...in which i reveal myself to be a lousy hippy.
Okay, here's one to start with. Which is a bigger problem in the world, starvation or drug abuse? This is a question that needs answering: until we get our priorities straight (or at least vaguely defined) we're never going to make much progress at anything. I mean, it's no wonder the dolphins beat us back into the sea, but that's something else entirely.
So starvation has always been something of a problem. People die of it, there's no cure except food, and for some reason we don't have enough of that for everyone. People starve to death all the time, all over the world. Humans. Tiny little sparks of divinity, some think. People in any case.
Then there's drug abuse. This has also been around as long as humans have. People have been eating and smoking and otherwise getting messed up on various chemicals since the dawn of time. Some of them are bad for you.
Now we come to the issue at hand: If you're an American, you stand in the interesting position of funding a very large prison system which spends alot of money keeping people who do drugs out of their jobs and in a box where they can't do anything. This is where our philosophical/ethical/economic question comes in: Is it better to spend that money on keeping drug offenders in jail, or on feeding the starving? If one considers the economic impact of keeping otherwise productive people in jail, of opening huge new markets of what were once impoverished people, and of all the money left over afterwards (I don't know or care what the numbers are, but if Sally Struthers can feed starving children with just pennies a day, everyone we let out of jail should be worth a few hundred hungry kids, and we've got alot of people in jail.) even the most materialistic among us would probably agree that feeding the starving is a better way to spend money than keeping drug offenders in jail, however vile it may be to share an economy with people who ingest different chemicals than oneself.
Which is why I'm pro-abortion.
So starvation has always been something of a problem. People die of it, there's no cure except food, and for some reason we don't have enough of that for everyone. People starve to death all the time, all over the world. Humans. Tiny little sparks of divinity, some think. People in any case.
Then there's drug abuse. This has also been around as long as humans have. People have been eating and smoking and otherwise getting messed up on various chemicals since the dawn of time. Some of them are bad for you.
Now we come to the issue at hand: If you're an American, you stand in the interesting position of funding a very large prison system which spends alot of money keeping people who do drugs out of their jobs and in a box where they can't do anything. This is where our philosophical/ethical/economic question comes in: Is it better to spend that money on keeping drug offenders in jail, or on feeding the starving? If one considers the economic impact of keeping otherwise productive people in jail, of opening huge new markets of what were once impoverished people, and of all the money left over afterwards (I don't know or care what the numbers are, but if Sally Struthers can feed starving children with just pennies a day, everyone we let out of jail should be worth a few hundred hungry kids, and we've got alot of people in jail.) even the most materialistic among us would probably agree that feeding the starving is a better way to spend money than keeping drug offenders in jail, however vile it may be to share an economy with people who ingest different chemicals than oneself.
Which is why I'm pro-abortion.
posted by the autophobe at 9:37 AM
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