No, Mq, I understand free will better than most.
I also understand that many in the exercise of free will may well exercise it in a way that maximizes profit.
If you are Mexican, poor and uneducated but burning with ambition, you might well exercise your free will in a manner that maximizes your earnings. In lots of cases that means the drug trade because it is not particularly difficult to get into, is largely untaxed and has a huge and profitable tax flow.
This theoretical Mexican's free will could not be exercised in this nefarious direction in the absence of a market, i.e., your Sunday afternoon pot smoker who has exercised his own free will but has no clue that getting the stuff to him has resulted in untold death and destruction.
Now, if the Sunday smoker didn't exercise his free will to smoke, or snort or inject or whatever, the little ambitious guy in Mexico who is killing, corrupting and destroying in order to supply the worthless Sunday afternoon lollygag would not have much to do, would he?
There is a true meshing of two sets of volitions, demand and supply. One cannot exist without the other.
Inject social costs into the equation and The Big Balance Of Things definitely tips my way. Observed in a vacuum, as you do, the myopic view is that the lotus eating lollygag idiot in San Francisco is not doing much harm by smoking or snorting away. He probably hurts himself mostly. Who cares? If that were all that's involved, I'd say, go ahead, my life is easier when others destroy their neurons.
But when the costs to the people affected by the supplier's free volitional actions, which are deadly, disruptive, corrupting and very, very damaging even, as I posit, eventually doing harm to our national security, then my Big Balance of Things tips heavily my way, leaving your arguments eating dust.
But I am not going to change your mind. So let's agree to disagree. |
