Legalizing the cultivation, possession, and sale of marijuana seems like buying a goose that lays golden eggs — just pass the law, sit back, and enjoy increased tax revenues and reduced law enforcement costs. Easy peasy, right?

Unfortunately, politicians never do something the easy way when they can instead turn the whole process into an expensive regulatory maze that rewards well-connected lobbyists and campaign contributors while denying the public maximum benefit.

The latest case in point is New York, where governor Kathy Hochul whines that legalization is a “disaster” because New Yorkers decline to navigate that regulatory maze and are instead just growing, selling, buying, and consuming cannabis without her permission.

“It’s not every street corner,” she complained to the Buffalo News. “It is every other storefront. It’s insane.”

Would she consider it “insane” if “every other storefront” sold milk, or bottled water, or trail mix? I kind of doubt it, but given her obvious predilection toward controlling literally everything, it wouldn’t surprise me either.

New York’s “legalization” law didn’t legalize growing your own cannabis. It didn’t allow existing “medical marijuana” dispensaries to sell to regular customers. And so far, the state has only licensed about 50 stores to sell the stuff — in a state with a population of 20 million people.

Here’s a quick primer on how to successfully legalize marijuana:

Step One: Repeal all laws pertaining to  the cultivation, possession, sale, or purchase of marijuana.

Step Two: Enjoy the increased sales tax revenues and reduced law enforcement costs.

Step Three: There is no step three. You’re done.

Trying to impose burdensome “licensing” schemes and taxes (or, at least, taxes above the usual sales tax rate on everything else) creates a “worst of both worlds” scenario.

When it’s hard to buy — and still illegal to grow — the newly “legal” substance,  and when the “legal” version is heavily taxed, people will still want the stuff as much or more than they did when it was “illegal.”

People who want to grow their own already WERE growing their own and will continue to do so. People who prefer to purchase it will purchase it, and they won’t care whether their dealer, or their nearest convenience store, has a Very Special, Important, and Expensive Permission slip hanging on the wall.

If Hochul is serious about solving the “problems” of marijuana legalization, she’ll stop trying to enforce the state’s idiotic licensing schemes and tell the legislature to ACTUALLY legalize the stuff already.

The marijuana genie was never really in the bottle — in the war on marijuana, marijuana was always the winner — and now it’s coming fully out and granting people their consumption wishes.

The politicians can get out of the way, or they can get run over.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“I know the Legislature is doing a bill to try to protect our meat,” Florida governor Ron DeSantis recently told a college campus audience . “You need meat, OK? And we’re going to have meat in Florida. Like, we’re not going to have fake meat. Like, that doesn’t work.”

Florida’s legislature is one of several considering bans on the sale of “cultured” or “lab-grown” meat. State legislator Danny Alvarez (R), the bill’s sponsor, pretends that it’s about food safety: “As of today, the unknowns are so great …. There are no long-term studies.”

That’s at least more coherent than DeSantis’s weird “protecting meat” language, but it’s still incorrect. There is one conclusive long-term study. It’s called “the history of humankind.”

For as long as there have been humans, humans have eaten meat.

And for as long as humans have eaten meat, humans have tried to improve the quality of that meat and get more efficient at producing it. Domestication of animals instead of just eating wild game. Cross-breeding to produce animals that give us more, or better, meat. Different methods of feeding and fattening. Use of antibiotics.

Cultured meat is the next step in that long chain of “improvements.” It produces meat with less need for large herds, big feed lots and pastures, vast quantities of grass and grain, costly transportation of large animals from farm to slaughterhouse to market, etc.

The jury is still out on whether cultured meat will prove commercially viable, becoming  available at attractive prices and in attractive forms. But whether it does or not, it’s meat. Not “fake” meat. Meat.

For the most part, politicians advocating for a ban are honest about their motives, if you listen closely.

It’s not about “protecting meat,” whatever that’s even supposed to mean.

It’s also not about “protecting consumers” from … well, something. Consumers who like meat can only benefit from more choices that, if things work out, will be cheaper both at point of sale and in terms of economic impact (for example, a bunch of land becoming available for uses other than grazing would likely mean lower housing prices).

It’s about protecting one of the most politically powerful and heavily subsidized (but I repeat myself) American industries.

That industry loves to be called “farming,” but the better name for it these days is “Big Agriculture.”

At one time, most Americans worked in farming. These days, about one in one hundred do. Today’s “farms” are highly concentrated factories operated by wealthy multinational corporations, not by stoic peasants in overalls, holding pitchforks or driving tractors, like my grandfather before me and me in my childhood.

Multinational corporations and powerful lobbies don’t use politicians to protect consumers. They use politicians to protect themselves from competition at the EXPENSE of consumers.

So now you know who Ron DeSantis and Danny Alvarez really work for, and that it’s not you.

The “solution” to the “problem” of cultured meat is to buy it if you want it and not buy it if you don’t want it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Has The New York Times Magazine‘s David Wallace-Wells forgotten the star of Bedtime for Bonzo?

Maybe not, but his “Javier Milei Is a New Prophet of Apocalyptic Capitalism” (March 31) never mentions an obvious forerunner of the current president of Argentina. Wallace-Wells finds the tone of Milei’s speech at Davos 2024 on January 18 “vehement” and “millenarian,” but Milei’s conclusion that “The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself” is a near-verbatim echo of a much-quoted line from Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address.  Most of what preceded it could have appeared in an issue of The Freeman magazine like the one Reagan was photographed reading.

Perhaps Wallace-Wells’s comparison of Milei’s “Ayn Rand regime” to “a free-market junta, this time imposed not militarily but by 55.7 percent of the popular vote” intends to evoke Reagan, even if Wallace-Wells associates the phrase “shock doctrine” with milder measures than described in Naomi Klein’s book that introduced it. Milei’s opposition to abortion is to Wallace-Wells a sign that free-marketers regard feminism as a “war on progress and achievement.” Reagan’s was a deal-breaker for Rand, who warned a Q&A audience in 1976 that “should that monster succeed in 1980 … I damn any of you who vote for him.”

Rand’s assessment of Reagan as “a cheap Hollywood ham” who “always played idiotic parts in grade-B movies” was unduly harsh.  Bonzo wasn’t in the league of Oliver Stone’s effort to remake Planet of the Apes with another California actor-governor, or even Clyde the Orangutan’s outings with a Carmel-by-the-Sea mayor. Its lead does convincingly portray a college professor whose chimpanzee-rearing antics aim to scientifically disprove that crime and vice are inevitable results of innate inferiority.

Such a bleeding-heart academic activist might expect to be denounced by the ideologue Wallace-Wells describes as “not a protectionist trade warrior speaking to the losers of globalization but a radical free marketeer who believes too much has been done to console them.” Yet Milei explains at length how economic growth cuts the losses of “the losers of globalization” by making even the poorest less poor (speaking as the head of the country whose comic strip heroine Mafalda called it a grower primarily of “pesimistas”). At least Wallace-Wells acknowledges contrasting views on trade of a politician who otherwise “shares a certain style with Trump.”

Wallace-Wells calls Milei “certainly the first avowed anarchist to be running a large modern government” for whom “all tax was coercion” while accepting Milei’s self-description as a “minarchist,” which Wallace-Wells explains as someone who would “preserve only the defense and law-enforcement functions of the state.” Samuel Edward Konkin III, who coined the term, noted that by their own reasoning minarchists called “for criminals … to fight other criminals” rather than using “free-market (all-voluntary) methods.”

Instead of wielding his office as a cudgel “against the forces of collectivism, social justice, environmentalism and feminism,” Milei could try following Arnold Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood with a role in a future Apes or Kong installment.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY