Randomly Selected Article or Link

...well, perhaps not quite but this is interesting, if blindingly obvious in a sort of a "why didn't we think of that" way:

I've been writing for a while now about how the globalization of communication (and delivery) technology is set to make it ever harder for states to quantify and collect taxes based on trade and incomes and make it imperative, if they want to have any revenue stream into the future, to switch taxation to more fixed sources like ("economic") land - ground rents, airspace, electromagnetic spectrum and so on, or face the prospect of ever increasingly authoritarian measures to force people to repatriate income and assets for tax purposes.

I hadn't counted on VAT being amongst the first to be threatened, but here it is. It's not going to help buying cakes from Tesco yet because it will only work if it is actually imported, I suspect (no getting away with simply operating from a warehouse in every town that happens to be owned by a Channel Island company I would think).

But people, liberal minded political types especially, need to wake up to this double threat - to recognize that revenue collection will be more difficult in future if based on moveable assets, incomes and trade, and to recognize that addressing that means going one of two ways - the more equitable land tax, or the more authoritarian crackdown on trade and "cross-border" earnings.  The ability to move money and income and so on overseas is moving fast and getting ever easier for the ordinary person - you no longer need to be super-rich to go offshore.  We need to act fast to counteract its effects on future tax revenues.

A conversation got me thinking; what is it we seek to control through drugs laws? Is it the substance in question itself, as the system for enforcement would have it - since it prohibits specific substances. Is it the effects of taking certain substances? And if so, is it the health effects, the social effects or the immediate short term effects of taking those substances?

It seems to me that the latter, the short term usually neurological effects that people seek, are mostly benign. People don't do drugs in order to hurt themselves, to bring on short term pain, usually, but in order to give them a particular desirable feeling - often of wellbeing, escape from some painful reality, sometimes of added confidence, at other times of empathy for others, sometimes merely relaxation, or extra energy. All these seem like legitimate feelings and effects for people to want to seek. And sure, they can be gained by all sorts of ways other than by taking drugs - though possibly with more difficulty and less convenience.

But is it actually immoral to take substances to achieve such ends? Clearly not, as many legal substances can do the same things and we don't necessarily proscribe chocolate (the theobromides - poisonous to dogs for example - promote wellbeing), coffee (the caffeine is the most commonly used stimulant on earth) or St John's Wort (an ancient treatment for depression, possibly an "over the counter" SSRI). Heck, humanity might not have survived so long without the supposed aphrodisiac effects of many natural and often exotic foodstuffs and supplements.

Anyway, the point is that we put all sorts of things, natural and synthetic, from oysters to Horlicks, into our bodies in an attempt to achieve certain feelings. And there are "chemists" out there, a whole industry, constantly trying to reproduce some of the effects of illegal substances without actually using any illegal substances. The science will likely always be one step ahead of the legislators, so I have no doubt that these concoctions are achieving more than a placebo effect. You can buy them on the internet for next day delivery from online stores that have forums that people join to say how much they enjoyed them or not. Just like eBay or Tesco online.

But whilst they may be legal, are they safe? They certainly don't have much of a regulatory framework or testing regime to prove themselves. Yet they are legal when many proscribed drugs have had centuries, even millennia of use for us to examine for evidence about their safety.

Why is heroin so intrinsically bad when common lore at least says that our longest reigning monarch to date ran the empire on an opium concoction; even a Roman emperor kept the northern Germanic tribes at bay whilst writing a classic tome about his predecessors while taking opium. Tales tell of how the first president of the United States kept himself in balance with cannabis and that the slavery campaigner William Wilberforce similarly emancipated half the world while toking. Some of our greatest poets seem to have had a penchant for mind-bending substances - would we have denied the world their art worried about what they may have been taking when producing it? And, just as today, throughout history there have been chemists, alchemists, trying to find such things as the elixir of youth.

So on the one hand we have all these relatively natural substances - opium, cannabis, coca, certain fungi and so on - used for millennia and with relatively well researched evidence about their effectiveness, the dosages at which they are safe (from experience if nothing else) and the circumstances in which they may not be, and they are illegal. Even the main active ingredients in some synthesized drugs like ecstasy have a hundred year history since it was patented my Merck and has been tested off and on for different uses - a drug waiting for something to cure! On the other we have perfectly legal concoctions, though nobody but the creator and I suppose a DEA investigator if they wanted to check, knows what's in them, they have little research history and for all we know they might be toilet cleaner and arsenic.

The devil you know, versus the devil you don't? I know which I would consider safer. Drugs laws are pointless. They criminalize the wrong people. And in the process drive the whole thing underground into a system controlled by organized crime - killing far more people in that process, from failed narco-states to street gangs in Manchester or London. And that criminalization makes it all the harder for people to seek help or even to be open about their use, often until it's too late. We know it would be possible to maintain a fairly humdrum ordinary existence even addicted to opium if it were available, regulated and quality controlled, for before the Harrison narcotics acts in the US that started the "war on drugs" we know that the preponderance of addicts were white upper and upper middle class women, like Queen Victoria mentioned above. We don't know that about the toilet cleaner and arsenic concoction deemed legal - albeit by default probably - and I think I know what I would rather my friends and family were taking if they were that way inclined.

When reputable science puts ecstasy nearly twenty places below alcohol and tobacco in the list of the most harmful substances and yet its supply can get you a life sentence who do we think these laws are serving?

Way back last year sometime James Graham wrote an insightful piece about Intellectual Property - the big 21st century faultline?. As readers will know, as a mutualist, like other libertarian and anarchist descendants (part of the debate amongst whom James highlights), I regard patents and copyrights as one of the four great monopolies that have to be crushed before we get a truly free world and a genuine advance in the conditions of labour. It's not one that I major on because I don't understand it enough yet to make decent arguments - particularly it has to be said against those who tell me that pharmaceutical life saving advances would be jeopardized by any change to this protectionist mechanism.

But as well as obviously following the debate about digital rights/restrictions the subject recently came up at a university board meeting where we were discussing the outrageous economic rent stolen by publishing houses from academics in return for organizing a peer review system that things like Technorati rather prove unnecessary to my mind.

Anyway, I just thought James, if he hasn't seen it already, might like to see this analysis at the Ludvig von Mises Institute blog of the Radiohead album giveaway "stunt" and how it might change the playing field as the CD version of the album goes on sale in the US today:

There are two issues here that are getting mixed up. One relates to copyright, the mercantilist law that forbids the perfectly peaceful action of spreading around a good of infinite supply, whether that good is a sequence of notes or an arrangement of letters or pixels in an image. The second issue relates to an empirical question of what constitutes good marketing and entrepreneurship.

What's been happening up to now is that copyright issues have encouraged and spread what is essentially an entrepreneurial mistake: the failure of many publishers and studios to take full advantage of electronic media as a means of marketing their wares. They have believed that giving stuff away kills the market for sales, when the reverse might actually be true.

I'll probably be returning to the whole subject of IP during the next few months as the issue about academic publication really caught my interest. I agree with James that IP may well turn out to be a big issue in the coming years and decades, not least because we are now exposed more than ever before to a globalized market in which not every culture thinks the same way as western capitalists. For example the "group think" of the far east seems to an extent to understand ideas as collective property. Islam has specific doctrine on how the gifts of the creator, however humanity discovers them, should be distributed.

But for now I thought the Mises article was an interesting insight as a call to the "culture" industry to grasp the nettle.