I’m writing this column as an open letter to my state’s US Senators (Republicans Marco Rubio and Rick Scott). I encourage you to write to yours as well, and if you like any of the language herein, feel free to “steal” it.

Dear Senators Rubio and Scott,

On December 4, the US House of Representatives passed, by a margin of 228 to 164, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act. If passed by the Senate and signed by the president, the MORE Act would  remove marijuana from the federal “controlled substances” schedule. While the bill unfortunately includes provisions for regulation and taxation of the plant, it’s a move in the right direction.

The Washington Post reports that, to their and their party’s shame, all but five House Republicans voted against the bill, and that Republican leaders in the House and Senate mocked it as a distraction from other matters such as COVID-19 relief.

As former President Barack Obama liked to say, “let me be clear” on this issue:

While I’m personally never inclined to vote for Republicans or Democrats, in Florida those are usually my only two options in US Senate races. You have a chance to get my vote for re-election in 2022 (Senator Rubio) or 2024 (Senator Scott) .

In fact, if you sponsor a Senate version of the bill, work to bring it to a vote, cast your vote in favor of it, and lean hard on President Trump (or, depending on time frame, President Biden) to sign it, you’ve got a pretty GOOD shot at my vote.

If you assist Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in keeping such a bill from coming to the floor for a vote, or if you vote against that bill when it comes before you, you’ve got NO shot at my vote. Not for US Senator, not for President, not even for dog-catcher.

It’s just that simple.

Thirty-six states now provide for medical access to marijuana, and 15 states have legalized recreational use. It’s time for the federal government to get with the program.

Marijuana is not and never has been a dangerous drug. It’s a medically and commercially useful plant, and as a recreational intoxicant it’s considerably less unhealthy and dangerous than alcohol or tobacco.

In fact, the most dangerous thing — practically the ONLY dangerous thing — about marijuana is the possibility of getting arrested over it.

Millions of Americans have, over the course of decades, found themselves entangled in the criminal justice system for using, possessing, growing, buying, or selling a common and beneficial plant.

That’s a moral crime, and politicians like you are chief among its perpetrators. Your participation in the ongoing conspiracy against rights known as marijuana prohibition ruins lives, destroys careers, and restrains commerce to the detriment of all Americans.

The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act offers you a chance to give up the thug life on this one issue. Seize that opportunity with both hands — if not because it’s the right thing to do, then because your political futures depend on 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.

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Some of the richest young heirs plan to use their inherited wealth “to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top” despite being among them (“Silver-Spoon Socialists,” The New York Times, November 29). Convinced that “true wealth redistribution means redistributing authority” rather than mere largesse, they are “investing in or donating to credit unions, worker-owned businesses, community land trusts, and nonprofits” that spread power as well as money.

Such alternatives have long been dismissed as marginal, it having been assumed that only concentration of political power can effectively fight concentration of economic power. As Doug Henwood has advised anti-corporate protesters, “socialize Merck, don’t dissolve it,” since he considers “large, complex organization” necessary. Such urgings were little needed at the close of a twentieth century when socialization had become almost synonymous with nationalization (or at the very least heavy regulation).

Yet the move away from such a conflation two decades into the twenty-first century was anticipated as far back as the nineteenth, when the economic stratagems of Josiah Warren, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Benjamin Tucker aimed at what Tucker called “subjecting capital to the natural law of competition.” A freer market could “socialize its effects by making its use beneficial to all instead of a means of impoverishing the many to enrich the few.”

Even as the twentieth century produced unprecedented amassings of wealth and power, attentive historical scholars confirmed Tucker’s view that legal privileges entrenched dominant firms and blocked the benefits of market exchange in the realms of banking, real estate, international trade, and invention. Bertrand Russell observed that “the harm that is done by great industrialists is usually dependent upon their access to some source of monopoly power.” Gabriel Kolko showed how “it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.”

The sources of monopoly power identified by Tucker are still the primary factors that distort free trade into unfair trade. Those interested in using what they have to help have-nots should aim to reroute the economy beyond those barriers — or remove them entirely.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “The negative philanthropic highway” by Joel Schlosberg, Lake Havasu City, AZ News, December 7, 2020
• “The negative philanthropic highway” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, December 8, 2020

“Why,” Candice Holdsworth asks at British web site spiked, “aren’t more artists standing up to lockdown?” “The lockdown has completely decimated the live-performance industry,” she writes. “And yet we hear very little from leading people in theatre, music and the arts criticising the lockdown and what it is doing to their industry.”

There are exceptions. Probably the most prominent is Van Morrison, who’s recording lockdown protest songs (with, among others, Eric Clapton) and using the revenues to fund grants for working musicians left unemployed by government mandates.

But the exceptions prove the rule. Most entertainment celebrities have gone along with, and some have even actively promoted, government shutdowns of everything from movie theaters to nightclubs in the name of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even if one supports such measures, it’s important to understand that they impose costs on all of us.

As both closures and non-closure restrictions stretch on month after month, some performance venues will doubtless close permanently. They can’t pay rent, keep the lights on, and feed their owners forever without generating revenue.

How many musicians, dancers, and stage actors — aspiring, up-and-coming, or long-working but without financial resources to wait the pandemic out — have already given up and sought work that neither utilizes their talents nor brightens our lives nearly as much? How many will never return to entertainment?

Technology helps.  Music can be recorded, videos produced, shows live-streamed to home viewers. But for many artists and many fans, there’s just no substitute for live, in-person performances.

And speaking of audiences, the lockdown measures cost us as well. Missing those evenings out at the club or theater may not be Oliver Twist level deprivation, but it’s definitely a quality of life downer.

In late November, my wife and I went out to a club to see a band for the first time in ten months. Same club (the High Dive in Gainesville, Florida) and same band (The Grass is Dead — a fantastic combo melding bluegrass musicianship with Grateful Dead and related music) as the last time, in January.

The difference between the two gigs was stark. Masks, of course. Severely reduced audience size. No dance floor (you could stand next to your chair and dance, but not mix). Drinking outside only.

I’m not complaining as a customer, mind you. It wasn’t just better than nothing, it was fantastic. There’s nothing like joining fellow fans in a room to hear great musicians doing their thing and doing it well.

But with an audience of maybe 20 or so (The Grass is Dead can pack a venue in normal times), I have to wonder how either the band or the club made enough money on the show to keep going for very long. And in many places, that show couldn’t have happened at all, even with social distancing, masking, etc.

Politicians and bureaucrats, whose paychecks continue to arrive in full and on time, are doing terrible and likely long-term harm to both performers and fans in the name of fighting COVID-19.

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.

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