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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.
(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.
