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In this episode, an authoritarian and some anarchist(s) have an unhinged conversation about policing.
Participants: Yassine, Kulak, & Hoffmeister25 [Note: the latter's voice has been modified to protect him from the progressive nanny state's enforcement agents.]
Links:
About the Daniel Penny Situation (Hoffmeister25)
Posse comitatus (Wikipedia)
Lifetime Likelihood of Going to State or Federal Prison (BJS 1997)
The Iron Rule (Anarchonomicon)
Eleven Magic Words (Yassine Meskhout)
Blackstone's ratio (Wikipedia)
Halfway To Prison Abolition (Yassine Meskhout)
Defunding My Mistake (Yassine Meskhout)
Recorded 2023-09-16 | Uploaded 2023-09-25
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Notes -
Sure, I oppose drug enforcement on philosophical grounds because I don't think buying/selling/using drugs should even be illegal. I think people have an inalienable right to put whatever they want in their bodies. Assuming drugs are and will remain illegal then your favored policy will depend on what goal you want to prioritize. Simplifying a lot but:
I pointed out here the issue of drug overdoses in prisons to highlight the costs involved with any kind of enforcement.
The goal I’m trying to prioritize is to reduce use, because that also addresses the other two problems simultaneously. I don’t just want to stop people using drugs because I hate happiness and want to deny people a source of harmless enjoyment. As I stated in the podcast, I want to prevent people from using drugs because I can observe empirically that a substantial percentage of people who use hard drugs become astronomically more likely to commit crimes, and to become generally feral and unmanageable, as a direct result of their drug addictions.
Your argument does not seem materially different from the communist position that if we want poor people not to steal things, we should just give them as much stuff as they want, and then they won’t have to steal it.
I think you articulated your position clearly in the episode. I disagree with you on some empirics: how likely people get addicted, how detrimental drugs are (and of course how much of that detriment is innate vs. a consequence of criminalization), how much non-property crime is driven by drug use, and so on.
The stolen food parallel argument doesn't map. The basic premises for my "free heroin" position is that heavy drug addiction (namely opioids) does two things: makes it near-impossible to hold a real job and makes addicts extremely motivated to get more drugs. Combined together, addicts' ability to make money is significantly narrowed while their risk-tolerance is significantly increased. Ergo, crime becomes the only practical avenue for addicts to fund their habit, and property crime is particularly bad as a "vocation" because of the horrendously high deadweight loss it inflicts on society. The factors I outline are not present in a hypothetical scenario involving poor hungry people.
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