Isegoria

The three candidates running for president in 1912 offered three different solutions to crony capitalism, Lynn C. Rees says:

The candidate of the Progressive Party, former president Theodore Roosevelt of New York, sought to build the United States federal government into an over-awing Leviathan that could cow large concentrations of wealth by subjecting them to tight scrutiny and regulation. This Leviathan would not necessarily seek to break up these concentrations of economic power: Roosevelt was convinced bigness was the future. Furthermore, such concentrations of economic power were necessary for competing in the increasingly vicious international market for power where empires and nations struggled against other empires and nations. Some hinted that there was a possibility of Roosevelt’s Leviathan itself being bought by dollars from those great concentrations of wealth. However, Roosevelt dismissed this fear because the natural ruling class that would control the Federal government was Old Money of Impeccable Old Blood like himself and Old Money can’t be bought by New Money. Old Money would be supported by professional regulators trained in the latest science of administration, many of whom would be from the ranks of Old Money themselves.

The candidate of the Republican Party, incumbent president and former Roosevelt henchman William Howard Taft of Ohio, sought to contain large economic concentrations by using the Federal government to selectively break them down into smaller pieces and regulating them around the edges by controlling their interactions with each other. Taft’s vision was one of checks and balances where Federal-scale concentrations of economic power were checked and balanced by other Federal scale concentrations of power while Federal checks and balances on private wealth were checked by the constitutional checks and balances within the Federal government itself. As president, Taft struck a more moderate rhetorical tone about business than Roosevelt had when Roosevelt was president. But Taft more energetically pursued judicial remedies to break up or impose structural checks on the more vicious concentrations of economic power. Taft favored checks and balances through one-time restructurings of concentrated economic power and its institutional forms over continuous oversight governed by the discretion of a permanent regulatory agency. The former approach put in place firmer checks and balances on the ravages of concentrated economic power without as much possibility of the corruption of business and state by an ongoing regulatory relationship between the two.

The candidate of the Democratic Party, New Jersey Governor Thomas Woodrow Wilson, proposed breaking up large concentrations of wealth into so many tiny pieces that each tiny piece could be overawed by just one of the forty-six little leviathans of the several states of the Union. They’d be so small they could be drowned in a bathtub. This was a variation on the tradition of state’s rights and a smaller less activist Federal government that the Democratic Party had advocated with varying degrees of seriousness since Martin van Buren had formed it around the person of General Andrew Jackson after 1824. Federal attention to Federal-scale large concentrations of wealth was only necessary if there were Federal-scale large concentrations of wealth to pay attention to. Breaking them up into state-level concentrations of wealth would return responsibility for policing concentrations of wealth to the states or the people respectively.

Washington State is struggling to create a legal marijuana economy:

Early in the summer, Kleiman projected that legal cannabis in Washington will initially sell for at least forty-two dollars for an eighth of an ounce. Outdoor growing will lower that figure, but probably not enough to undercut street dealers. Ben Schroeter, who goes by Ben Jammin, has been selling pot in the Seattle area for forty years, and offers high-quality, locally grown product for twenty-eight dollars an eighth. He sells weed from California at twenty dollars an eighth. Some customers may be willing to pay a premium for the convenience, and the peace of mind, associated with buying legal pot that has been tested for impurities. But Ben Jammin says, “I assume that a lot of people are still going to come to me.”

At the city-council meeting in Seattle, Kleiman said that the tax scheme outlined in I-502 was rigid and shortsighted. Because of the state’s heavy surcharges, legal marijuana will likely be more expensive than the illicit equivalent; but, as production costs plunge, legal pot will become much cheaper. “We’re gonna have a tax that starts too high and winds up too low,” Kleiman said. He laid out a better approach: “The optimal tax system… if I were doing it on a blackboard, would have been somewhat homeostatic. You’re looking to maintain a price maybe a little bit below, or a little bit above, the current illicit price. And, therefore, you’d like to have the tax be low at the beginning… and rise as the cost in the industry falls.” The state didn’t reconsider its tax plan, however; the prospect of an immediate windfall was perhaps too tempting.

One group is definitely not coming to Washington’s legalization party: minors. Scientific evidence suggests that marijuana poses few long-term health risks to adults but can harm adolescents whose brains are still developing. The liquor-control board has made it a priority to keep people under the age of twenty-one out of I-502 stores. But, according to some studies, a quarter of marijuana consumers are underage. Kleiman told the city council that it would be better for children to get marijuana from parents or friends who buy it at I-502 stores than to obtain it through the black market, because of the testing and the quality control. Moreover, if kids keep resorting to the black market, they will sustain the criminal enterprises that I-502 was designed to eliminate. “Once you have a licensed-store system, you should expect — and in fact want — most of the pot that goes to kids to go through that system,” Kleiman said, adding, with a seditious grin, “You can’t say that out loud. But I can.” Young people who can obtain a green card already purchase pot from dispensaries. “Nineteen-year-old kids on skateboards with a medical-authorization card,” Ben Jammin told me. “That’s the cash cow now.”