Hello America and hello world. This is another episode of Insane Government. Thank you so much for listening.
May 10th, Tuesday. I don't know if you guys think that's a good thing, but I don't like Mondays, I'll tell you that.
Anyway, today's Tuesday, May 10th. Right now it's 8 o'clock. We're here from Monday to Friday, 8 to 10 p.m. Eastern Time.
Thank you so much for tuning in to Insane Government.
Now, today's episode is called Drugs and the Economy. We are going to have a guest. His
name is Mark Thornton. He's a big renowned, well, I think he's renowned anyway, so Austrian
economist, American economist. And so we're going to be talking about how we are spending
billions of dollars on this war on drugs. Countless of people are being put in jail
for something that should be treated as a medical condition, in my view, and it shouldn't
Mark Lortzman, The Austrian School of Thought, The Few Experts on Drugs, and Mark Lortzman,
And also I want to remind you all, go on my Facebook page, type in Insane Government, simple
as that, and like the page.
You can get a whole bunch of updates.
Also we are going to get a new look, a new look.
Everything's going to be switched.
Not the name, not how we do stuff, but just the look, graphics and everything like that.
My folks down here, the staff are working on it and the development is just unbelievable.
I already witnessed some of it and it's like, whoa.
And we're making the website a little bit better and you know, our URLs can be called
InsaneGovernment.com.
So, you all have to get ready for this. This is going to be great. And if you go all the way to the Insane Government page right now on VlogTalk Radio and click show extras, we do have a calendar.
So, tomorrow we're going to have Jeffrey Miron on. On Thursday, we're going to have Harry Johnson. Yes, the one from the South Carolina debate.
and for 2000 you'll be on as well. Then on Friday we'll have Walter Block on the show.
I think May 18th we will have Pastor Terry Jones on. Then on May 19th we'll have Barry Goldwater Jr.
and then May 20th we'll have Mike Gravel and then May 26th Curtis Harris. We have a whole bunch of people.
We're filling it up even more and next month is definitely going to have more work on it.
So stay tuned, this is the same government, this episode's title is Drugs and the Economy, we'll be back right after this intro.
...bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent basins. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico?
Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president in the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism.
But he said under the name of liberalism, the American people will adopt every president of the socialist program.
Broadcasting live from the Garden State, I'm your talk show host, Victor Mikolovsky, and this is Insane Government.
and this is in this is insane government that was just reading something right now
but um guys thank you so much for listening to listen download the shows
and listen to the shows so online we do have the economists here Mark Thornton
I'm gonna let him on the show right now you guys can put your questions in the
chat room if you have any you can send me an email as well you can send me a
message on my account as well as awesome to do it if you want to ask questions as
Well, so I'm gonna let him on right now. Mark are you there? I'm here Victor, it's
great to be with you here tonight and with your audience. Thank you so much and
I don't know if I'm pronouncing your last name right, is it sorting? Yes that's
correct. Okay good because I'm saying and I'm
like God I hope I'm saying it right you know like. Well everybody says it right
but everybody spells it incorrectly. It's T-H-O-R-N-T-O-N.
Well, there's the problem, huh? Because I had some people on before and their names are
just unbelievably like, I had this one person named Anjum Chowdhury, you know, that was
a handful at one point, so I'm like, God. But yeah, I went, I made it through that episode.
You're the last name I'll do.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Good luck to NF on there. Mikolovsky, there you go. A lot of people
I got several awards in my time and I hate it when they say Victor Mikhailovsky. I'll get the award right now. I hate receptions like that when they say my last name. It's so hard to go through that.
We're not going to be talking about today's last names, but what we're going to be talking about is first off a war on drugs.
and you know, I've been researching all of it and been very into it for the past couple
of years and just found some great interest into it and so my audience has recommended
me and I looked it up and I'm like, wow, he's on Mises.org and I'm like, great, there's
that type, she'll give you an email and now you're here.
But you know, as you would know, if you're really into it, the war on drugs, the big,
big campaign on this, you know, it's a big prohibition on this whole drugs things, you
know, from cocaine, heroin, marijuana, all that.
it's a whole prohibition on it and so you know it's been started since uh well you really they've
been making all these departments since the uh uh 1914 is as much as i know they had like the
harrison narcotics tax and i would they they just tax some stuff in the drugs that was like i think
the start of it all but it's been going on for so many years so many years and it's been rampant
in just a few recent years, they've been stepping up on it but for some reason I'm
looking in statistics and doesn't seem like anything changed but let me before
I jump into this as well let me just to start off if you can please share with
the audience you know your background education like what current projects
you're you know if you're doing if any and your profession if you if you would
like to say it. Sure my graduate students call me the best economist that nobody's
ever heard of. And I work at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, MISES.org. I'm a senior
research fellow there. I got my undergraduate degree at St. Bonaventure University up in
New York, and I got my PhD in economics at Auburn University. I've taught at Auburn University
at Montgomery and Trinity University in San Antonio and Columbus State University in Georgia.
And I'm back in Auburn working at the Mises Institute and it's the world's premier free
market think tank and education foundation.
We have the largest economic webpage in the world and one of the most trafficked economic
Web pages in the world and I'm just very happy to be very lucky to be the senior
fellow at the Mises Institute and actually we're putting together, we have
what's called the Mises Academy, the online courses in lots of free market
stuff. I'm putting together a course on the drug war that students can take
either auditing or for grades over the internet and that's going to be offered
pretty soon. Well that would be interesting because I was looking on that website and I
know they have they look like they have some summer courses there or whatever
and I was looking at their online courses I was very interested into it so
I never knew that you are one of the teachers there so I would love to get
that course from there for the the war on drugs there if you're going to be
Offering. Yeah, I've been with the Mises Institute for a very long time and we
started out as a very small organization and now it's, like I said, the world
global leading free-market think tank and we're really the most radical of all
of the free-market think tanks and it's an educational mission, not a political
mission, but we have a renowned course, a weekly course at the Institute called
of the Mises University, but it takes place in the last week of July, but it's already
been sold out for a long time.
When I say sold out, it's actually free to the students, but we had so many applications
that we had to stop the application process.
We have other conferences at the Institute and we have other conferences around the world.
and we have one in Austria coming up, we have one in Indianapolis, Indiana coming up, we
just had one in Chicago and Nashville.
So if you go to our webpage and look at the events, there's a lot of great free programs
and the website itself is open of course 24-7, 365, there's no fees, there's no registration,
everything's for free, you can download hundreds of books.
off the website so it's really a great resource whether you're
worried about how to get your laundry clean, skateboarding issues, tattoo
issues and then of course inflation and taxes and the debt and business cycles. If
you want to know about business cycles, our web page is really the only web page
where you're going to find any reasonable information and accurate
Predictions about the Future.
Oh yeah.
It is a very, very interactive site, I may say that and I really appreciate it.
Guys, they have a donate, the facility that we can donate and how you pointed out, they
do give out the books there.
You guys have to pay for these books I bet and so if you're down there and you're looking
at those books, donate, I'm thinking of donating some more money.
So I read some of the books there, read parts of it and listen, some parts I want to read,
The books that we publish, we make available in PDF format.
You can actually look at the product for free and read it for free.
You can download it, you can print it.
But what we find is that most people, once they see a book and they can determine whether
I served on a lot of nations. I ordered them all at the same time. It was very insane how
I got them all in one box. There was some crazy Keynesian person who opened it up and
stole it. Nobody did that at that time. It was good. I love reading about it. It's the
only economic theory that makes sense. I encourage everybody to go look into it.
Yeah, a lot of these books are real classics. We've brought back some early libertarian
and Classics from 100 years ago and a lot of the books that you mentioned, we're talking
about New York Times bestselling books.
Most of the prices of our books are less than $20 so that you can develop a whole library.
As a matter of fact, a lot of people who get into the libertarian free market think tank
situation, they like to come to our conferences, even our academic conferences and buy the
the books on site and then have them signed by the authors and then you've got
something that's really valuable to keepsake and it's a classic in the
libertarian tradition. So you know go to the website, look at the events you know
and say you know when and how can I get myself physically in contact with this
stuff as well as over the internet.
That's good you pointed it all out and I suggest you go into it and I gotta say man, you do
have a great background and that's why I wanted you for this specific topic next week, first
before the other people because I want to do this month a big topic on war on drugs
and the economy.
I was trying to figure out a good person to start it off and they're not to be used so
I'd be very happy that the audience chose you to do it.
But I don't know if that's going to be a good thing or a bad thing, we'll find out.
Well, you know, in your guest tomorrow, Jeff Myron is a great researcher on prohibition.
He does a lot of great technical stuff.
He's a libertarian and he teaches at Harvard University, so let's see, he's going to be
a real unique guest for your audience as well.
Yep, yep, yep.
I talked to him on the phone and he's like, wow, you know, talked about it briefly, but
he does know his stuff.
He made a couple of books.
and Libertarianism from A to Z, but he's a pretty good person, pretty good author and
everything like that.
But now let's jump into this big war on drugs issue.
You know, since we have clarified, you know, a good bracket on it, and you know, the war
on drugs, you know, you can see a big resemblance with that and alcohol prohibition, right,
with the crime and the drugs and the gangs, because guys, you have to recognize that alcohol
alcohol is a drug and a lot of people don't, especially once they're not educated as well
and they don't recognize alcohol as a drug and I don't know why because it's a drug.
The crime, drugs and gangs, that was the thing in the prohibition, right?
You know about it, right Mark?
Yeah, I wrote my dissertation at Auburn University on the economics of prohibition and what I
What I found was that prohibition of anything causes the same set of problems and so what
I did in my dissertation is I looked at the theory behind what prohibition causes and
then I applied it to both alcohol and to drugs but it would also apply to baby diapers or
orange juice or whatever you want to look at.
If you prohibit something, you get the same sort of effects, you get, of course, the legal
market dries up and you get a black market in its place, you get a lot of crime, you get
a lot of corruption, the product itself is being produced in an entirely different fashion
and so you get an entirely different result.
So one of the things that economists have failed to realize is that, you know, we think of
mainstream economists, they think in terms of prices and quantities and with prohibition
it's different because prohibition doesn't just change prices and quantities, it changes
everything about the market, everything is different.
And so one of the things I found and it's probably one of the most important things
is that prohibition causes the product that's prohibited once it is produced in the black
market, it becomes much more potent and it becomes much more dangerous because it's produced
not by professionals but by an amateur essentially.
And so even if prohibition is successful in reducing the quantity and driving up the price
somewhat. What they ultimately caused is the product to become much, much more
potent and much, much more dangerous. And so, for example, during alcohol
prohibition, you know, basically Americans were beer drinkers before
prohibition. And then with prohibition, when everything had to be secret and
everything had to be condensed and concealed, what the illegal producers
Ended Up Bringing to Market was high potency whiskey. So it wouldn't be
surprising for example that whiskey of it was typically maybe 80 proof or 40
percent alcohol would be 160 proof or 80 percent alcohol. So it's much more potent,
it's produced you know they would call it bathtub gin because it was produced in
small batches by amateurs and they would add in all sorts of adulterates like
wood alcohol which is very harmful to your health and so you know when
prohibitionists they thought well we'll dry up the supply of alcohol so that
people will be healthier and so that people won't be harmed by alcohol but
what actually happened is the whole thing backfired just on this one margin
of Potency and Purity, we ended up producing a product that was much more
dangerous, much more harmful and of course they were not able to completely
dry up the supply of alcohol so that the total amount of alcohol consumed during
prohibition was about the same but it was much more dangerous product for the
people producing it and for the people consuming it. Yeah and you know and you
So, you brought up a good point of the gangs and you brought up a good point of the crime.
But how I look at this as well is that I'm just starting this in economics things.
But if you take out let's say some of the supply, it is going to drive up the demand
obviously right.
And let's say if we take out the – well nowadays for, let's say, the cartels are
driving like a couple of vans up and down the border, right?
Let's say we take one of the vans out.
Now they have to hire a couple of more people to guard that van. That costs money and the
drugs, the cost of drugs will go up as well. Now let's say we start going down in their
farms and start spraying pesticide on it. It's going to kill that thing. But really,
you really think you're going to kill every single plant. That's just impossible. You're
going to have that one plant that costs so much money. And so all the price of it is
just going to be driven up, everything. And you saw like alcohol prohibition. That's what
I think led to the rise of the mafia. When we finished the alcohol prohibition and got rid of it, they were falling apart, but then they found this thing called gambling, and then they went into that, and then they found this thing called narcotics, and they went into that and they stayed.
Now you have the cartels and stuff like that who are just primarily with the narcotics, now they're going onto that. So you can agree with that and you can see some sort of relationship.
Am I right in that observation and saying that the prices are going to go up and this
is partly the reason why the mafia and the cartels stayed around?
Yeah, the law enforcement and the jail sentences and that sort of thing, they impose costs
on these producers and so the producers, the price goes up and they're willing to pay more
costs in order to bring that product to market.
And so all sorts of new organizational forms, you mentioned the street gang.
We have the street gang today, but the street gangs originally formed during the 1920s to
distribute alcohol from the wholesale producers to the speakeasies, which were the secretive
bars during the 1920s where you had to have a password in order to get inside and that
kind of stuff.
... that new organizational form of the street gang where they got all the money but they
also had that organization and then the mafia, of course the mafia and organized crime, what
they would do is they would buy off the cops, they would buy off the prosecutors and they
would buy off the politicians with bribes so that they could operate without fear of
being apprehended and so the organized crime or the mafia would pay bribes and they would
turn in their competitors so that the police could say, oh, we're capturing people.
What they're actually doing is, you know, they're creating a monopoly for the mafia.
So it's a real, you know, that's an organizational business form that was adopted in order to
get around the greater and greater enforcement.
So it's a never-ending process.
The more they try to enforce things, the higher they drive up the price and the more resources
these illegal producers have at their disposal to buy bigger guns and to pay bigger bribes
and to buy off politicians higher up the political scale.
And so, however hard we push in trying to prohibit things with police officers and investigators,
longer prison sentences, no matter what we do, it just gives the other side more money
to avoid everything.
So you just can't win this game.
No matter how far we push it, no matter how far we degrade our Constitution to fight this battle, ultimately it's a losing cause.
I'm looking at some of this and some of the history behind it. We've been doing so many operations. We do so much domestically.
you know we we arrest around what was in 2000 it said 1.5 million Americans
arrested for drug offenses you know 500 thousands were even more imprisoned from
that so our jail cells are being packed now and and the room is not being left
for the murderers and everything like the ones who I think need to be there
there's the ones that are threatening the rights of others but let's say if
anybody would be under the influence whatever while driving then that's
something different, you're bringing in somebody else, so of course, it's still
a little bit of a personal issue, but in today's talk, we need to make a little
bit of a form, a form of policy for drugs. President Nixon had something called
Operation Intercept, I think that was the name, and it was the goal. It had basically been
to march on the border to Mexico. He almost shut down, according to people, the cross-border
traffic because they were trying to check this stuff out, but that effort only lasted
an astonishing 20 days. I think he realized the level on what he's versing here. And later,
You got the Just Cause operation in 89.
So this was, I think, dealing with Panama and George H.W. Bush, he also directed this
whole thing.
So it's been going on for years and you got the Columbia thing, the most famous one.
We've been trying to get them out and guess what?
We killed Pablo Escobar and we burned and we got rid of most of their cocoa plants but
For some reason, cocaine still keeps on coming. They still come here with submarines and planes.
So we're really not doing anything, something right here. And when Pablo Escobar died, people
thought it was over and everyone knew like a week later it's not because after all that
violence. So since you're saying all this, do you think this is the right thing we're
doing with foreign policy, with the war on drugs? Do you think we should continue what
for Doing. I know we're funding a little bit more of it to fight this office war on drugs, especially in Mexico and other countries. Do you think we should continue doing this, in your view?
Absolutely not. And, you know, that's another promise of The Prohibitionist is that if we eliminate alcohol, if we eliminate drugs of certain sorts, that will prevent crime. And so you'll get a bonus back by getting rid of the drugs or the alcohol or whatever it happens to be.
will have fewer crimes, and so society will profit from it. But of course, again, it backfires. It's the exact opposite.
As you mentioned, we put people who are convicted of nonviolent drug offenses in prison,
and we have minimum mandatories for smoking pot, but that doesn't apply to rapists, murderers, arsonists, burglars, and things like that.
So, once we fill up the prison with non-violent drug offenders, they have to release early
murderers, robbers and rapists.
And so, these people, the real criminals, know that the cost of crime for them is going
down while the cost of pot smokers is going up.
And so, we are the most imprisoned people in the world, in all of history, and it hasn't
Stop Drugs, it hasn't reduced their price, it hasn't decreased their availability, it's
only led to a much, much higher crime rate in the United States.
During alcohol prohibition, for example, before alcohol prohibition, the murder rate in the
United States was about five murders for every 100,000 people.
During prohibition, it got as high as 10 murders per 100,000 population.
And when they repealed Prohibition, it fell back down to five murders per 100,000 people.
We never got back to 10 until the modern war on drugs.
And of course, now we have lots of violence, lots of crime, much of which goes unreported.
And of course, we've exported crime to places like the Mexican border, which is basically
a lawless area now, where the cops are being mowed down by the drug gangs.
And so, not only do we have a tremendous amount of crime in the United States, which the police
can't control, which individual citizens now have to control it for themselves, but we've
exported all this crime to other countries.
We've exported all this drug corruption to these other countries.
And so, the promise of the prohibitionists that we'll be healthier, you know, and things
Things like that, or that will have less crime, it turns out to be exactly the opposite.
We have much, much more crime, we've clogged the court system, we've completely filled
an ever-expanding prison system, all at taxpayer expense, of course, and so the taxpayers can't
Justice anymore for the normal crimes, property crimes, violent crimes, things
of that nature, because the whole criminal justice system is being dragged
into this war on drugs and it's being completely clogged up and our legal
process has been mutated because of efforts to enforce these laws and as a
As a consequence, Americans no longer feel safe, and huge sections of the inner city
where a lot of the drug war is fought has been completely decimated.
Neighborhoods have been completely decimated, public school systems have been completely
decimated, people no longer feel safe, and as I said, the murder rate is outrageous.
Innocent bystanders are being killed in this war on drugs, drive-by shootings, gang violence and of course the gangs are all about the drug money and so basically what you have here is the promise of the prohibitionist with respect to crime, with respect to corruption, with respect to health and all the rest is just a complete lie in fact.
and you know you brought up a point there but you know some of the killings that
would happen and stuff like that are happening right now but you know I'm
bringing up this topic you know in my what we had some topics in my English
class I'm 16 years old and everybody else is like oh god right what what's
going to bring up this time but now they really admire what I'm saying but today
we were talking about war drugs and I said let's live on our own with drugs and some of the
and they're going to crash their cars and just basically go insane and the production
would go lower because nobody would be working that efficiently.
So they're worrying about the economy, the safety, the health of people.
So what would your response would be to that?
Well, it's a complete fallacy.
It's a complete fallacy and it's not surprising.
People see the illegal drug business and then they think, well, if we legalize that, we'll
just get much, much more of the same thing.
But what I've shown in my research, dozens of papers and articles and books, is that
what would really happen is that the illegal marketplace would disappear and the legal
marketplace would reappear, which is exactly what happened with alcohol prohibition.
So if Walmart or Bayer Pharmaceutical Company started making marijuana cigarettes and selling
marijuana cigarettes, what you'd find is that the product would be less potent, it would
be much safer to consume, you know, Walmart would not be shooting people from Target because
they were also selling marijuana cigarettes and the companies who sold
marijuana cigarettes would be competing not only on the basis of price but on the
basis of quality and on the basis of safety you know and so there would be
the crime all the crime element in drugs would disappear the safety element would
be greatly enhanced because companies don't want to kill off their customers whereas heroin
dealers don't really give a damn and companies would produce safer products just like you
see low tar cigarettes and light beer and decaffeinated coffee.
There's safer, less addictive alternatives that are being offered in the marketplace and
So, you know, in the marketplace, when safety improvements are added into an industry, everybody
adopts them because they can advertise.
In the illegal marketplace, nobody advertises because the cops would bust you.
So, like Henry Ford, everybody's heard of Henry Ford.
Well, he introduced the safety glass windows that if they got hit by a rock or you were
in an accident, the glass wouldn't shatter and cut everybody to pieces.
And once he started putting those into his automobiles and advertising, hey, we've got
safety glass in our automobiles, guess what?
Everybody adopted safety glass windshield, and so we would expect the same sorts of things
in a legal market for drugs is that the products would be much safer, that there would be a
tendency towards safety and information.
For example, in today's marketplace, we've got last year 27,000 people died of an overdose.
The majority of them were actually for legal prescription-grade drugs, but things like
barbiturates and heroin, things of that nature, yes, they're not good for you, but what kills
you is taking too much heroin while simultaneously drinking too much alcohol, but that's something
that nobody tells anybody, whereas if it was a legal marketplace, everybody would be compelled
to tell all their customers, hey, if you take this drug, make sure you don't drink any alcohol
or it's going to slow your heart down and cause an overdose.
Even I didn't know that for years as somebody who was doing research on illegal drugs.
So I mean problems like that would virtually disappear overnight.
And speaking of disappearing, when we did repeal alcohol prohibition, it was FDR, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, who repealed it.
And he got the nomination for president because he switched his position from prohibitionist
to a repeal candidate.
He made it his number one campaign promise.
He made it his number one priority in office, and so as soon as he goes into office he legalizes
beer, he tells Congress, you know, get together a constitutional amendment, the 21st amendment
to repeal prohibition, and the country was overwhelmed in a period of days, basically.
Everybody was rejoicing in the streets, crime came, you know, screeching down, corruption
was greatly diminished, all of a sudden wineries reopened, breweries reopened, distilleries
reopened, new jobs were available, you know, the unemployment rate on election day was
25% and all of a sudden new jobs were available all across the country, farmers had new markets
for their products, barrel makers, bottle makers were back in business, bars and taverns
opened up all across the country. FDR's theme song, Happy Days Are Here Again, rang out
throughout the economy. It was a magical transformation that legalization brought about. And it did
lead to more people dying or anything like that. It did lead to more alcoholism. It actually
really reduced a lot of these problems and so, you know, legalization, you can't think
of it in terms of just lowering the price of a black market illicit good.
You have to look at it as eliminating an entire black market economy and all the crime and
corruption and degradation that goes on and just normalize it.
So it's just a normal product like prescription drug or cigarettes or alcohol or aspirin or
anything like that.
I mean there's no ill effects or very few ill effects associated with those products.
So that's what legalization holds a promise to.
In incident, when they legalized alcohol in 1933, of course the government was running
being short of money, public school systems were failing, firemen and police officers
had to be laid off because there was no taxes coming in, and when they legalized alcohol,
they reinstituted federal taxes on alcohol, state taxes on alcohol, and local licensing
fees for bars and taverns, local taxes on alcohol so that government started to get
more revenue and we were able to hire back school teachers, firemen and police officers,
things of that nature, there was actually a big time tax revolt going on across the country
because people were losing their houses, they were losing their farms because they couldn't
pay their taxes and so the FDR with legalization, he ended the tax revolts, he got city, county,
State, Federal budgets back in line, even though, of course, the price of alcohol for
the consumer was falling dramatically.
In other words, instead of paying a dollar for a beer, you were paying ten cents for
a beer and two cents of that was going to taxes.
So the government was making more money and consumers were getting a 90% tax cut on their
and their alcohol purchases.
And so it was a win-win-win-win-win proposition for the American people and that's why FDR
is one of our most popular presidents.
A lot of people think, especially the big government liberal types, think that FDR was
popular because of his New Deal and because of World War II and because he got us out
of the Great Depression.
Well, the simple fact of the matter is, is that the New Deal had very little impact on
the daily lives of Americans and, of course, he never really got us out of the Great Depression.
We had 15% unemployment throughout the 1930s, which is almost twice as bad as it is right
now.
So things were bad, but the fact that he came into office and made things so much better
by legalizing alcohol made him the most popular president or one of the most popular presidents
in US history.
Now, here's another thing that it's going through.
It's dealing with, before we hop onto the solutions a little bit and a little bit about
the economy, but here's the nice thing.
The Right dealing with it.
I personally think if we would just talk about this whole issue, if you want to do drugs
in your house, go ahead.
If you want to do it in your backyard, go ahead.
If you want to shoot yourself up until you die, go ahead.
Just don't go in the car and drive by my house or anything like that or drive by me while
you're on intoxicated with that stuff.
Don't come by me or try to inject that stuff with me.
and I think you have a right to do it.
And the big thing is, is like we were discussing before, it's like, okay, if we would legalize
everyone, it'd be crazy.
I asked that question again in the English class today, I said, listen, raise your hand,
if we would legalize heroin right now, if we would legalize it right now, who would
do it?
Nobody raised their hand, you know?
So am I, who would do it, even if it was illegal right now, nobody raised their hand.
So I'm like, is the term going to cause somebody to do it?
I don't know. It's themselves. I think making it illegal maybe makes them more curious. I don't know. But I don't think the term is not the factor that's pushing these people to do it.
And all these people are worried about it. Don't worry about it if you're not going to be the one affected by it. Supposedly, the whole country is against the whole drug, so nobody should be worrying about it right now.
is not a lot of people use heroin, not a lot of people use cocaine. So these most
dangerous drugs are going to stay with the most craziest people in society, okay?
And if they do it, they do it. If they drive a car, they're going to be charged
with that. But what do you think? What do you think about the rights and the
individual and the drug use? Mark, what do you think about that? Yeah, well first of
Well Victor, it's actually the case that prohibition actually draws certain people, a certain class
of people towards it.
It actually encourages them to do it.
For whatever reason, I'm not a psychologist or an anthropologist, but it's well known
that young male adults, say 16 or 15 to 30, young 30s are drawn to risky behaviors.
And so by making something illegal, by making it on the underground economy, it tends to
attract risk-taking people who tend to be dominated by young adult males.
And so it actually increases the demand for those most dangerous drugs and by legalizing
it and making it more normal, people are more likely to ignore those products altogether.
And so, you know, and then also you're absolutely right about, you know, the legality of something
and its use in society.
For example, private prohibitions work very well in contrast to government prohibitions.
Private prohibitions are things like airline companies, trucking companies forbidding the
pilots and the drivers consuming alcohol or drugs prior to or during their work schedule.
So any kind of heavy machinery, any kind of dangerous job, employers mandate and very
often use drug testing so that their employees are not operating these dangerous machines
while under the effect of drugs and alcohol, primarily because they have a legal liability.
If their employees do something that's harmful to others, whether it's legal or illegal drugs
and other people are hurt. The employers take the liability. And so those type of private
prohibitions are very well enforced, you know, and churches can prevent their members from
smoking pot during services. Convenience store operators can put out a sign that says, no
shoes, no shirt, no service, which makes a lot of sense. I mean, you don't want people
People walking around barefoot in a convenience store where there very often are broken glass
bottles and so those type of private prohibitions will segregate drug consumption away from
the public.
Just as restaurants started offering no smoking sections long before the government came up
with any idea about restricting tobacco use. They wanted their customers to be able to
be segregated away from tobacco smoke which some people find offensive and so the market
came up with that idea. It worked extremely well and airlines did similar things long
before the government ever came in with the Prohibition. So private sector has... Go ahead.
I'm talking about that and you bring up a good point there. Here in New Jersey, you know, some
places banned smoking, the private institution banned smoking in the restaurant. I have no problem
with that. But what the government has done is they banned smoking in all restaurants. I don't
care what you say. Now, what do you think about that? Do you think that's right that the government
says that like we're looking out for the people there or do you think it's more
of a private institutions choice there? Oh it's certainly it's the private sector
I mean the private sector comes up with these ideas they find out where they're
useful and where they're not useful where they're beneficial where they're
not beneficial I mean the government you know they'll come up with a bright idea
about banning smoking in a smoker in a cigar club you know so there's they come
They come up with all sorts of crazy things. They take a good idea from the marketplace and then they take it to the ridiculous extremes.
For example, they wanted to ban, a long time ago, they wanted to ban smoking in public buildings entirely because of the possibility there would be fire and other people would be hurt.
Well, it turns out, upon empirical investigation, what I found is that there were almost no
fires in public buildings started by cigarettes.
All the fires started by cigarettes were in private residences, which the ordinances that
the government were trying to put into place had no effect.
And so they didn't even bother to check the facts.
They just went ahead with regulations and rules and laws to impose their will on society,
again having no practical effect essentially and basically just making everything much
more difficult for people so that now instead of employee having to smoke in their office,
They have to go downstairs and go outside in the cold and the rain, losing valuable
work time, even though they're smoking in their own personal office or maybe employee
lounge would have no negative effect on productivity.
But the government bans it without understanding or even investigating the effects.
So it's a matter of taking away liberties and getting no practical benefit from it all
and actually hurting productivity.
So it's just once again, the government do-gooders, the nanny state of these bureaucrats and politicians
and do-gooders, progressives, socialists, whatever it happens to be, of grabbing a good
thing that's been developed in the market economy and wanting to take it to an extreme,
exaggerate it, enforce their will upon everybody in society for no practical benefit.
You know, and we were talking about war on drugs before, and you all bring up good points
I really appreciate you coming on again. I want to say that. You're really bringing out good knowledge that I never knew before.
But we always can criticize, criticize, criticize. And I came on the show before and I gave out my solutions for this war on drugs and how to bring crime down and everything like that.
So I think maybe we touched upon it, but just to make it clear, what would be your solution in short to this big crime rate in drugs and big drug use?
What would your solution be? Increase police or maybe not making it that combative? Maybe
make it like stand back a little bit? Legalization? What's your solution to all of this?
I've got a lot of work on Mises.org in academic publications and I like to call it perfect
legalization and that's where you legalize all of the drugs and you treat them essentially
like you would any other commercial product with no other regulations, no other taxations
other than those that exist on other existing goods in the economy, create a level playing
field, release all the non-violent drug offenders from prisons and jails, turn the attention
of police towards property and personal crime and I would also, in order to make this work,
in order to really chop down on drug abuse and irresponsible behavior is that I would
also dismantle a lot of the social safety net so that individuals can't just go about
drinking themselves into oblivion and smoking pot until they're numbed beyond belief or
Taking dangerous drugs like cocaine and heroin and methamphetamine and then, you know, crashing
up their car, burning down their house and then they get to use the taxpayer services
of ambulance hospitals and unemployment benefits and welfare and public housing and all these
and other elements of the social safety net. No, we've got to take that social safety
net away and make people rely on their networks of friends, of family, of social institutions
like their church and the Salvation Army, insurance companies and things of that nature
so that there is no free social safety net that you have to be personally responsible
to create your own personal safety net of friends, family, church, civic organizations
and so forth that you have contributed to positively so that they're willing to help
you out if and when you do get into trouble of some sort or another.
If that kind of situation existed in society, we would have much less irresponsible behavior.
And that's not just drinking, that's not just drugs, it's any kind of irresponsible behavior.
And so if you have that kind of onus on each and every individual citizen in society and
you have the police redirecting their attention towards protecting homeowners and children,
protecting property, investigating rapes and murders and robberies and burglaries and of
of Arresting all sorts of people who are doing real harm to others, then society is going
to be much more prosperous, much more peaceful, and much more along the ideals of the American
Revolution.
Well, put it in a great, great way there, when you put the more solutions in there,
everyone heard that.
It's perfect legalization.
Yeah, perfect legalization.
That's a good term, too.
Yeah, perfect legalization, that's a good term too.
So I'm going to use that in the next class because I'm writing an essay on it.
Just twice an essay we're going to be working on all week.
And a whole bunch of topics to choose from, so it's war on drugs, you know.
So now I'm going to put that in my essay.
I spoke to Mark Thornton and we talked about perfect legalization.
So, you know, so you can't wait to put that one in there.
But we have seven minutes left and you said you only could stay up until 9 o'clock here.
I got several emails and several even comments at school and everything like that.
They've been asking me, Victor, you're getting all these economists on the show.
Can you ask them a couple of questions?
One of the questions is basically hyperinflation.
I study Austrian economists a little bit and economics about it.
What do you think is the possibility of hyperinflation?
Do you think it's very possible in the next year or so?
That's what some people are saying they're predicting, like some faculty in my school,
the ones who buy all silver and gold, they're saying it's very possible in a year or so.
Is this fake?
Is it possible?
And what do you think?
It's certainly possible, Victor.
We are on the road towards hyperinflation.
We are doing the things that are the preconditions for hyperinflation, which is essentially building
up a huge government deficit and also the Federal Reserve is basically going along with
this deficit spending and this burgeoning national debt and it's creating more and more money,
is buying up more and more government bonds and that essentially is the formula for hyperinflation
to break out.
We are the world's reserve currency as of right now.
If we are dropped as the world's reserve currency and we're in the process of being dropped
as the world's reserve currency, then inflation is going to pick up at a much higher rate,
something that you and your friends have never ever even seen or conceived of and it's going
to be an entirely different world and all sorts of things are, the price is rising and
the value of the dollar falling, the price of gasoline rising, the price of all commodity
based products rising very rapidly, going beyond our ability to consume them.
Hyperinflation is when prices are rising by more than double-digit figures every month.
But basically, it gets completely out of hand.
In Zimbabwe, which is the most recent hyperinflation, they were issuing trillion-dollar bills so
that the average guy had tons of trillion-dollar bills in their wallet.
A trillion dollars Zimbabwe note would buy you a cup of coffee and then eventually it
was worth nothing.
They had to put signs in public restrooms that said, please don't use Zimbabwe dollars
as toilet paper.
They were clogging the pipes, okay, and the entire economy breaks down and the social
The real fabric of society breaks down when you have a hyperinflation and there's a history
of these hyperinflations that have occurred around the world and even in the United States.
During the American Revolution we had a hyperinflation, there was a hyperinflation in the Confederacy
during the Civil War and it's all related to big government debt and so there's no
There are no signs in Washington D.C. that they have any intention of dealing with deficits,
or the national debt, or the entitlement programs like Social Security, or the future unfunded
liability of the federal government.
And basically we've seen estimates by professional academic economists and even by government
economists that estimated that our future unfunded liability, which is basically all of our expenditures
into the future that we don't have revenues to cover. It's $200 trillion. That's the highest estimate.
But with that as a precondition and as Washington showing no signs,
I mean that recent budget cut amounted to something along the lines of $300 million.
That's not even a drop in the bucket. That's not even the
Humidity in the bucket. That's embarrassing. It's truly embarrassing and so hyperinflation
is currently a projection. In other words, that's what we're headed towards and unless we
make some changes, adopt the Austrian School of Economics point of view,
the government's budget should be balanced, the government should be a small part of the
of the Economy, the taxes should be small or non-existent, replaced with fees.
We make Governor Christie look like a wimp, basically, but all the things he's doing
in terms of trying to rationalize expenditures, cut budgets and balance the budget, we would
I'd like to do on steroids for the federal government, but they're not even turning their
head and looking over their shoulder.
They're pushing full steam ahead with ever-increasing budgets and no tax cuts under consideration,
no budget cuts under consideration.
Another thing that FDR did when he first went into office, he cut all federal employee pay
by 25%. That's another reason he was so popular because everybody knew that government employees
were making twice or more in what private sector employees were making, and that's
even worse here in the United States today. Government employees for similar jobs and
experience make twice the wages and benefits, including days off from work, a similar private
Sector Worker is getting. But we're not doing any of that. None of the candidates are even
suggesting any of that. So hyperinflation is something that your listeners need to equate
themselves with and need to be prepared to deal with financially, emotionally, psychologically
because it's like an earthquake going through society, but it's not vibrating the surface
of the Earth. It's shaking the very foundations of the market economy that they have come
to basically live on. And as a consequence, we can stop it, we can change it, we can reverse
it, but we've got to get to working on it very soon.
Yeah, yeah. And before I let you go here, for my own little conscience and my other
I don't know how well you can give advice on this, but I just bought 10 ounces of silver when it was $31 per ounce.
I didn't get it on spot, but I got it for $32 an ounce.
I'm trying to stock up on silver, then sell it, and then buy a whole bunch more again and save it just in case if hyperinflation is going to happen.
Do you think keeping silver at home and saving it all up for hyperinflation is going to be
some sort of deterrent, a little hedge against the hyperinflation or is it just minuscule
and not going to do anything?
Having, you know, owning silver and yeah, you can own it in your house.
I, as a public advocate of gold and silver ownership, I have to keep mine in the bank
But it's an insurance policy. It's not an investment. It's an insurance policy. It's just like owning a fire extinguisher.
You have it in your house. It's off in the corner. Nobody really pays any attention to it. You don't ever want to use it.
But if there's a problem, it's there. So that's the way you want to view owning gold and silver
is an insurance policy against things like inflation and hyperinflation or even war or other types of disasters that other Asian people and African people hold gold against all sorts of catastrophes but certainly inflation and hyperinflation are the two most important.
I'm just wondering, I don't know if I was stupid to buy all that, but everyone is saying it's like, Victor, you bought how much?
And I'm like, I just wanted to get it, you know, and I have it stocked up right now and I just took a couple of coins here, silver dollars here, I love them, you know, they're nice pretty coins, but...
I went to Subway on St. Patrick's Day and ordered a turkey sub and gave them the money and I got back the change and in the change was a quarter, it was a silver quarter.
I went back to my office and I looked it up on the internet and that quarter was worth
more than my entire lunch cost.
Now fast forward a couple weeks later, it was worth over 10 bucks and it's still basically
worth the price of a Subway sandwich and a Coke.
That gives you some idea about how much inflation we've experienced since 1964 and of course
the massive movement in silver recently is hopefully not a sign of the future but it
certainly looks that way and then of course we saw the collapse in the price of silver
due largely to the fact that the brokers in silver were requiring larger margins on speculators
and so the market fell apart. So the government can rig these markets and so that's why you
have to view owning gold and silver as an insurance policy for the long haul, not necessarily
as a short-term investment.
Well, you know, yeah, yeah, largely on the part there. But again, I'm going to keep on
Investing into it. But again, thank you so much for calling in. I think I have to let you go here but
thank you so much for calling in, receiving my emails and responding to them. I do get a lot
of response from other people but again, I want to thank you again for coming on the show, taking
your time. I'm going to email you in the URL and stuff so maybe you can give it to other people if
they want to hear you from here. Thank you very much. I greatly enjoyed the show and good luck
Thank you so much and have a great night or afternoon wherever you're at.
Good night.
Yeah, good night.
Bye-bye.