say legalisation, not merely decriminalisation. Decriminalisation can mean that it’s legal to enjoy drugs but still illegal to sell them. Portugal, for example decriminalised every imaginable drug, from marijuana, to cocaine, to heroin in 2001, to discover that to discover that drug use went down rather than up, that the drugs being consumed were far safer than they were before, and most importantly Portugal now enjoys the second-lowest death rate from recreational drugs in all of Europe (after experiencing one of the worst rates with prohibition)
But because the selling of those drugs in Portugal is stil illegal, it is still largely in the hands of gangs – who are certainly being nicer than they were, but are still at heart just gangsters. “Decriminalisation’s flaw,” notes the Economist, “is that it does nothing to undermine the criminal monopoly on the multi-billion-dollar drugs industry. The decriminalised cocaine consumed without criminal consequences in Portugal is still supplied by the gangs who cut off heads in Colombia. Washington, DC’s version of legalisation is similarly flawed: although possession has been legalised, Congress has prevented the city from legalising the buying and selling of the drug. The capital’s pot business will therefore remain a criminal monopoly. The new law is good news for the people who harmlessly get high. But unless it is followed up eventually by legalisation of the supply-side of the business, it is [still] good news for the crooks who sell it.”

 

Suzuki Samurai: The usual racket

US Secretary of State John Kerry visited Cambodia last week to … well, no-one really knows what he was there for, including John Kerry. Our intrepid reporter Suzuki Samurai was there to watch his arrival, and the local reaction to it.

---

The pre-arrival had all the delicacy of a local and more hysterical version of CHiPs.

Five hundred taller-than-usual Khmer goons spread across every intersection with Kevlar vests, Chinese assault rifles and mirrored Ray-Bans¹. Check! 

White-tunicced motorbike cops² with screaming circa-1950's sirens and mirrored Ray-Bans  out there removing parked cars. Check!

Beige uniformed cops (Ray-Bans again) blocking side-streets of traffic. Check!

An eerie two minutes silence—followed by thirty noisy seconds of drag-racing Chevy Suburban-flanked Cadillac³ motorcade-racket. Check!

It’s all on here in Phnom Penh: it’s all on because cos’ nobody’s hero John Kerry is right here in town! 

Mind you this spectacle isn't reserved just for one of Kerry's eminence. Every tin-pot politician and gangster gets this treatment here.

Still, as I sip my twenty-leventh margarita watching all this silliness I start to imagine the conversation going on in the Cadillac: -

Kerry [looking out to see a sea of mirrored Ray Bans looking back at him; turns to Advisor for help]: “So, same score as Laos then?”

Advisor: “Kinda. Except of course this place is a democracy.”

Kerry: “Really!? I thought that was Laos?”

Advisor: “Nope. That place is a communist dictatorship.”

Kerry: “But my notes say that they are both in the same shape: corruption; political assassination; human rights abuses...”

Advisor: “Ahh, sure.”

Kerry: “Hmmm. So, what I'm saying to this [checks notes] um, Hun Sen fella?”

Advisor opens his folder and hands Kerry a briefing paper.

Kerry: “This again? All you've done is scribble out the names of the guys of all the last ten places we've been to.”

Advisor: “Yes sir, but we're trying to keep these guys onside; so don’t say anything off script….

Kerry: But you’ve given me no script.

Advisor: ..ahem, the Chinese give them billions every year without any pesky questions.''

Kerry: “Pesky questions?”

Advisor: “Yes Mr Secretary. Questions like the ones we used to ask, such as 'where's all our tax-payers money go'?

Kerry: “So. I've got this memorised now...one short meeting, yada yada yada, human rights, growth amazing, friendship...blah blah blah, and then we’re off. What time do we leave for Beijing?”

Advisor: “Zero six hundred.”

Kerry: “That's in the morning right? [Looks out longingly at Suzuki at a sidewalk cafe.] Can we possibly stop for a margarita?”

---

¹ The wearing of sunglasses during the day in is unusual. However, during the night Ponch & Baker glasses are mandatory.

² Any untrained, incompetent government crook with a walkie-talkie, often-dropped ageing Chinese service pistol, and a badge.

³ For the pedants among you: yes, it was a Cadillac rather than the usual Lincoln.

Prohibition Caused the Greatness of Gatsby

New film The Great Gatsby, a lesser version of an earlier classic rework of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great American Novel,” prompted today’s guest poster Mark Thornton to recall the history on which the book was based…

Baz Lurhmann’s up-to-the-minute adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a good movie, but it is no indictment against capitalism, as some may contend. It is rather an implicit condemnation of government prohibition.

When I read the book in high school I did not like it. I found it hard to read, not because it was overly complicated or poorly done, but because of the subject matter. The book (as well as the movie) dwells on decadence, licentiousness, promiscuity, and recklessness, or what was called “luxury” in the old days. I have an aversion to all that, and there was only so much I could take.

There is an important difference between wealth and luxury (in the modern sense) on one hand and the type of riotous over-the-top behaviour on display in movies like The Great Gatsby, Moulin Rouge!, and Leaving Las Vegas.

Having written my dissertation on the economics of prohibition, I now understand the value of The Great Gatsby much better. The decadence on display serves, not merely as titillation for the reader/viewer, but as an object lesson in the evils of prohibition.

The whole plot is intimately tied to the prohibition of alcohol accomplished by the 18^th Amendment to the Constitution. In particular, many aspects of the plot are driven by the black market that developed in the 1920s.

Prohibition made alcohol illegal, but it did not eliminate it. Illegal producers known as moonshiners sold their illegal product to illegal distributors known as bootleggers, who in turn sold it to illegal retail establishments known as speakeasies. Everything had to be secretive. The process was overseen by organized crime syndicates and street gangs who paid bribes to corrupt politicians and law enforcement. Respect for the law sank to an all-time low.

In the world of this black market, property rights were protected with machine guns rather than judges and juries. The stigma against young women drinking in bars at night was displaced by the allure of an exciting night out on the town drinking and listening to jazz. Instead of these profits going to competing entrepreneurs, the money was going into the pockets of thugs and wannabes. Social order was replaced by chaos. This cultural decay was the ironic fruit of the puritanically-motived prohibition movement.

The central character of the story is Jay Gatsby. Gatsby comes from a dirt-poor family and is a big dreamer, as well as a big risk taker. He keeps his past shrouded in a web of lies and half-truths as he sets out to remake himself into a person of wealth and prominence. This is the ideal personality for making it big in black markets.

The mysterious Jay Gatsby indeed does become “filthy” rich by selling illegal booze. During Prohibition doctors could prescribe “medicinal liquor” for their patients for literally dozens of ailments, including alcoholism. Gatsby sees this as an opportunity and establishes a chain of drugstores with the help of organized crime and corrupt politicians.

Alcohol has been an effective remedy for treating a variety of medical problems throughout the centuries. During Prohibition, doctors were paid well for writing the prescriptions and drug stores were also very well compensated for selling “medicinal alcohol.” I could not find records of how many prescriptions were written, but the one I have framed in my office is number E362545 which was issued on 8/13/31 and cancelled in 1932. Here is an image of a prescription from Wikipedia.

This was the heyday for pharmacies. The Walgreen’s chain of drugstores started in the 1920s with 20 stores in the Chicago area, but ended the decade with over 500. I have to believe that it was not so much their great milkshakes, but the pints of Old Grand Dad that they were able to sell at high prices that contributed to its success.

The thing about legal outlets for otherwise illegal products is that there tends to be “diversion.” In other words, a drug store that can legally acquire and sell alcohol can also sell their products illegally to speakeasies which would then resell the alcohol to their customers by the drink. This was clearly happening with Gatsby’s drug stores.

Prior to prohibition most Americans were accustomed to drinking their whiskey “straight” or with water. However, much of the moonshine and bathtub gin that was produced during Prohibition was of high potency, but poor quality. The diverted whiskey, during the Roaring 20s, would therefore have fetched high prices making enormous profits for drug store owners like Gatsby.

To deal with the high potency, bad taste, and sometimes bad smells, the speakeasies experimented with “cocktails,” which combined alcohol with juices, dairy products, and food items. As a result, thousands of different cocktails were invented as the speakeasies competed against one another for the customer’s money.

The Age of the Cocktail might be the only silver lining to come from Prohibition,* other than Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—a testament to how twisted society can become, and how the Jay Gatsbys of the world can reach the stars, with the help of government prohibition.

Mark Thornton is a senior resident fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and is the book review editor for the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He is the author of The Economics of Prohibition and the editor of The Quotable Mises, The Bastiat Collection, and An Essay on Economic Theory.
If you enjoyed this might also enjoy his video lecture,  Prohibition Through the Eyes of Homer Simpson - A Talk by Mark Thornton.
This post first appeared at the Mises Daily.

* Well, apart from the hot jazz pouring out Harlem nightclubs financed by pouring hot booze inside, seen here in another Spike Lee’s joyous depiction of the time, set to Lionel Hampton’s romp Flying Home …

… and in Francis Ford Coppola’s Ellington-fuelled film about the granddaddy of  corrupt clubs, The Cotton Club.

The drug lords are holding a party on the US Government

Every time a politician pledges to go hard on the War on Drugs, the drug lords hold a party.

We’ve said this for years.

And here’s one now to back me up, a Mexican Drug Lord officially thanking American lawmakers for keeping drugs illegal.

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera reported head of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, ranked 701st on Forbes' yearly report of the wealthiest men alive and worth an estimated $1 billion, today officially thanked United States politicians for making sure that drugs remain illegal. According to one of his closest confidants, he said, "I couldn't have gotten so stinking rich without George Bush, George Bush Jr., Ronald Reagan, even El Presidente Obama, none of them have the cajones to stand up to all the big money that wants to keep this stuff illegal. From the bottom of my heart, I want to say, Gracias amigos, I owe my whole empire to you…
As an epidemic of murderous violence rages on the Mexican-US border, and the American government wastes boatloads of badly needed money on the illegal drug business which results from the Prohibition laws, El Chapo is laughing all the way to the bank. "Whoever came up with this whole War on Drugs," one of his lieutenants reports he said, "I would like to kiss him on the lips and shake his hand and buy him dinner with caviar and champagne. The War on Drugs is the greatest thing that ever happened to me, and the day they decide to end that war, will be a sad one for me and all of my closest friends.

You think our local gang leaders don’t feel the same way? Fortunately, Mexican president Calderon does not. He knows what prohibition has done to Mexico. He just can’t get any politician in the States to give a shit.

According to sources in the Mexican government, President Calderon is begging American officials to, in the words of reggae great Peter Tosh, legalize it. "Oh yeah," said an official close to the Mexican president, "Felipe is going crazy. He's screaming at everybody who comes in, 'Why don't they make this sh*t legal already! You're killing me here!' Look, everyone knows, when you have Prohibition, you create gangsters. And the more you prohibit, the more gangsters you make. El Chapo is hero now to all those slumdogs who want to be millionaires. Kids in the street, when they play games, they all want to be El Chapo, the baddest man in the whole damn town."
Meanwhile, many speculate that rich and prominent Mexican families are in cahoots with American businessmen in the alcohol industry, wealthy industrialists who launder the unprecedented profits from the drug business with their legitimate enterprises, and lawmakers who get gigantic kickbacks and payoffs to make sure that these drugs remain illegal, so they can remain rich, fat and happy. According to sources on both sides of the border, tens of millions of dollars in payoffs and kickbacks are stashed in Swiss banks every year, blood money from the brutal business made possible by a corrupt system supported by laws that don't, and have never, worked.

You think that has ever bothered politicians?

Don’t like drugs? Then legalise cannabis.

Cannabis is supposed to be a “gateway” drug? The drug that leads people on to harder drugs?

Bullshit.

What makes harder drugs so prevalent is Prohibition. If you don’t believe me, then just ask  thousands of current and former members of law enforcement who support drug regulation rather than prohibition—including Scotland Yard’s former head of drug policing.

• Prohibition doesn't get drugs off the street. The government can't even get rid of drugs in the controlled environment of a prison, so they certainly can't get rid of them from the relative freedom of our streets. Which means….
• Outlawing drugs doesn't make them go away; it simply puts them in the hands of outlaws, and in the hands of the soft targets on whom the outlaws focus. Which means…
• Prohibition limits demand a little, but it limits supply a lot -- as every economics student knows, this pushes up prices a lot, and gives remaining dealers a profit on a plate.
• Prohibition means people don't stop consuming drugs they just change the drugs they're consuming.

Which means there is what Milton Friedman called an “Iron Law of Prohibition” (yes, ACT members, that Milton Friedman) which says that the more you actively prohibit drugs, then it is the more virulent drugs you actively encourage.  Which means instead of the relatively benign drugs like cannabis, alcohol and tobacco being easily available and sold by friendly pharmacists, it’s the nasty stuff instead—and peddled by fearless gang members.   Johann Hari summarises:

‘You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society [said Friedman]. Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favour are a major source of the evils you deplore.’
    Friedman proved, for example, that prohibition changes the way people use drugs, making many people use stronger, more dangerous variants than they would in a legal market. 
    During alcohol prohibition, moonshine eclipsed beer; during drug prohibition, crack is eclipsing coke. He called his rule explaining this curious historical fact “the Iron Law of Prohibition”: the harder the police crack down on a substance, the more concentrated the substance will become.
    Why? If you run a bootleg bar in Prohibition-era Chicago and you are going to make a gallon of alcoholic drink, you could make a gallon of beer, which one person can drink and constitutes one sale – or you can make a gallon of pucheen, which is so strong it takes thirty people to drink it and constitutes thirty sales. Prohibition encourages you produce and provide the stronger, more harmful drink.
    If you are a drug dealer in Hackney, you can use the kilo of cocaine you own to sell to casual coke users who will snort it and come back a month later – or you can microwave it into crack, which is far more addictive, and you will have your customer coming back for more in a few hours. Prohibition encourages you to produce and provide the more harmful drug.
    For Friedman, the solution was stark: take drugs back from criminals and hand them to doctors, pharmacists, and off-licenses. Legalize. Chronic drug use will be a problem whatever we do, but adding a vast layer of criminality, making the drugs more toxic, and squandering £20bn on enforcing prohibition that could be spent on prescription and rehab, only exacerbates the problem. ‘Drugs are a tragedy for addicts,’ he said. “But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike.’

It’s not complicated.  If you don’t want gangs deciding what drugs your children are going to dabble with, because they will, then end the War on Drugs now.

If you do want a legal, transparent, accountable market for drugs, rather than an illegal, secretive, unaccountable one, then end the War on Drugs now.

If you want police cracking down on real criminals instead of spending time frisking people harming only themselves, then end the War on Drugs now.

Because if you can’t even keep drugs out of prisons, then you sure as hell can’t keep them off the streets.

How could you end Prohibition easily? Well, here’s a simple proposal: just start by unbanning all the drugs less harmful than alcohol. (According to Britain’s widely respected Lancet journal of medicine, that means we could immediately legalise for recreational use (in decreasing order of harm): Buprenoprhine, Cannabis, Solvents, LSD, Methylphenidate, Anabolic steroids, GHB, Ecstacy, Alkyl Nitrites, Khat, and di-hydrogen monoxide.) On what rational basis could anybody object? Especially if they’re an alcohol “user” themselves?

NB, for those not familiar with Uncle Milt’s Iron Law of Prohibition, here’s a handy summary:

Don, John and the right to take a toke [update 2]

Good news from yesterday’s speech by Don Brash, with two announcements from an ACT leader that are long overdue: that he thinks folk have the right to defend themselves and their loved ones, and the right to ingest cannabis if they so desire. [Full speech here.]

That it has taken this long for an ACT leader to state the bleeding obvious is tragic, especially since there’s little chance of any ACT MPs being returned next election—and if there are, then little chance of any ACT MPs or board members voting to make either policy their party’s policy.

Can you see John Banks (potentially their only MP) promoting your freedom to put into your body what (and whom) you see fit? Not a chance. [UPDATE: See.]

Can you see him attacking the police for victimising crime’s victims instead of the perpetrators of said crimes? Not a hope. No more than he can credibly promote the party’s position on fiscal responsibility after leaving his Auckland City Council over $800 million in debt under his stewardship.

So this is what it appears to be then; a trial balloon released just to attract attention, without any  commitment as to policy. What’s surprising about this tepid non-announcement however is how surprised the commentariat is that an ACT Party leader would (gasp) muse aloud about policy positions like this, because policies like this always should have been firmly in ACT’s territory.

Even if the country’s clueless, calcified commentariat is unable to see the connection between the right to pursue your own happiness and the right to defend your own life—two rights which are linked as one in freedom—if ACT ever had a reason to exist then it was to promote the policies of freedom and individual rights, i.e., policies like this, while all around them parties were peddling the opposite. That they’ve rarely if ever done so has led them to the place they are now: which is to have made themselves completely and deservedly unelectable, and incapable of promoting the very policies their party’s leader (and many of their members) would like them to promote.

Mind you, at least the party’s other John is leaving. That can only be good news for ACT’s few remaining freedom-lovers who do want to promote the right thing in a party committed to principles, not just politics. I do genuinely wish them good luck.  (One John down, one more to go?)

UPDATE 1: And here’s another John, and this one’s talking gibberish.

UPDATE 2: Eric Crampton makes some excellent points:

… ACT would do best to return to its classical liberal roots - that there's an unserviced space that's relatively liberal on economic and on social issues. As a right-wing rump to National, more liberal on economics but conservative on social issues, they'd be bound in the spot occupied by the Greens on the left - forever taken for granted by the dominant coalition partner because they couldn't plausibly bring down the government in favour of a coalition led by the main party on the other side. And, I've also thought that staking out a position on marijuana legalization could be a good way of signalling a move to that space. It would confound the usual narrative dominated by right-left thinking and, in so doing, bring a lot of positive press for ACT as it moves into a different space.
    So I was really pleased to hear Don Brash musing about marijuana decriminalization over the weekend. Sure, decriminalization hardly goes far enough: if the trade remains illegal but possession legal, production remains split between informal household production among those into gardening, friendly informal supply among friends (albeit with risk that comes with growing more plants than is needed for personal use), and the gangs. Cactus Kate is right: full legalization is better.

…Brash [has] tried to pull the Party to the liberal side - a move that makes sense, but is hard given ACT's starting point. It wasn't made easier by that a bunch of people who claim to support marijuana decriminalization started piling on making fun of Brash's policy move. Yeah, you know who you are. It's all hip to make fun of the 70-year-old who's obviously hardly come within smelling distance of pot and pretend that he's a dope-head for advocating policy change….  
    If the result of pushing for rational policy discussion is to be made a laughingstock even by those who purport to support rational policy, it ain't hard to figure out the likely effect on the supply of rational policy discussion… There's no way that the politicians will lead public opinion on this one, but there's good chance they'd follow. [However] if even the pundits who agree with legalization make fun of the politicians who support it, no chance of any kind of policy move until there's obvious public support…
The issue's now dead. And ACT probably is too.

Welfare Strikes Again

[Guest Post by Callum McPetrie]

The welfare state and "multicultural" government policy of many European governments has yet again led to riots. As reported in Stuff:

   "Dozens of immigrants from North Africa rioted during the night in a multi-ethnic neighbourhood in Milan, smashing shop windows, overturning cars to protest at the knifing death of an Egyptian, Italian police said."

This certainly isn't anything new; in fact, it's the second in Milan this year! And of course, we all remember the famous Paris riots of 2005, when large numbers of poor immigrants from Paris's suburbs went on a rampage. In all parts of Europe, many immigrants (including second and third generation immigrants) are not assimilating into European society, and many are living in the poor suburbs of cities like London and Paris. Likewise, the immigrants are not just from one part of the world - the Egyptian in the story was killed by a South American. Why is this so?

A quick glimpse will show that many of these disenfranchised immigrants live in state housing. Unemployment is extremely high - a New York Times article written before the recession reveals that the unemployment rate in a Parisian suburb with a high number of immigrants, Les Bosquets, was about 40%. Likewise, these suburbs have high numbers of young people, with birth rates several times the national average across Europe.

So, these disenfranchised immigrants are, by and large, products of the European welfare states. Likewise, heavy labour restrictions - particularly so in France - are preventing immigrants from working their way up the social ladder. Without any way to get up, many young immigrants turn to crime and gangs to make up for lost self-esteem. This can also lead to the spread of dangerous ideas such as jihad, among Muslim youth. The welfare state and French-style social democracy provide a disincentive and make it harder to climb the social ladder and assimilate into the local culture, be it French, British, Italian or Greek.

DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: Gangs, gold and government immigration goons

Libertarianz leader Dr Richard McGrath takes an irreverent look at some of the past week’s headlines.

Laura Norder wins elections

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. To my great surprise, John Boy Key appears to be sending that very sensible message to violent criminals, and to shop-owners and others who've been the target of those criminals he's sending the message (well, sort of) that it's okay to defend themselves.

Bravo for that much.

John Boy has finally come out with a policy that's both worth a damn, and is different to the other team's. Yes, it's election year, but two cheers for that anyway. It's been twelve years since Libertarianz first introduced its policy that "Life sentences for real crimes will mean life" -- unlike other parties I could mention it's not changed every few years depending on which way the wind is blowing -- so it's worth a cheer or two when the mainstream parties finally catch up.

National's policy of ensuring, or trying to, that thugs won't get the chance to destroy people's lives *more than twice* is half-good, and will keep the rest of us half-safe. Two very loud cheers for that.

Contrary to the claims of both Helen Clark MP and Peter Williams QC in objecting to his policy, "corrections" isn't about "redemption" or rehabilitation for criminals -- and contrary to John Key's claim it's not primarily about "deterrence" either -- it's primarily about restitution for victims, and then protection for us.

The only reason not to take violent criminals off the street -- the only reason -- is that not doing so would safely allow a criminal to make recompense for their crime to the victim.

Government's primary job -- the only one for which it has any moral justification -- is to protect those who value their life, liberty, property and happiness from those who've shown beyond reasonable doubt that they're quite partial to taking them all away. ("The rights of the accused are not a primary," argues Ayn Rand, "they are a consequence derived from a man’s inalienable, individual rights. A consequence cannot survive the destruction of its cause.") That's the only reason to lock people up: not to not to rehabilitate criminals, and nor even to punish them, but to protect us from their savagery.

If John Key understands that much, then he perhaps understands more than I'd ever given him credit for.

That said, Key still resolutely ignores a fairly significant elephant in the room, and his policy has a fairly substantial fish-hook -- its price-tag: at least $314 million plus $43 million annually for a new prison to lock up the estimated 572 or so thugs that will be locked up under this policy who aren't locked up now.

That's why he gets just two cheers. Ignoring the obvious, and a new prison that's both expensive and unnecessary. Repairing to the reason we have laws against violent crime will tell you why it's unnecessary:

All actions defined as criminal in a free society are actions involving force—and only such actions are answered by force.

Do not be misled by sloppy expressions such as “A murderer commits a crime against society.” It is not society that a murderer murders, but an individual man. It is not a social right that he breaks, but an individual right. He is not punished for hurting a collective—he has not hurt a whole collective—he has hurt one man. If a criminal robs ten men—it is still not “society” that he has robbed, but ten individuals. There are no “crimes against society”—all crimes are committed against specific men, against individuals. And it is precisely the duty of a proper social system and of a proper government to protect an individual against criminal attack—against force.

Which means "crimes" without a victim are not in fact a crime -- "crimes," that is, such as smoking a joint, cutting down a tree on your own land, or putting a chocolate bar in your kid's lunchbox. Locking people up who've committed no crime against anyone else is not only immoral, its not only expensive, but it's urgently necessary to solve the problems Key seems at least to want to.

The main point here is of course the failed War on Drugs, whose results we can see on the streets of South Auckland and the gangs of Wanganui, in the increased profits of those gangs and the increased abundance of more and more dangerous drugs -- in the increased time taken away from real crimes by concentrating on bogus victimless crimes; in the rise and rise of 'P' -- the ideal prohibition drug -- and in the explosion of prison numbers in recent years.

It's now so serious that even a mainstream political parties really has to focus attention on what the War on Drugs has done, and how ending it will solve so many problems:

• End the War on Drugs to fix the gang problem, by taking away their source of profits.
• End the War on Drugs to fix the 'p' problem by taking away the need for such a *virulent* drug -- the ideal prohibition drug.
• End the War on Drugs to fix the prison overcrowding problem, by not locking up people who have committed no crime against anyone.
• End the War on Drugs to solve the policing problem, by taking police resources from so called 'crimes' with no victims so that real crimes with genuine victims like rape, robbery, murder, theft and fraud can be vigorously pursued and the rights of these real victims enforced and upheld.

UPDATE 1: More on the damage that dullards do:

BZP ban boosted the illegal drug market, survey shows - A survey of Otago University students has found the ban on party pill ingredient BZP has only boosted the illegal drug market. [Hat tip Whale Oil]

UPDATE 2: Lindsay Mitchell reckons the Nats "two strikes" policy has gazumped her own party's "three strikes" headline policy. "Clever move by National," she says. "Makes ACT irrelevant on the very ground they chose to fight the election on."

Where ACT should have gone [she says] is to the root of most crime and the best way to prevent it: Serious and radical welfare reform. National would never follow them there.

Thanks goodness one party at least has pointed out that road, huh?

But as Susan says at Lindsay's, why stop at two strikes?

I don't know why you'd subject another one (or two, in the case of ACT) innocent people to a serious [violent] offence before locking the offender away for a long time?
Why not get serious with the first conviction for violent crime?

As long as the justice system is fixed first and it's restricted to violent crimes only, why not?

Why gangs? Why shooters? The answer, my friend, is blowing through the schools.

After the events of the weekend -- youth violence, party mayhem, gang shootings -- people are asking questions: "Why do people join gangs?" "How do we put a stop to them?" "What makes someone drive through a crowd of young people with the intent to kill?" and "What the hell is happening to this country?"

The answer to the second question is simple enough: If you want to stop the rise and rise of gangs, then stop giving them an income stream. Stop giving them money. As any student of history can tell you, prohibition plays into the hands of gangsters. We've done the same thing here, and too few seem to want to recognise that.

Why do people join gangs? What makes someone drive through a crowd of young people with the intent to kill? I think the answer to both is the same, and to demonstrate the answer, let me tell you about young Katelynn Johnson (right), a student at Virginia Tech -- a 'Hokie' as they call themselves -- who had a rather enlightening reaction to a monument for the 32 dead 'Hokies' in the Virginia Tech shooting. This martyr to worthiness added a 33rd stone (to the monument, not to her weight). The 33rd stone, she explained, "was meant for the shooter."

When there was an outcry and someone removed the 33rd stone, this was Johnson's reaction:

"'To see this community turn on one of its own no matter what he did is heartbreaking to me,' Johnson said. 'If we're a community, we're a community. If we're a family, we're a family. You can't pick and choose your family.'

"'We lost 33 Hokies that day, not 32,' she wrote. 'Who am I to judge who has value and who doesn't? I am not in that position. Are you?'"

Well, I can say with certainty: "Yes, I am!" But Johnson, who is the very model of Progressive education, cannot. For her, as blogger Rob Tarr noted, her identification with the collective as a primary trumps everything; as does her complete inability and unwillingness to make any moral judgements whatsoever.

Johnson is a perfect product of modern Progressive education, in which moral relativism and socialisation -- ie., identification with the collective -- are taught almost from birth as values that trump everything. As Glenn Woiceshyn explained after the Jonesboro shooting, Progressive education is "Socializing Students for Anarchy":

According to the founder [of Progressive education], John Dewey, "The school is primarily a social institution," whose central purpose is not "science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography . . . but the child's own social activities." Our schools certainly embrace both parts of this doctrine: teachers now attend to the child's "social" needs as devoutly as they dismiss his intellectual ones. Why, then, is social conflict--rather than social harmony--escalating?

The answer is: precisely because of this doctrine.

The Progressive philosophy maintains that the cause of social strife is the unwillingness of an individual to sacrifice his convictions to the group. Dewey maintained that it is the insistence on distinctions such as "true versus false" and "right versus wrong" that generates social conflict. If only children did not hold strong ideas, disagreement and conflict would evaporate in the sunshine of social harmony. Truth, therefore, is socially fractious--while ignorance is bliss.

Hence, what the Progressives mean by "socialization" is the surrender of one's mind--of one's independent knowledge and judgment--to a "group consensus."

As you can see, moral relativism is only one part of modern failure, and Johnson isn't the only perfect product of modern Progressive education in the news. So too are school shooters, drive-through party killers, and gang members -- they're all part of the same coin. The overwhelming need to belong, the identification with a collective -- any collective -- is part of what explains the rise and rise of gangs; it is part of what makes them so attractive to members, and it is what Progressive education has succeeded in teaching these poor saps. That most gangs are tribal, and their members often Maori, is just a further aspect of that collectivism, a message of tribal socialization that would no doubt have resonated for young Maori.

For young hoods who shoot their fellow students or who mow down fellow party-goers with their cars, I think there's a similar thing going on: the collective and the need to belong trumps everything -- for these destructive bastards rejection by that collective is worse even than murder. At least murder gets them recognised.

As blogger Gus van Horn notes, to understand such an outlook, to get an inkling of how such an attitude is possible -- an attitude incubated in the Progressive education system delivered in the state's factory schools -- one need go no farther than this essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education that discusses US school shootings [emphasis has been added]:

[R]ampage school shootings are never spontaneous. Before they loaded a single weapon, [shooters] let fly with dozens of hints, ranging from vague comments like, "You'll see who lives or dies on Monday," to more-specific warnings to friends to "stay away from the school lobby." Those warnings started months before the shootings themselves. ...

Why do school shooters broadcast their intentions? They are trying to attract the attention of kids whom they hope will embrace them as friends but who have typically denied them the social status they crave. Michael [Carneal, for example] desperately wanted the acceptance of the "goth" group in his high school, which barely tolerated his presence. He posed as a delinquent when he was actually quite intellectual, passing off CDs he owned as stolen property. He stole pistols from his home and brought them to school as gifts for the most charismatic of the goths. "Not good enough," was the response. "We want rifles." No matter how hard Michael tried to change the way his peers saw him, nothing worked until the day he started fantasizing out loud about taking over the school and shooting people. That did work. He began to get attention. And once he had announced his intention, he risked social failure if he declined to go through with it.

School shooters are problem solvers. They are trying to turn the reputations they live with as losers into something more glamorous, more notorious. Seung-Hui Cho, a student of creative writing, probably didn't get a lot of "street cred" for his artistic side. Young men reap more social benefits from being successful on the football field. When their daily social experience -- created by their own ineptness, and often by the rejection of their peers -- is one of disappointment and friction, they want to reverse their social identities. How do they go about it? Sadly, becoming violent, going out in a blaze of glory, and ending it all by taking other people with them is one script that plays out in popular culture and provides a road map for notoriety.

So the answer to that last question posed above should now be simple enough. What the hell is happening to this country? Answer: Progressive education.

Progressive education has been socializing students for anarchy now for at least half-a-century, so why should we be surprised that it is succeeding? It is exactly as Rob Tarr says, that for such misbegotten products of Progressive education, identification with the collective as a primary trumps everything else.

The antidote to this collective nihilism is course is the promotion of rational individualism, and an urgent change in the values taught that are taught every day in those factory schools -- or else, perhaps, the destruction of those schools.

And that's surely worth a thought?