On December 19, 2023, Colorado’s
Supreme Court ruled that Don Trump, a former U.S. president, had engaged in
insurrectionist activity as a matter of fact, and furthermore, as a matter of
law, the U.S. Constitution bars him from holding any office, including
the presidency. With an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court a certainty, realized
even by the Colorado justices, and some notable (and very visible) Republicans
arguing that the American people should have the final say on whether Trump
will be president again beginning in 2025, the question of who should have the
final say—the judiciary or the people—was pressing, and indeed, very important.
I contend that the determination of fact should have been made by a jury in a
criminal proceeding, and that even absent that, the ultimate decision should
still be made prior to, and thus not during, the election, for the question is
whether Trump can be listed as a candidate for the office. Ultimately, the
tension lies between the value of a politics-free judiciary and democratic
(majority) rule.
Nederland, Colorado. A town in Boulder County that had embraced
marijuana dispensaries for profit, found itself just outside a wildfire that
burned 600 acres in July, 2016. Two homeless men were charged with
fourth-degree arson for failing to put out their camp fire. The townsfolk
reacted in anger, pointing to the increasing number of homeless people in the
nearby national forest. Officials had been forced to deal with “more emergency
calls, drug overdoses, illegal fires and trash piles deep in the woods.”[1]
Some residents urged the U.S. Forest Service to crack down on the homeless by imposing
tighter rules on camping, or banning it altogether in certain parts of the
woods most popular with the homeless. An analysis drawing on the political
philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth-century English philosopher can be
employed to reveal a broader perspective on the problem.
The debate over whether the Scottish region of Great
Britain should secede from the UK extends beyond whatever provincial interests
unite and divide the state’s regions; it "is also part of a larger
question that extends well beyond Britain, to Texas and Colorado, for example,
and elsewhere: What are the benefits and drawbacks of larger, politically
diverse countries, compared with smaller, more homogeneous ones?"[1]
Yet is Britain a large, heterogeneous country even as it is a state in the European
Union? Texas is much larger, and yet it too is a state in a union of relatively
homogeneous states.
The full essay is at "Essays on the E.U. Political Economy," available at Amazon.
[1] Katrin
Bennhold, "How Scottish Independence Relates to Larger Tax Fights,"
The New York Times, August 21, 2014.
As the citizens as well as legislators of Colorado were no
doubt marveling in astonishment at the seismic $5 million figure for just the
first week of legalized marijuana sales, Alaska Lt. Governor Mead Treadwell received
a petition to legalize recreational use. With over 45,000 signatures, of which
only 30,169 are sufficient, the petition correlates with polls in early 2013
revealing that 54 percent of voters support the legalization.[1]
As with many other governmental matters, the devil is in the details.
Already,
the legislative proposal would levy a $50 tax on each ounce of pot sold. Just imagine if such a tax were levied on
each ounce of alcohol sold! Alaska
lawmakers may have insisted on the exorbitant tax as part of the proposal from a
desire to bilk the consumers as if they were a golden egg (or bowl), or to
discourage them on moral or public health grounds from ingesting the particular
product. The “crowding out” effect on State taxing power due to more and more
federal taxation was certainly a political force behind the support of
legislatures in Colorado, Washington, and Alaska starved for revenue.
Yet
the hypocrisy practically leaps off the page in Bill Parker’s statement that
marijuana is “a substance objectively less harmful than alcohol.”[2]
Parker had been a legislator and the Alaska Public Safety Commissioner. Similar
hypocrisy infects the comparison with tobacco, in that at least one study in
2012 reports that moderate pot recreational use does not harm the lungs whereas
cigarette use does.[3] So
the proposal’s prohibition of pot-smoking in public (as already was the case in
Colorado) is at the very least irrational, if not reefer madness unplugged. Even
the restrictions on drinking alcohol in public may be excessively paranoid, given the passing of the religious taboo against alcohol.
Nevertheless,
the proposed prohibition on public smoking of marijuana (without a
corresponding ban on tobacco use in outdoor public places on account of the
danger posed by second-hand smoke) did not stop Tim Hinterberger, one of the proposal's principal sponsors and
a professor of developmental biology at the University of Alaska in Anchorage,
from accepting the proposed system of “sensible regulation,” not to mention
taxation.[4]
“Replacing marijuana prohibition with a system of taxation and sensible
regulation will bolster Alaska’s economy by creating jobs and generating
revenue for the state." The professor cheers the end of the black market
in pot without realizing that the proposed $50 tax per ounce would keep the underground
alive.
Generally speaking, the highest tax rate does not necessarily proffer
the most tax revenue. One could even say that the more greedy and unreasonable
a sales tax, the more the underground market can be expected to thrive. Once unleashed, freedom naturally finds its own way home.
In
short, it would seem that irrational exuberance is not limited to Wall Street.
Perhaps the real question is why human beings have so much trouble getting over
not only prejudice and moralizing, but also overreacting to the unknown. It is
as if legislators and regulators assume that regulations cannot be added if
needed as unforeseen dangers are uncovered or encountered. The sheer rigidity
and overreaction as evinced in the regulation of the recreational use of pot
may even point to a subterranean fault in the American psyche. Perhaps at least
some of the widespread pot use stems from the natural frustration in being repeatedly
slapped in the face by a hypertrophic fear of change and the supporting
pathological ignorance that can’t be wrong and presumes itself as fully
justified in snatching whatever authority it has.
[i]
Hunter Stuart, “Marijuana in Alaska Gets One Step Closer to Full Legalization,”
The Huffington Post, January 8, 2014.
