Skip to main content

Cannabis and Reparations


 So: one municipality has decided to pay race-based reparations. 

How? with a tax on cannabis. 

As Spock would say: "fascinating." 

The trend toward state-level legalization of cannabis has gone pretty far, and there is now a friendly administration. Back in January 2017, when I attended a San Diego conference o the industry, there was a good deal of nervousness about the incoming administration and what action it might take. Well, it did not act as a friend, but it always had other things on its mind, so the state-legal systems have survived it.

The Biden administration might be willing to go further than to allow such systems to survive. It might integrate them with federal banking law in an important respect, which could lessen the amount of violent crime. After all, without that integration, cannabis merchants are mostly cash businesses. They leave a lot of cash around the premises, and that in turn attracts violent ctime. So ... let these legitimate businesses open bank accounts already!

But now cannabis has been targeted as a source of reparations money?  Why? Probably just "because it's there." Because cannabis merchants are still the disreputable folk who aren't allowed to keep bank accounts. Their profits aren't regarded as fully legitimate so they are easy targets. 

Is there a deeper connection here that I'm missing. (And please don't reply with "who used to pick George Washington's hemp anyway?") okay? 

Comments

  1. HenryApril 12, 2021 at 10:28 AM

    Wouldn't the government tax legal cannabis sales just as it taxes alcohol and tobacco sales, aside from whether cannabis merchants are "disreputable"? Does it make a difference that the tax receipts will be targeted for a particular cause?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ChristopherApril 12, 2021 at 1:29 PM

      Henry, It seems to me that The Powers That Be may have calculated that the aura of disreputability on the one hand, and the notion that "this money will be going to a good cause" on the other hand, may allow them to get away with a bigger share of the income from businesses in this area than they can get from liquor or tobacco sales. And I think that this could be a miscalculation, because the legit dealer in state-legal marijuana have to deal with competition from the continued black market, folks selling without benefit of sate licenses. Too much taxation at the retail level may drive the business back to the black market status whence it was only recently and partially raised.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
7 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
13 comments
Read more