Why I have Been So Quite Lately

It is difficult to write about the politics of the moment when everyone has gone crazy or insists upon talking to morons.

First up Eliana Johnson. Some weeks back she, I assume, took President Obama to task for calling the Holocaust senseless. Her argument, such as it was, consisted of the claim that say what you'd like about the tenets of National Socialism it wasn't senseless. She then posted a follow up that was equally stupid.  Had the President followed her advice and said something like: while we all deplore the murder of millions we need to keep in mind that the Nazis acted out of deeply held belief; their violence wasn't senseless; rather, it was ideologically driven and, from their point of view, necessary. I would have called for his impeachment. Indeed, if you think back to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iran you will recall that any attempt to contextualize Isamist violence was viewed as tantamount to treason, you will understand that Johnson would, in fact, have called for Obama's execution had he done what she suggested he do.

It is no secret that  Matthew Yglesisas is a dolt. Recently he asked, in the context of the increasing inequality in America, "What do people have less of." Paul Krugman responded that we have less time. This misses the larger point that what "we" have less of is consequential political power. That is why wage stagnation matters. It's not that one cannot go deeply into debt to get law degree and no job as Yglesias suggests it is the fact that the plutocrats domination of out political system is evidence that the assault on the working poor, which is nearly all of us, is evidence that we live in a plutocracy.

And David Brooks is teaching a course at Yale about "humility" the exams for which are:

Assignment 1: Mid-Term paper of 2,500 words. Students will be asked to grapple with the indictment of their generation made by Christian Smith, Alasdair Macintyre and Jean Twenge. Due Date:  February 26. Deliver Hard Copy at end of class.  40% of the final grade.

Assignment 2: Final Paper. 2,500 words. Students will be asked to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of one of the character codes covered in the course. Due April 29. Delivery by email.  40% of the final grade.

 Leaving aside the fact that course make no sense, he is asking students to learn how to write David Brooks level stupid essays. The idiots have taken over the asylum and the morons are considered honest interlocutors.

So basically, I find it hard to say anything because the world has become such a hot mess and I give up.

Matt Yglesias Still Dumb

Re the Chicago strike he writes that

[i]f you think that Chicago's teachers deserve the right to form an association to advocate, lobby, and bargain on behalf of the interests of its members (and why shouldn't they?) then you have to think that they deserve the right to advocate for ideas that may not be in the public interest

Without a rough definition of "public interest" the claim that if I support public unions then I must support advocating anti-public interest ideas is devoid of content.

Indeed, given that teachers have a set of concrete demands, both in this case and in general, it would be helpful in Yglesias offered some examples of anti-public interest advocacy or policies. Given that his example drawn from private sector unions is the increased cost associated with increased wages, he seems, although given his dunderheadedness it is hard to know, to mean that increased wages mean increased taxes.

The problem here, of course, is that only neoliberals and libertarians fully support the notion that providing adequate funding for public services is anti-public good.  Paying teachers a decent wage, protecting them from the  arbitrary authority of administrators in thrall to the latest educ-scam, and the like are, actually, policies that promote the public good. Smaller classrooms and more teachers make for better schools. Limiting the power of the administration or rabid maniacs riding various political, religions, or other hobbyhorses to dictate curriculum or tenure and promotion decision is another public good. And so on.

People babble on about rubber rooms and lazy teachers but the fact of the matter is that teaching is a highly competitive profession and thee most teachers care about students and want their schools to continue to improve. Assuming that they and their unions want to advocate for policies that decrease the public good is one way to assure that the best and the brightest of this and any future generation will seek to join a profession, like banking, investing, or punditry, where failure is not an option and even the dimmest  of bulbs is free to fail upwards.

Social Policy and Marketing Parking Spaces

As most of you know Matthew Ygleasias is neoliberal nitwit. For some reason, perhaps the utility of nitwits to forward neoliberal nonsense, lots of folks on the putative left like to link to him and engage with his nitwittery. Over here, for example Mike Konczal mention Yglesias and the guy who invented the idea of using market mechanism to create a dynamic pricing of parking spaces in the same passage. Over here, we find a discussion of the same set of issues, using the market to increase the costs of good and services by including "negative externalities." In the latter example, Peter Frase concludes with these perfectly sensible comments:

Willingness to pay, of course, is also a function of ability to pay, and a market mechanism implicitly attributes worth to a person’s desires in proportion to the money they have to spend.

Thoughtful neoclassical economists know this, but they usually choose to ignore it, presumably because the consequences of confronting it would be too politically uncomfortable. Their own theories tell them that, due to the decreasing marginal utility of money, an extra dollar is worth more to the poor than to the rich. It follows that asking an extra dollar for parking hurts the well-being of the poor far more than the rich, and systematically privileges those who don’t need to think twice about paying six dollars for a parking space. To which a good left neo-liberal would no doubt reply that the issues of rational pricing and wealth redistribution are logically distinct and should be thought separately. But politically, this means that redistribution is the lonely last instance that never comes.

All of which is enough to make a good progressive recoil from such a thing as “the market price for street parking”. But this position is not nearly audacious enough. Rather than a rejection of market relations, this is merely a rejection of a novel form of planning, in favor of the older, more obscure, more unfair and more inefficient methods of planning the use of public space. We could say instead that what’s needed is a direct assault on the inequalities of wealth and income that subvert the functioning of prices, and thereby impede the realization of the plan.

What I don't understand, to be frank, is why we have all these bright fellows seeking to resolve epiphenomenon when the real problem, as Frase points out, is economic inequality. Basing any set of social or political responses to the problems of humanity in society on market mechanism necessarily results in a society based on wealthy people's desires.

So how about everyone on the loft leave Yglesias to blather on in the well-funded obscurity of Slate except, perhaps, to point out that his solutions to life's problems are the "and a pony" of "left" policy discourse.

The Economy Doesn't Work Like That

Matthew Yglesias finds it

pretty frustrating to hear DC officials explicitly talking about the idea of making public service provision less efficient as a job-creation scheme.

The idea is that DC might

rely[] on manpower, not mechanization—countering a civilizational trend that's left us with more people than jobs to occupy them. "We are starting to reconsider some of those choices," Tregoning said, and "might choose a path that has a lot more labor."

It's wrong, he argues, for the state to increase job creation by downplaying mechanization because it will offend the neoliberal market state's ideal of efficiency over people. His preferred solution? Supply side economic because, from the first link,

even in models that lead to very strong negative conclusions about supply-side actions in severe recessions, these considerations don’t apply on the municipal level.

He provides no link to an article but does link to Boston considering ending its ban  on happy hours. And concludes that

[t]his is exactly the kind of thing state and local governments should be looking at. If Massachusetts makes it easier to tempt people into the bar with drink specials, that means more work for bartenders and bar-backs, more work for delivery guys, etc. It’s more glamorous for politicians to talk about high-end jobs, but as Tregoning says, you need employment for people with low levels of formal education too. Many commentators seem to me to be irrationally biased against working class service sector occupations relative to working class manufacturing works, but even leaving that aside, there’s just no way a big expensive city like DC or Boston is ever going to play home to giant factories.

So a couple of things, if Boston has happy hours there will be no extra jobs created. How do I know? I''ve worked happy hours and bartenders just work harder for a couple of hours. And, as by the way, it's not the case that those who deliver ardent spirits, wine, and beer would suddenly find that their 40 hr weeks are now 50 or that some much increased demand means that their boss has to hire more workers, it just means that they will drop off an extra keg, case, or whathaveyou on their regular rounds. In short, they will work harder for the same money. Relying on manpower and not mechanization isn't some yearning for decently paid union jobs at the factory but rather that instead of one garbage man driving a mechanized truck for 8 hrs a day three guys, one driving and two hoisting, will work for a semi-decent wage for 8hrs a day five days a week. That means that two guys and/or gals who previously had no or a crappily-paid job will have decently paid job. They can buy things, things they need: food, shelter and clothing, and -- who knows -- maybe go to a bar or restaurant.

The reason supply side economics don't work is because they don't create jobs that pay enough money for the workers to live a decent life. Supply side economics creates a situation within which a decreasing number of people have more money then they need which they then spend on luxury and other nonsenses. Yglesias might find the increased number of bars in which he can imbibe for less an attractive proposition but it is not an economic policy.

Like Douthat, he can't think.

Remain Calm

Matthew Yglesias doesn't understand the concept of immiseration and, what is more, is unable to look out the window. The current Neoliberal international economic order has created more inequality and more and more vicious economic catastrophes and yet he wants us to think that all is well. It is true, I suppose, that there is more wealth but it is also true that the fewer have captured that wealth. Consequently, all is not well.


This capture of wealth by fewer is true globally as well.  What kind of a deranged maniac looks at the world as it is and concludes that it isn't at all like it is but rather a Neoliberal utopia?

Not Ready for Prime Time

 According to  Dana Goldstein DC school's are suffering a loss of competent, effective teachers because of the Rhee-based teacher harassment policies. Matthew Yglesias responds by pointing out that teachers get more money, or at least some of them do. This is, of course, not the point. DC and, in fact, any school district that decides to go the harass the teacher mode of "school reform" is going to suffer the same loss of good teachers. Why? People don't teach to make money. Teachers teach because they like to teach. Change the workplace rules, turn teaching into exam prep for the for-profit test making industry, and pay more: you'll get people who want to make money but don't care so much about teaching. Use the current system and pay more and you'll get more of the same, which is too say lots of good teachers working to help their students be all they can be.

 That's right, 85% of the teachers are good to excellent obviously the key to making the schools better is harassing them and the students with testing regimes. Not, say, alleviating poverty because that would be hard work.

Wrong Yet Again

Eric Loomis and Matthew Yglesias are having an argument about technology and its ability to improve one's life. As Loomis points out, with becoming politeness, he knows quite a bit more than Yglesias about the subject under consideration and, as is usually the case, Yglesias misses the point.

I'd like to make a point about facts, reality, and Yglesias' resistance to both. Yglesias argues that

Once upon a time, middle class American households had to spend an incredible amount of time washing laundry and dishes by hand. Nowadays, the mass public can afford dishwashers and washer/dryers.

The facts of the matter are that technology hasn't changed the amount of time involved in managing a household; it just shifted it around:

Yet despite the introduction of electricity, running water, and "labor-saving" household appliances, time spent on housework did not decline. Indeed, the typical full-time housewife today spends just as much time on housework as her grandmother or great-grandmother. In 1924, a typical housewife spent about 52 hours a week in housework. Half a century later, the average full-time housewife devoted 55 hours to housework. A housewife today spends less time cooking and cleaning up after meals, but she spends just as much time as her ancestors on housecleaning and even more time on shopping, household management, laundry, and childcare.

So the problem here is that the best example he can come up with relies on his usual commitment to factiness while avoiding reality. This is made even more abundantly clear when one considers Yglesias admission that the alleged benefits of technology

hasn’t happened. But the world would be a better place if it had.

This isn't, as Yglesias seems to think, a defense of technological optimism; it's a reason to reject it. Relying on the automaticism of technological innovation has, time and again, failed to achieve the utopian society technological optimists promised.  The time has come, as the Walrus put it, to speak of many things chief amongst them the need to create the world we want by changing the rules, as it were, creating the world we want. Second among them is the admission that proponents of automaticism are apologists for a world made in the image and likeness of those with money.

As is his wont, Yeglesias argues that if only the world wasn't so stubbornly the way it is instead of the way he wishes it were he'd be right.

Oh For Dumb

A couple of days ago, Matthew Yglesias lamented the winner take all refusal to compromise politics of the contemporary Republican party. He also insisted that

[t]his is the fundamental reality of American politics today, but far too few people put it at the center of their accounts of what’s happening.

Some time ago he praised Mitch McConnell as being "very good at his job" precisely because of his obstructionism and etc.

It's almost like he types the first thing that  comes into his head without thinking.

He Didn't Mean What He Said

Matthew Yglesias on the unfairness of no choice in schools for poor people:

This is part of what drives me crazy about debates around charter schools and “choice” in the United States. Every prosperous family in the Washington, DC metro area is exercising public school choice when they decide where to live. And competition between suburban jurisdictions to attract affluent residents and raise property values is an important force in the competitive delivery of social services. It’s only poor people who just get stuck living where they can afford to live (i.e., someplace with low-quality services) and going to whatever school happens to be there. You need to either increase the number of high-quality schools or else increase the capacity of existing high-quality schools. Otherwise, well-heeled parents will use their financial clout to buy access to them, and poor parents will be stuck with the schools they can afford.

This seems relative clear cut: the rich by virtue of being rich have a choice of sending their kids to good schools. The poor don't. The implication is, which is why charter schools and choice appear, that those kinds of choices for poor families will improve educational outcomes.

Freddie deBoer wrote:

Matt Yglesias pulls out his new hobby horse: rich people have more choices than poor people, charter schools increase choices for poor people (even if they don’t work!), and for this reason we should, I take it, undertake all the union-smashing ideas beloved of the reform movement.

This is, again, pretty clear and accurate. Today, Yglesias wrote:

A lot of school reform haters seem mighty impressed by this Freddie de Boer takedown of an argument about charter schools that I never made. So here, again, is my argument. The term “charter schools” doesn’t appear in it in order to clarify the point that this is not an argument about charter schools.

What follows is a description, as opposed to argument about, of how money allows rich people to live wherever they wan't.  Leaving aside the sophomoric "school reform haters" as shorthand for people who accept that the available evidence shows that choice and charter don't work, notice how his defense of his original argument requires stripping the argument out of the original post by denying the implication of his use of charter schools and choice in the original.

Unless Yglesias threw those words in there at random and now denies they were there at all, the serve an implicit claim that charters and choice would/could offer to the poor what the rich already have. Otherwise there is no argument just a tediously obvious description of how, you know, having money allows its possessors to buy stuff.

Lame.

Beer Me

Matthew Yglesias really doesn't understand how the world let alone education works. In two posts of remarkable incoherence, Yglesias seeks to show that if you favor choice in one thing you must favor choice in all things and, whatismore, if you favor unions you have to favor crap beer because some major league makers of crap beer are unionized therefore unionization causes crap beer. Consequently, if you like non-unionized micro beer, you must support charter schools.  Others have pointed out the silliness of the argument.

Leaving aside the issue of how Carter's deregulation of beer making for private consumption led to increases in craft brewing for sale, I think it's worth pointing out that the only way this works is if charter school improve educational outcomes, they don't. Here, of course, his mindless commitment to failed ideological project blinds him to the fact that effective reform is driven by what works and what doesn't in the world as it is actually constituted rather than what ought to work if the world as it actually is conformed to a discredited ideological cosngtruct.

A Quick Point

One reason that has become so difficult to raise taxes is that neoliberals posing as Progressives make this kind of arugment:

That’s not to say we need to “soak the professors” rather than “soak the rich.” Taxing the consumption of high-rollers and redistributing it to the less fortunate is a great idea. But a lot of the political dialogue I see online seems to consist of a slightly strange form of class resentment in which intellectuals, nonprofit workers, or public servants express bitterness about the high incomes of businesspeople whose lives they don’t actually envy.

Here the desire to tax the wealth is represented as class warfare. The obvious response:

Taxation isn’t a matter of rewards and punishments. It’s a matter of paying for the public obligations a govt takes on by collecting money from the members of society. The reasonable way to go about this is in the manner that least disturbs the ability of those individuals to go about their lives, at the very least to go about their lives in a way that leaves them capable fo contributing next year at tax time. We don’t tax the rich members of society at higher rates than the poor because we imagine that they are sinners in need of punishment. We tax the poor at lower rates because we don’t want the govt to take from them what they need to survive and thrive. We could tax people who earn $1,000,000 a year at 90%, and they and their families would do fine, would have food and shelter and clothing and health insurance, and even amusement, in abundance, and they would still be doing just as well next year and able to pay just as much in taxes. Take 90% from someone who earns $25,000, take almost any % from them, and you’re going to starve them. They won’t be able to pay taxes next year if they go quietly with this arrangement, because they will be dead of starvation or exposure, and there will be war if they don’t go quietly

Small wonder, then, that tax increases are off the table when we have to rely on some guy on the internet to make the argument alleged progressives refuse to make.

More Wasting of Time

Over to Crooked Timber the conversation about neoliberalism and Matthew Yglesias continues. Henry Farrell asked and continues to ask for Yglesias' "theory of politics" in response Yglesias harps on "policy" and makes sophomoric underpants gnome quips. This is the classic neoliberal dodge.  Pretend that you care deeply about policy and demand detailed arguments for and against and then ignore reality.

Take school choice, for example, the evidence is that the policy doesn't work. Yet Yglesias and the Wisconsin Republicans refuse to allow reality to get in the way of the expansion of this failed policy. Why? Because it's not about the ends; it's about the means: when the means meet the ideological test, they cannot fail they can only be failed.

Neoliberalism is a set of predetermined policies based on falsified believe in the efficacy of markets that seeks to dissolve disagreement with the disgraced and disproved "verities" of a failed and fairly ridiculous economic daydream.

UPDATE:
In the comments to the latest over to Crooked Timber, somebody claiming to be Yglesias writes:

Since a lot of people seem hung up on the word “workable” let me define it thusly: a “workable” policy agenda is one that, if implemented, would in fact achieve its ends.

School choice doesn't work and yet he insist on it; deregulation hasn't worked and yet he insist on it; destroying unions as a means of strengthening an industry hasn't worked and yet he think we need to get rid of teachers unions and so on. By his own words is he condemned. 

Waste of Time

It seems that this is the 20th anniversary of Tom Waits' Rain Dogs. It is one of the all time great albums. For reasons that are entirely unclear, to me in any event, someone decided to have a bunch of talentless bums important artists cover the songs.

In a related note, various and sundry people have been picking  on Matthew Yglesias for his neo-liberalism.  As is his wont, Yglesias responds by demanding concrete examples of his sins. Although, much like singing covers of Tom Waits, it's a waste of time, the problem with neoliberalism is that at its core it is dedicated to a market fundamentalism. Over to the Crooked Timber, last link, the idea is to divide neoliberalism into left and right with Yglesias being "left" and, one assumes, Thatcher and Reagan being "right." The difficulty here is that once you buy into the genius of the market and spend time mocking regulations and licensing  regimes, you, which is to say Ygelsias, provide a left-wing-I-really-care-about-the-poor-and-downtrodden gloss to a horrid  political/economic ideology, which hates people, and, what is even more important, because Yglesias and his fellow "left" neoliberals despise everyone to their left, which has the added advantage of providing a reasonable "left" neoliberal cover for the refusal of either the center or the right to listen to the actual real left.

One result of all this is that stolid centrists like, for  example, Obama tend to make the wrong policy decisions. 1848, I can't say this enough, ought to have taught the reasonable hippie punchers that the Conservatives and Reactionaries do not actually want and in fact won't give an inch.

The problem, in other words, isn't policies or end points it's the fact that Yglesias and co ally themselves with men and women who refuse to work toward the same ends via any policies. In short, "left" neoliberals are fooling themselves. And, just to be clear, if you think neoliberalism works, look out the window.

UPDATE:
Here's a thingymabob by Bradford Delong in which he tries to make "left" neoliberalism different from right neoliberalism and, quite frankly, I think  he fails. See also.

Agency

People's actions in the past create the present. This seems to me to be axiomatic. However, there are those whose interest are best served by eliding agency. So, for example, Neo-liberals like to use "market forces" or some other obscurantist language to make the hideous appear inevitable. I was, mistakenly it seems, under the impression that people on the left were aware of this linguistic slight of hand. From Eric Loomis I learned that

even a lot of progressives seem to talk of globalization as this unstoppable trend with a self-powering propulsion engine pushing it forward ever faster.

I thought that this had to be wrong; however,  I read this in which a "progressive" admits to thinking that she once thought globalization was "evolutionary" rather than actively pursued in the interest of profit maximization.

Shortly thereafter I was reading an older James Fallows essay on the fundamental errors of the media, in his specific case how the journalists' intellectual laziness and ignorance buttress the lure of talking "horse races" instead of issues. It's undoubtedly true. What do these two things have in common?, you ask. Consider Yglesias' intellectual development. He went from an uniformed dimbulb urging war to a uniformed dimbulb using partially digested economic language to urge passivity in the face of inevitability of "market forces."

It's simply bizarre the extent to which masking reality is a fundamentally necessary skill for succeeding in the media business.

Matthew Yglesias: Still Dumb

It's one thing to be a Neoliberal hack, busily attacking workers and so forth with gay abandon. It's another to fail entirely to understand the nature of an argument in favor of paying workers. Of course, Yglesias got where he is today by being dumb as a box of rock.

Crises

Let's say you're on a boat and the boat springs a leak. You face a crisis: too much water and the boat will sink. One group wants to plug the leak another wants to start the bilge pumps and a third wants to do both. Suddenly a dim bulb shows up and says: No, let's fire the deck hands. If you decide that the dim bulb is correct, you really have no place talking about this crisis and it's solutions.

As we all know, Detroit is a failed city and its school system reflects that. The "learning outcomes" of its students are reflection of the corruption, poverty, and so on. Yet Matthew Yglesias views this particular engine room slowing filling with water and insists that the deck hands did it. Moron.

Form Versus Substance

Matthew Yglesias castigates Democratic and Progressive politicians for not riding roughshod over their opponents when they have the chance. As is his wont, Yglesias commends the manly men of the Republican party for their disdain for substantive democracy. As he often does, he commends them for refusing to engage in debate and compromise while extolling their use of procedure to get, or sort of get, what they want.  In this case, his thinks that the ACA, which is now a law, was badly handled because the currently dead-on-arrival Ryan plan passed with little or no debate, compromise, and etc.


David Weigel engages in the same sort of silliness when he derides Liberals for not engaging in the antics similar to the Tea Party Patriots on the grounds that their sober rejection of the Republicans anti-human agenda because there was

there was no reaction worthy of YouTube, nothing for cable news.(via)

Meanwhile in New Jersey, manly man and deeply-committed Republican governor Chris Christie threatens to go all Bismark on the New Jersey Supreme Court. Can the the Yglesias/Weigle wing, i.e., bright young things more enamored of the surface than the substance of things, of the commentariat's adulation be far behind? After all, like Paul Ryan, he's serous and taking on issues, the destruction of his state's constitutional order, in the service of solving as problem by attacking the least among us.

Contempt for Neoliberalism Isn't Nostalgic

Matthew Yglesias misrepresented reality when he wrote

People like to get nostalgic about the blue collar factory work of yore, but one advantage of the service sector is that it’s considerably less deadly.

Who is "nostalgic"? There's no link. What lots of people get angry about is that formerly decently-paid jobs have disappeared because Neoliberals rejiggered the economy in a way that rewarded a minority of the world's population at the expense of the everyone else. It's this kind of fundamental dishonesty that really gets my goat.

And then there is this:

But of course this ideal-type marketplace is supposed to feature “perfect information” whereas in a real marketplace there are asymmetries between workers and management about safety and managers themselves aren’t omniscient with regard to the costs and benefits of safety measures. If you can establish credible public agencies that track and disseminate information about the incidence of workplace injuries, that trains people in best practices, and helps inform people about often obscure health risks then you’re helping bring us closer to that kind of world.

In plain English: The notion that free markets create optimal conditions for workers, and by extension consumers, is false. Some managers and owners lie about hazards, risks, attempts at amelioration, and so forth and refuse to take necessary precautions and all do the same either because they don't know or don't care about the dangers confronting workers and consumers, to say nothing of the environment. Therefore, the state needs to regulate businesses to protect workers, consumers, and the environment.  However, if he put it that way it would require jettisoning the Neoliberal project of obfuscating reality through the use of debunked theories of how economies work.

Wrong but With Awesome Sauce

So Matthew Ygelsais reads something about how if citizens get to choose how their tax dollars are spent there is less on defense and more social programs. He concludes:

This is a reminder that one of my least-favorite sayings about politics is the idea that democracy is the worst form of government except for the alternatives. Not that I favor dictatorship, but this often seems to me to reflect a failure of imagination. There are lots of non-authoritarian modes of governance, including selecting people by lottery (like we do for juries), plebiscites, direct citizen input (as in this tax choice concept), along with different balances between elected officials, appointees, and civil servants. It’s important to actually think about the flaws in our current approach and whether better ideas exist.

Did you know that the Athenians used lottery to fill some of the offices of their democratic system of government? Did you know that California uses plebisites? Did you know that "direct citizen input" is nearly the dictionary definition of democracy? Are you, in other words, aware that with the exception of the meaningless stuff about balancing between different agents in a democratic form of governance, you are arguing against democracy by pointing out all the different ways democracies have and continue to organize? It's almost like he paid no attention in any of classes because he was busy being interesting.

This is Almost Certainly the Wrong Way to Go About Things

This idea

Mexico should, after a public and transparent process, designate one of its dealing organizations as the most violent of the group, and Mexican and U.S. enforcement efforts should focus on destroying that organization.

Leads Matthew Yglesias to conclude

I certainly agree that something along these lines is the right way to deal with the crime and violence associated with hard drugs. The idea that a city is going to eradicate the buying and selling of cocaine and heroin from its borders is preposterous. What you want to do is make the dominant business strategy for a vendor of hard drugs be something like “don’t kill anyone and don’t be a nuisance.” You find the peg that’s stick out highest on the disruptiveness chart, and you whack it down.

You know what would work? Legalization. People still smuggle alcohol but without the violence that attended alcohol smuggling during Prohibition. You stop the violence and corruption associated with drug smuggling? Make it unnecessary.