[fighterpilot]

Drug gangs destroying South America, tens of thousands dying due to Fentanyl-laced pills, lost tax revenue, huge taxpayer expense, petty crime used to fund overpriced drugs, are all signficiantly worse things than what you are afraid of. It's a laugh to see all these right-leaning people who pretend to be libertarians (not sure if that's you, but in general) but are actually in favor of a large state and authoritarian government intervention on topics such as drugs.

[throwaway0a5e]

How is there any lost tax revenue if it's not taxed? Why should everything be taxed be default?

[fighterpilot]

Opportunity cost of tax revenue.

  "Why should everything be taxed be default?"

The opportunity cost point was the least important in that list. If you don't want to tax it, that's fine with me.

[iammisc]

I'm not a libertarian and I'm not a small government person.

I believe inimited government, not small government.

If you need a giant government to enforce law then you need a big government.

For example, if you have a government of say 100 people, and they decided to hire 10 people and start a fast food restaurant I would be against this new government of 110 people. On the other hand, if the same government needed to hire 5000 people to combat drugs, I'd support that.

Why? Because limited government means government should only do a limited number of things. Opening a fast food restaurant is not the proper place of a government. Enforcing drug law is. Government can be as large as necessary to accomplish that.

[fighterpilot]

Ok, you are not a hypocrite, but I still think it's objectively bad policy from a cost-benefit standpoint, and it's bad from every political perspective. Four arguments that might move a right-leaning person:

- The drug war is indirectly causing more illegal immigration into the US because it's destabilizing South America.

- The drug war is shifting large profits away from US pharma and into foreign narco gangs, which is bad for GDP growth and therefore the strength of the nation.

- The drug war means taxation needs to be higher because it's expensive.

- The drug war creates more street crime, which ranks highly in what right-leaning people care about.

So I just don't understand why right-leaning people (not just libertarians) are so actively voting against almost all of their stated interests. Add to this a number of other reasons (how bad it is for the black community, how poor whites are being literally killed by fentanyl, how it pushes people into more dangerous and cheaper drugs such as ice and crack, how hypocritical it is for alcohol and cigarettes to be legal, how morally questionable it is to punish a victimless crime), and the case is clear cut to me.