Wednesday Open Thread

21 thoughts on “Wednesday Open Thread”

1. Question of the day – would Fentanyl deaths drop if it was legalized?

   If it was legal people would get the drug at a specified dosage with nothing bad added in. A lot of the deaths from what I read in the paper are due to crap like rat poison mixed in as well as some pills are a much heavier dose.

   If it was legal, with restrictions on advertising like there is on tobacco, it would eliminate a lot of the incentives offered to potential users.

   On the flip side, it would likely mean more recreational users.

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2. Fentanyl is legal for medical applications treating chronic pain. Dying patients in hospice get fentanyl pain patches, since the side effects don’t matter at that point. Fentanyl is a useful drug within that narrow range of applications.

   I don’t know that I would ever want Fentanyl as a legal recreational drug. It is cheap and gives a powerful high, and can be  deadly in small doses, especially if pure. Unlike other opioids or synthetic drugs, fentanyl doesn’t have to be mixed with chemicals to be deadly. The opioids themselves can lead to overdoses.

   The reality is that we have no control over street drugs. If someone in China mixes fentanyl into a powder, smuggles it in anonymous packaging, then someone in the US presses that into a blue pill and calls it viagra or oxycontin or some other name, and packages it up in a pretty wrapper, somebody is going to take too much of it and die. The population of users is becoming more aware, and the rate of increase in OD deaths is down since 2020.

   The latest trend in street drugs is to take a synthetic cannabinoid, “Spice“, which is often mixed with chemical and natural ingredients. The net effect of Spice is a THC -like high, and undetectability in urine, hence procuring a clean urine sample. This makes Spice popular with people who are in recovery from other addictions. However, Spice can be toxic or deadly, as it is mixed with things like rat poison and other chemicals.

   The solutions would be public education and residential rehabilitation, not legalization nor prohibition.

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   1. Just wanted to throw in that it's addictive. I can be fairly libertarian with substances, but deciding to use this one should be left to medical professionals.

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      1. Agree.

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3. Crypto (Bitcoin, etc.) is a …

   What exactly is crypto currency? Let me explain…

   With all the discussion around Crypto, and the recent disasters such as FTX, it’s best to start with the basics. What exactly is crypto.

   Let’s start with what currency is today. There is a long evolutionary trail to today. And where we are now is every country has an official fiat currency. And the only money/currency in wide use are these official currencies issued by each country.

   These are called “fiat” currencies because they are backed by nothing. Not by gold, not by other countries or currencies, not by anything. If enough people stopped believing in the dollar, it would lose it’s value.

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   1. Not quite right… You are missing the whole "backed by the full faith and credit of the US government."

      And truly that is a huge difference. Crypto is precisely and only fiat, backed by full faith in… ZILCH-O. A personal check has far more reality than crypto because it is a contract with your signature, and the recipient could sue you in court if you renege.

      Government script exists in an environment of regulation, institutions, debt, international trade and the economic and financial system. 

      I mean, you might as well say that property ownership is fiat, merely backed up by a few tough guys with truncheons. Feudalism or Libertarianism, it's all the same.

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      1. Quite right, Parkie.  Dollar bills are not inflation proof but unlike crypto always have value because they are legal lender for all debts public and private.  Owe the IRS $10,000 in taxes?  $10,000 pays it.  Owe $20,000 in a private lawsuit?  $20,000 in paper money pays it off.

         Want to put a price on Donald Trump’s integrity?

         Three cents should cover it, with a nickel back in change.

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      2. You're right and you're wrong. You're right that the "full faith & credit" is a strong message that the government will do anything & everything to support the currency.

         But you're wrong in that, and the end of the day it still is based on people's faith in the currency. If enough individuals lose faith, that government backing won't matter.

         It's the difference between Turkey where things are a bit dicey but almost everyone still believes in the Lira and Sri Lanka where enough people have lost faith in the Rupee and it's cratering.

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         1. But government backed money always has some value.  Tulip bulbs and crypto do not.  Yes, when a government collapses, its currency will too.  But, barring a second term for Trump, we can have faith that our dollars will have value in ten years.  If you think not, buy my farm for $10,000,000.  It’s worth about 1 percent ofvthat today.  Do we have a deal?

            Crypto, in contrast?  I doubt $10,000,000   today would be worthmore than my farm in ten years.  There is no there there.  The original crooks sell it to fools who sell it to bigger fools and once you run out of fools the whole house of cards collapses.

            At least with tulip bulbs you could grow pretty flowers.

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         2. I don't agree with your label that I'm wrong wrt the faith issue.

            I mean, I totally agree that we hold this on faith, however it is a faith based on history and expected consequences. At what point does faith become certainty; at what point do we lose faith. That is what government institutions do, or financial frauds like Turkey fail to do.

            That's why I brought up the similarity of property rights. Yeah, I do expect that if I try to occupy the Duke's manor house he will send out some thugs to persuade me otherwise. 

            From Brad DeLong, the economics historian:

            Now, everyone close your eyes and try to imagine a private, profit-making rights-enforcement organization which does not resemble the mafia, a street gang, those pesky fire-fighters/arsonists/looters who used to provide such "services" in old New York and Tokyo, medieval tax-farmers, or a Lendu militia. (In general, if thoughts of the Eastern Congo intrude, I suggest waving them away with the invisible hand and repeating "that's anarcho-capitalism" several times.) Nothing's happening but a buzzing noise, right?

            Now try it the wishful thinking way. Just wish that we might all live in a state of perfect liberty, free of taxation and intrusive government, and that we should all be wealthier as well as freer. Now wish that people should, despite that lack of any restraint… not… rape… sell fraudulent stocks in non-existent ventures… dump of mercury in the… general stock of water from which people privately draw.) Awesome huh? 

            Adam Smith: Withering away of the state? Private profit-making rights-enforcement organizations? Have none of you ever taken a trip to the Scottish Highlands? Have none of you ever read about the form of society that used to exist there? In the Scottish Highlands David Friedman's dream of a society without a state, in which justice was administered by private profit-making rights-enforcement organizations, was a reality. And what a reality! The private profit-making rights-enforcement organizations were called "clan lords" and their henchmen. In the Highlands, everyone was seen as either a clan member to be helped, a clan enemy to be killed, or a stranger to be robbed. With such insecurity of life and property, the system of natural liberty could not operate to create prosperity, and life was… what is the phrase?…

            Thomas Hobbes: Nasty, brutish, and short.

            Adam Smith: Thank you.

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            1. Again I agree with you and Voyager – mostly. There is a lot of history, strong government, etc. behind the dollar. And a long successful history of a competent independent Federal Reserve.

               But my point is, under all that, at the base, it remains an article of faith.

               I don't say that to equate it with the basis of faith in Crypto, but to point out their giant difference. That the dollar has incredibly strong faith while Crypto has the faith of a bunch of people hoping to make a quick buck on the stupider Crypto investors following them.

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4. ECA Reform by the end of the year? From TPM.

   We now have direct evidence that Mark Meadows strategized the overthrow of the Constitution with 34 Seditionist Republicans in the House and the Senate. It looks like the ECA may be brought into the end-of-year omnibus spending bill.

   Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced on Tuesday that he expects there will be action on the Electoral Count Act reform before the new Congress takes over in January. 

   The Democratic leader said he anticipates the end-of-year omnibus spending bill that’s currently being negotiated will include reform on the outdated 1887 law — which lays out how presidential electors are counted in Congress. 

   “I expect an omnibus will contain priorities both sides want to see passed into law, including more funding for Ukraine and the Electoral Count Act,” Schumer said.

   Democrats and a handful of Republicans have been negotiating ECA reform for the past year, with Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) announcing they’d come to a bipartisan agreement this summer. But it’s been unclear for some time whether the legislation would pass during the lame duck session. 

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   1. I'd feel a whole lot better if there were a statement that included such assurances from McConnell and Pelosi (and maybe McCarthy, too). 

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      1. I wouldn't count on McCarthy vouching for anything other than his determination to get 218 House Republicans to vote for him for speaker.

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5. You shall be known by the company you keep ….

   Brett Kavanaugh caught partying with Matt Gaetz and we can't think of a worse way to celebrate the holidays (msn.com)

   Not sure on whom this reflects worse: Kavanaugh or Gaetz.

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6. A little light reading for our Merchant Snowflake of Death: 

   Here’s What Russia Wanted in Exchange for Whelan

    

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7. We’re moving into the “dog-eat-dog” phase … and there won’t be near enough napkins. 
    

    

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   1. Yep. It's a doggy-dog world!

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8. #ElmoTweets 

   The @ElonJet account has been suspended, although @BezosJets remains active (it’s all public info, btw) 

   

   PS: Tesla stock is down 50% over the last year, about *20%* just in the last month or so since he took over Twitter. 

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9. Strongman Envy from Josh Marshal at TPM.

   One of the most bracing, bizarre aspects of Mark Meadows texts with members of Congress is the fact that many truly seemed to believe the most absurd claims and conspiracy theories. This wasn’t just red meat they were tossing out on Fox and Newsmax. They were saying this stuff, in earnest, in the privacy of text messages with longtime colleagues. But even this, I would say, isn’t the heart of the matter. There’s something else we see in the very first texts, before the TV networks called the race but when the writing was clearly on the wall. It can most easily be summarized as: Trump can’t be allowed to lose. On November 6th Rep. Brian Babin tells Meadows that they “refuse to live under a corrupt Marxist dictatorship.”

   There are various comments like this. Trump has simply been too good a President. And we can’t let him not be President. If we lost, we have to figure out a way to unlose and fast. Or there’s Rep. Rick Allen’s comment that the nation is in a state of “Spiritual War at the highest level.” It’s all of a piece. The impulse precedes the evidence.

   Not all of these characters are members of the House Freedom Caucus. But most are. (In one telling detail, Babin was a member of the HFC but resigned because it proved insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump.) Meadows himself was one of the group’s founders. Rick DeSantis was another member during his three terms in Congress. Someone recently remarked to me that Freedom Caucus is libertarian in opposition and authoritarian in power. Which is a good way to put it but also simply another way of describing authoritarians. Authoritarians don’t have any generalized belief in untrammeled expressions of power. They believe in the untrammeled expression of their own power.

   And that makes the simple point. The people in the Freedom Caucus have always been a dangerous group of authoritarian radicals. The one member who was a genuine libertarian, Justin Amash, was quickly purged from the group and booted out of Congress once Trump’s presidency brought out the group’s true nature. People are allowed to have such views. People can even elect them to Congress. But they must be seen in that light, like any other radicals awash in unAmerican ideas. Their model has always been Erdogan, Putin and similar global strongmen.

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10. OMFG!

    Watch the David Letterman interview with Zelenskyy 

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