A quote from today's column by David Limbaugh (the saner brother) and a few comments from me

[fpb]

No central planning-type guru is as smart at allocating scarce resources as a free market pricing mechanism.
(David Limbaugh, Townhall.com, 6 January 2009)

The market in drugs is not free. But in so far as it is free at all - that is, in so far as the prohibition can be dodged - enormous amounts of resources are allocated to drugs; large enough to pay for mighty criminal armies in Latin America and for colossal illegal businesses in the First World. Even so, the trade in illegal drugs is small in volume compared to the trade in legal drugs, specifically spirits, which have no other purpose than intoxication. The free market allocates enough resources to them to support the GDP of several countries. The market in pornography is for all practical purposes free - and in fact it extends to businesses not normally conceived of as pornographic, such as advertising and most of the daily press - and it is large beyond reckoning. The immensely rational and inconceivably smart invisible hand of the free market allocates enough resources to the wholly irrational goal of intoxication and self-abasement that, if it were removed, the result would be economic catastrophe around the world.

Comments

Re: Prohibition

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Actually, I do not think that was insulting. It really was a possible answer to a question that must arise in anyone's mind when faced with that kind of testimony: did the lady really not think of Cosa Nostra and the rest of the horrors of underground alcohol sale as part of the picture of Prohibition? It is a sufficiently known and understood feature of it. I have met at least another person who said more or less the same thing, and I found myself wondering whether they did not consider mass illegality a part of the result of the nineteenth amendment. The comparison with my fellow-citizens who look with nostalgia and admiration on the times of Prefetto Mori occurred to me. It is not a contemptous comparison.

Re: Prohibition

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

I would think it might just have been a case of her having lived in a rural area -- my own grandmother lived through that era as a young woman, but in a tiny town in central Illinois, far from Chicago. It was a time before television, when mass media was still in its barest infancy. She was in her teens before her family even had a radio, so most of her view of the world beyond the town of Broadlands came from newspapers -- and those would have been downstate ones, which focused primarily upon local affairs, with passing coverage of affairs in the wider world. There just wasn't the obsession with knowing all the news as it happened.

And the mentality didn't entirely go away with the rise of television -- I can remember many times when I was scolded for "excessive" interest in world affairs, told to concentrate on my own life and classes/job and leave such matters to those who were charged with handling them. Spending "too much" time reading the news and wanting to discuss it put me out of step with peers who believed I should put more effort into observing and mastering the dynamics of the various cliques that ruled their interactions.

Re: Prohibition

[lametiger.livejournal.com]

"And the mentality didn't entirely go away with the rise of television -- I can remember many times when I was scolded for 'excessive' interest in world affairs"

This mentality does NOT describe my mother, but I guess I can't keep anyone from making their own assumptions and projecting their own experiences and/or prejudices onto her evaluation of Prohibition. At this point, I have said all I am going to say on the subject. As I began by saying, I did not experience these things for myself. I merely wanted to point out that there was more to what was happening at the time than the one-sided picture we get from the usual sources.