What do you think?

I’m sure you, like me, have occasionally wondered why our society doesn’t act more rationally. Perhaps we might differ on the exact items in need of a better approach or the details of how we would handle them reasonably. Here are two of my examples.

There is no question that continuing to make it illegal for some people to obtain certain drugs is an all around losing proposition for our society. The illegal drug takers end up paying far more than the market price of the drug because of the risk in supplying them, the drugs themselves are often too strong or too weak or otherwise corrupted, and the users end up stealing my TV in order to fence it for ten percent of its value to buy more diluted drugs. We spend millions of dollars every year to keep these drug users in jail when we catch them, forty thousand dollars a piece on average, and millions more on the “War on Drugs”. Mexicans get to buy our guns for their drug cartels so they can kill everyone in town who isn’t part of their gang. What if these drugs were prescribed by doctors for their patients at reasonable prices, under controlled circumstances, and with suggestions for treatment. I’m sure that approach would cost a lot less and, while I’m sure it would not completely end the problems associated with drug use, it would surely go a long way. Why cause already drug addicted kids to also become thieves.

On another note entirely, I do not think the United States military should be the police force to the world.  I can’t imagine why we decided that Saddam Hussein was the worst dictator in the world and invade his country. I heard former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld on TV say no one could have anticipated the problems we encountered in Iraq yet many people did exactly that and were ignored. We armed the Taliban in Afghanistan to fight the Russians then decided to fight them ourselves. How ironic.

Should we attack the Lovely Leader or whatever Kim Jong-il is called in North Korea? Or Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe? How about straightening out things in Ivory Coast? Now we may armed the Al-Qaida guys in Lybia. Great.

How much money would we save if we brought the troops home from all these places and Germany and South Korea and Japan? So much for common sense.