Category: Law
California’s Gay Certification Program
Chris Rufo and Austen Hufford have a good piece on California’s Gay Certification program. Yes, you read that right.
In 1986, Governor George Deukmejian signed Assembly Bill 3678, which required certain CPUC-regulated utilities to submit annual “plans” for buying goods and services from woman- and minority-owned companies. Two years later, CPUC created its “Supplier Diversity Program,” which would enforce the law and set contracting “goals” for large utilities.
Under a series of Democratic governors, the program has expanded to include gay-owned businesses. In September 2014, then-Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation requiring CPUC to recognize “LGBT-owned businesses” as eligible for supplier-diversity benefits. Five years later, Governor Gavin Newsom expanded the program further, “encouraging” other companies involved in the energy sector to award contracts to gay-owned firms.
…This scheme raises an obvious question: How does a business qualify as officially gay? Paperwork. Supplier Clearinghouse, a group that certifies firms for the CPUC program, features a list of qualifications linked on its website. Applicants can secure certification by providing a letter from an “LGBT organization” attesting to their sexual preferences; proof that a newspaper identified them as “LGBT”; or three letters from “personal contacts” written “on company letterhead” attesting to their homosexual orientation. Corporate officials who “falsely represent” their business as gay face up to a year in county jail.
So there you have it. Under the logic of ever increasing privileges for pretty much anyone except white males we now certify whether someone is gay or not.
This is an economics blog, however, so let’s turn from the culture war and ask, following Luke Froeb at Managerial Economics, what these set-asides cost the taxpayer:
A set-aside moves price through two separate channels, and they push the same direction.
- First, it shrinks the number of bidders, so the second-lowest cost is higher (or the second-highest value is lower).
- Second, the set-aside bidders themselves may be higher-cost or lower-value than the bidders they replace.
Both channels move price against the government….The lesson applies to California. Fewer, weaker bidders mean a worse deal for the government.
Brannman and Froeb estimate that set asides for small businesses reduce revenues in timber auctions by 15%, a substantial amount.
Addendum: It is worth noting that optimal auction theory tells us that it can sometimes be in the seller’s interest to handicap a strong bidder in order to make them increase their bids. Thus, in theory, an “affirmative action” program (not a set-aside) that deemed a bid from a minority firm as say 5% higher (so a minority bid at 100 can beat a non-minority bid at 104) could raise revenues. Note, however, that this optimal auction story only works when the minority firm loses the bid! In practice, even these sorts of schemes are money losers for the taxpayer.
Bastiat’s telephone?
- Oakland has seen a 37% decrease in car break-ins over the last year.
- What’s good news for car owners is less so for repair shops that specialize in window and windshield replacements.
- Multiple businesses have reported a sharp decline in their income as a result.
Here is the article, via Air Genius Gary Leff.
Colorado’s Funeral Mistake
Today about a quarter of the US workforce are required to have a license to work in their chosen profession, up from just 5 percent in 1950. Almost always the trend has been to add occupational licensing over time, but in 1983 Colorado did something unusual: it delicensed funeral service workers such as funeral directors. Brandon Pizzola and I analyzed what happened in our 2017 paper, Occupational licensing causes a wage premium: Evidence from a natural experiment in Colorado’s funeral services industry.
What we found was that delicensing reduced wages, reduced prices, and caused a shift towards cremation rather than the more expensive mortuary services preferred by funeral directors. Here’s a key figure.
But that is not the end of the story. In 2023 a series of gruesome abuses came to light involving the sale of body parts, rotting bodies, and worse. Newspapers repeatedly noted that Colorado was the only state not to license funeral service workers. As a result, Colorado is relicensing funeral service workers as of 2027.
The problem is that there is no evidence that abuses were worse in Colorado. It’s easy to find similar abuses—including sexual abuse of corpses—in states with heavy licensing. Pizzola and I didn’t examine the rate of necrophilia among funeral workers in our paper (silly us), but we did cite the following:
A recent US government review of occupational licensing concluded that “the empirical research does not find large improvements in quality or health and safety from more stringent licensing” (CEA, 2015). Similarly, Colorado revisited their decision in a 1990 sunrise review that considered reinstating occupational licensing. The Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies found that since the 1983 occupational delicensing: (1) “there had been incidents of malpractice within the profession but no widespread pattern of abuse,” (2) “[a]llegations of significant threats to the public health, safety and welfare perpetrated by the death care industry in Colorado regarding the improper disposal of human or infectious wastes had not been supported by verifiable evidence,” and (3) “claims that the public in Colorado had suffered or might suffer significant detriment due to a lack of trained mortuary science practitioners caused by the abolition of the Board were unsupported” (Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies, 2007).
Moreover, the licensing requirements—mandating various hours of training and so forth—have very little to do with the types of abuses that generated public support for relicensing. How many hours of “don’t have sex with corpses” training is required? And the funeral director in the worst Colorado case was in fact sentenced to 40 years in jail. Isn’t that incentive enough?
People want what cannot be guaranteed: good behavior in all circumstances. And they will reach for a licensing regime if it promises that, even when such promises are empty.
My Conversation with Dave Baszucki
Dave is CEO and co-founder of Roblox, and here is the audio, video, and transcript. From the episode summary:
With over 100 million daily active users and projected revenue bookings of $7 billion this year, it is one of the largest gaming economies in the world—and one that has made millionaires out of teenage developers in Argentina, South Korea, and everywhere in between.
Tyler and Dave explore why Roblox decided early against prioritizing advertising revenue, why Dave thinks the main competition of Roblox is its own execution speed rather than Fortnite, whether every mega platform inevitably becomes an everything app, how falling token costs will change the platform, why he insists all the games on Roblox are beautiful, whether Robux should have a floating exchange rate, why admitting you have kids under 13 on your platform turns out to be a competitive advantage, why he’s skeptical of blanket social media bans, what his son’s experience with bipolar disorder taught him about metabolic health, his two-year sabbatical between companies that involved a motorhome trip across North America and a stint hosting talk radio in Santa Cruz, why Mutiny on the Bounty remains one of his favorite books, what he’ll learn next, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: What percentage of your games now do you feel are beautiful?
BASZUCKI: All of them.
COWEN: Some look just quite ordinary. They might be fun, but I wouldn’t say they’re beautiful, right?
BASZUCKI: Well, I was trying to go a couple levels out of the box on you there. The reason I feel they’re beautiful is when you said that, I immediately went to look and feel, but then I tried to imagine the 12-year-old or the 18-year-old or the 30-year-old struggling to build something wonderful and the human connection to those games. By that definition, I think they’re all beautiful. They are all the efforts of creation of real people trying to pour their hearts out to make something that other people love to play.
On an artistic basis, I think you could ask me what percent of paintings in the MoMA do I think are beautiful. I’d probably say 20 percent. If I had to look at 1,000 Roblox games, I wouldn’t name which is more beautiful to me because I think that’s less important than really the heartfelt work of all the creators.
COWEN: I’ve been struck when I look at gaming at how much people don’t seem to care much about the visual beauty of their games. I would have expected something different, say, 15 years ago, and they just want a game that engages them somehow. Normal standards of visual beauty seem to have fallen away. Is that incorrect? Would you correct that impression in some manner?
BASZUCKI: I think you’re absolutely correct. What I feel you may actually be describing, if we looked into other disciplines, the evolution of story from the campfire to written to audio to a movie, and the increasing fidelity; all of those stories, in a way, are beautiful, but at the time, for the vast majority of the creators, it may be that writing is just easier than producing a 4K Hollywood movie. I feel that’s a little bit like the metaphor you’re talking about right now in gaming.
For the vast majority of people, their story or their idea for their game is actually pretty beautiful. Whether it’s a fashion game like Dress to Impress or it’s a grow garden game, the games are arguably beautiful, even if they don’t look photorealistic. What I think we’ll see is, over time, as AI helps accelerate the ability to make games look really polished in any style the creator wants—could be photorealistic, could be anime, could be a Warner Brothers 2D cartoon look—you and I might say that looks more beautiful, but the core gameplay is still somewhat the original gameplay. I think we are going to see games arguably look more beautiful, even though I think they’re all beautiful.
The dialogue is a bit slow to get underway, but there are many interesting parts.
Can Online Activity Be Regulated? Evidence from Adult Websites
The consequences of online regulations depend on the extent to which users can circumvent restrictions or substitute toward noncompliant platforms. Since 2023, 25 U.S. states have implemented age verification laws that caused prominent adult websites (including Pornhub) to restrict local access for all users. We study how these restrictions affected browsing activity using individual-level panel data. Access restrictions reduced overall time spent on adult sites by roughly 10%. Specifically, for every 100 hours spent on top adult sites before restrictions, about 50 hours remained accessible at noncompliant sites that never restricted access, 30 hours persisted through VPN-based circumvention, 10 hours were substituted from compliant sites to noncompliant sites, and 10 hours were no longer spent on adult sites.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Matthew Brown, Emily J. Davis, and Devin G. Pope.
Montana’s SB535 and a Potential Biotech Renaissance in America
In 2024, China’s NMPA approved 83 new drugs, the FDA approved 50. China’s share of new commercial clinical trials jumped from 8% globally in 2013 to 30% in 2024, just behind the US at 35%. Last year, China-based Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals overtook AstraZeneca as the top clinical trial sponsor in the world.
What’s remarkable is how China is winning: deregulation and capitalism. It’s faster and easier to set up a clinical trial in China than in the United States. China is even experimenting with the peer approval model I’ve long advocated. The Medical Tourism Pilot Zone on Hainan island lets medical institutions import and use any pharmaceutical or device approved in the EU, US, or Japan — no separate Chinese approval needed. China is using our own regulatory judgments to get treatments to its patients faster than we do.
The core problem is that our clinical trial and drug approval system is slow and expensive. Getting a new drug to market in the US takes billions of dollars and a decade or more of clinical trials — and all of that before a company earns a single dollar. The consequence is drug lag and drug loss and also learning loss. Innovation is a dynamic process. You must build to build better.
It’s not over for the United States, however. Montana’s SB535, signed into law in May 2025, is the most important regulatory innovation in drug approval in my lifetime. The law authorizes investigational drugs and therapies that have cleared Phase I trials to be prescribed and sold — bypassing the traditional FDA approval pathway. It makes Montana the first state to license experimental treatment centers, “one stop shops” for otherwise hard-to-access care.
This is a very big deal.
SB535 makes Montana the only state in the nation where firms can move more quickly from a successful Phase I trial into limited commercialization. This positions Montana as a highly attractive location for biopharma, biotherapeutics, and other life sciences companies that want to accelerate time-to-market while continuing the federal FDA approval process.
Montana’s regulatory system creates the possibility of a self-funding clinical pipeline: companies using early commercial revenues to finance the path to full FDA approval. You get treatments to patients faster, and you keep companies alive long enough to prove their treatments work. Experimental treatments are not for everyone–these treatments are cash based–no Medicaid or Medicare and probably no private insurance either–but after conventional treatments have failed experimental treatments should be available for some patients, both for their benefit and for ours.
Montana is not alone. Florida now allows non-FDA approved stem cell therapies:
A new law in Florida, CS/CS/SB 1768, allows physicians to market and administer stem cell therapies that have not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for orthopedic conditions, wound care and pain management.
These experiments in regulatory federalism are vital and not just for patients but also for geopolitical competition. I am thrilled China is pursuing medical innovation (I predicted and applauded this in my TED talk) but I also don’t want to see America falling behind.
The Trump administration has been supportive. I would like to see HHS and the FDA working with companies operating under state right-to-try frameworks — sharing data, clarifying federal-state boundaries favorably, and treating these experiments as the biotech competitiveness infrastructure they are.
The FDA approval process has long been treated as the only legitimate path to market. The cost of that orthodoxy is measured in companies that never reached viability, innovations that never got off the ground, and patients who died when they didn’t have to. I have spent thirty years trying to get people to see the invisible graveyard. That’s hard. Most remain blind. But China’s bursting pipeline of new drugs is visible — could this be a Sputnik moment for biotech?
An American biotech renaissance — driven by AI, federalism, and regulatory innovation — is possible. The path forward is to double down on what makes America great: the laboratories of democracy are working, and in Montana and Florida, so are the labs.
AI nationalism, Europe included
Most of my Free Press column deals with Mythos, but here are some remarks on Europe:
There is yet another huge problem behind all these first-order problems. Let us say, for instance, that France’s Mistral AI develops very nicely and serves as an EU counterpart of Anthropic and OpenAI. Well, then the other European countries will become highly dependent on the French. That may seem okay today, but it will be much less fun for the Germans if the French really do have all that extra power and leverage.
As for the French themselves, they would be highly dependent on a private company. France may end up with one such company, but it is unlikely to have three of them. So Mistral will in turn have high leverage over France, French politics, and French foreign policy. Let us hope they are up to that. The simple point is that being influenced by someone in your home country, even if it sounds more appealing rhetorically, is not always better than being pushed around by foreigners. Sometimes the foreigners are less oppressive and intrusive, if only because they care less about you.
Worth a ponder. I am hearing good things about the new Mistral model, so these questions may become relevant sooner than I had thought when writing this.
The Cultural War is a Civil War
Kevin Bryan riffs on on my post The Nationalization of American Science. He is rightfully incensed:
AT is right this is a red tape-filled science policy of “losers”. If you think “cut funds from DEI-driven professors in the small departments no one cares about” is more important than “make sure the world’s strongest fundamental science continues”, you’re an idiot.
And yes, this is also the policy of “right-wing JD-brain” folks. They haven’t worked in a lab. They don’t know how we got AI, and recent cancer breakthroughs, and on and on. It’s all culture war, all the time – just the right-wing equivalent of the worst left-wing habits.
One last thing: I *hate* the term “administration priorities” or “President’s priorities”. Totally Unamerican! The President *executes* the law created by Congress, who represent the people, and who see turnover every two years. Period. “Oh, but Democrats do this too!” Grow up!
Owning the libs may feel good today but please look just one move ahead in the game tree. When AOC controls the executive branch, she will inherit every tool Trump normalized. Look a few moves further and see the damage to American institutions.
The culture war is a civil war. If we don’t end it, American science will be collateral damage.
Sometimes it is hard to solve for the equilibrium
Probably you all know about this:
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
According to not yet confirmed but likely true reports, it was shown that model could be jailbroken. The released Mythos already restricted bio and “AI improvement” queries, rather strictly in fact, so now we are back to the model not being available.
Here are a few of the constraints on the U.S. government, not the only ones I might add:
1. It needs for the main companies to stay in business. On top of that, it wants their IPOs to go reasonably well. And it is now much harder for the top companies to recruit foreigners, which is a significant share of their highest quality workforce (Demis, Ilya, Andrej for a start). It is also much harder for the main companies to drum up foreign business in a credible and sustainble manner.
1b. How are American multinationals operating abroad supposed to use top systems, moving forward?
2. It wants to use model access as a tool of both hard and soft power, so model access has to be possible at some level. But it is very hard to control what foreign agents will do with their partial model access, when they get it in the ffuture.
3. The U.S. needs to stay ahead of China in the AI race.
4. The U.S. needs to issue restrictions that are actually enforceable, and “U.S. citizens only” does not fit that bill. Furthermore (markets in everything!) it is easy enough to hire a traitorous American to access tools of wrongdoing, or for matter it is not difficult to fake citizenship in various ways.
5. USG cannot nationalize these companies and then proceed to run them effectively.
6. Chinese and other open source models do in fact improve at some reasonable pace, even if they are right now considerably behind the best proprietary models.
Is the most likely scenario that the government hardens some of its own systems and takes some further precautions, and then allows Mythos to be rereleased? Perhaps with some additional safeguards?
Is there such a thing as a model that cannot be jailbroken at all? I doubt that.
So basically we will be replaying this scenario periodically over time, but with each time the companies and also the government in a weaker and more precarious position.
I am willing to reject the philosophy of “safetyism” and bite various associated bullets. As it stands, these actions will not succeed in making us safer, including for the reasons mentioned above. Our regulatory institutions, attitudes, and approaches simply are not well suited to an era of radical innovation.
In any case these events do not surprise me (they do surprise me in their immediate suddenness however), as this kind of approach is what governments have been about for a long time now, USG included or perhaps USG especially.
Rising in status: Leopold, Aesop, and also Mistral. AI nationalism. Proponents of slow take-off as the likely scenario. Reticent, quiet CEOs. As for China, will they rush into this opportunity, or are they at least as scared as we are?
Here Comes the Sun(screen)
I have been banging on about FDA delay in approving new sunscreens since 2013. Well it has finally happened. Twenty six years after being approved by the European Union and thirteen years after then-FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg told lawmakers that sorting out the sunscreen issue was “one of the highest priorities” the FDA has approved a new sunscreeen ingredient.
The US has been slow because it regulates sunscreens under the the more expensive, time consuming and rigorous drug standard rather than the less expensive cosmetic standard. Does this mean that our sunscreens are safer? No.
In fact, American sunscreens may be less safe.
Sunscreens protect by blocking ultraviolet rays from penetrating the skin. Ultraviolet B (UVB) rays, with their shorter wavelength, primarily affect the outer skin layer and are the main cause of sunburn. In contrast, ultraviolet A (UVA) rays have a longer wavelength, penetrate more deeply into the skin and contribute to wrinkling, aging and the development of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. In many ways, UVA rays are more dangerous than UVB rays because they are more insidious. UVB rays hit when the sun is bright, and because they burn they come with a natural warning. UVA rays, though, can pass through clouds and cause skin cancer without generating obvious skin damage.
The problem is that American sunscreens work better against UVB rays than against the more dangerous UVA rays. That is, they’re better at preventing sunburn than skin cancer. In fact, many U.S. sunscreens would fail European standards for UVA protection. Precisely because European sunscreens can draw on more ingredients, they can protect better against UVA rays. Thus, instead of being safer, U.S. sunscreens may be riskier.
European sunscreens are also more pleasant to apply, and because they work better with makeup they are probably used more often as part of a skin care regimen, which may reduce the prevalence of skin cancer. Once again, the United States’ slower and seemingly more risk-averse approach actually increases risk.
The lesson, for those who are listening, is general.
The Nationalization of American Science
OMB, joined by some forty grantmaking agencies—NSF, HHS, DOE, NASA, DOD among them—has proposed a sweeping rewrite of the rules governing all federal grants, the Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance.
American science has long been state funded but not state directed. Since Vannevar Bush, money has flowed through many agencies to independent universities, allocated largely by peer review. The system has flaws—conformity, gerontocracy, waste—but it had one great virtue, the system was decentralized and not under state control. This rule proposes to bring science funding under top-down, state control.
Program goals must now be “aligned with administration policies and priorities” (§ 200.202). Merit review is subordinated to politics: “senior appointees must conduct these reviews,” ensuring “that discretionary awards advance the President’s policy priorities,” while “peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion” (§ 200.205). And every grant becomes terminable at will, whenever it “no longer effectuates program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest *as they exist at the time of the termination*” (§ 200.340, emphasis added). Universities must even ensure their subrecipients don’t “significantly damage the reputation of… the Federal Government” (§ 200.332)—a loyalty clause for scientists.
All this is sold as cutting “burdensome conditions,” a goal I would support, but sadly that is bullshit. The proposed rules add more paperwork and many more layers of bureaucratic review. Payment requests must include written justifications. Every disbursement gets screened through Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” system. Every recipient must run E-Verify. Applicants must disclose any employee who worked at the awarding agency within two years. And on top of the existing review machinery sits a new pre-issuance review committee of “senior appointees” second-guessing the experts. Fixed amount awards—pay for outputs, not inputs—an innovative reward mechanism are *eliminated*, so every award now gets routine cost monitoring and financial reporting.
Political review of every award, peer review demoted, agency review promoted, termination whenever “priorities” change. Chilling. It’s a nightmare of petty low-trust review of the kind that is already drowning science. I must deal with this kind of nonsense all the time. More is not better.
The machinery is centralized too. OMB’s guidance becomes binding regulation, effective government-wide with no agency rulemaking. One dial in the White House now turns every grant program in the country.
The new rules will be sold as getting rid of DEI but that is an excuse to bring in the commissars. The new rules don’t depoliticize science they create even more politicization with the sign flipped, and the drafters admit it:
In the previous administration, executive agencies frequently chose to subsidize and expressly prioritize projects based on their ideological alignment with the categories of activities discussed in the proposed version of § 200.300. See, for example, E.O. 13985, sec. 1, 86 FR 7009, 7009 (Jan. 25, 2021) (“It is therefore the policy of [the Biden] Administration that the Federal Government should pursue a comprehensive approach to advancing equity . . . .”). In this administration, executive agencies will continue to use their discretionary authorities in a manner consistent with current Executive Branch policy. If executive agencies were entitled to subsidize those types of activities during the previous administration, there is no constitutional basis to prevent the government from reaching a different policy determination regarding which activities to fund during this administration.
Read that twice. Tip your hat to the new constitution, take a bow for the new revolution. Will science prosper when it is whipped by political turnover? Research runs on decade timescales; administrations run on four-year ones.
A decentralized funding system is inefficient the way markets and federalism are inefficient—we give up some economies of scale and get experimentation, error correction, and robustness in return. A system in which every award advances “the President’s policy priorities” is efficient the way ministries of science are efficient. We know how that experiment ends.
America is moving in the wrong direction. We should double down on what made America great. Instead we are adopting all of the loser policies of authoritarian nations.
How High-Skill Immigration Restrictions Eroded Regional Productivity: Evidence from the 2017 BAHA Executive Order
This paper estimates the regional economic impact of high-skill immigration restrictions by analyzing the 2017 “Buy American, Hire American” (BAHA) policy as a quasi-experimental policy shock. By significantly tightening H-1B visa adjudication, BAHA caused new employment petition denial rates to double from 7% to 17%, while STEM-specific rejections tripled to 31%. Using a difference-indifferences framework, this study finds that states highly dependent on H-1B talent experienced a statistically significant 2.8% relative decline in value-added output. This implied a productivity loss totaling roughly $218 billion across the most affected regions. While concurrent tax cuts and deregulation likely offset the impact on employment and wages, the loss of specialized STEM expertise adversely impacted total factor productivity. These findings suggest that policies based on conventional employment metrics may overlook the “hidden damage” to productivity and innovation that drives the broader economy, thereby underestimating the true economic cost of immigration restrictions.
That is by Caroline Y. Su of McLean High School. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Let Me Disinherit My Children, S’il vous plaît
Following John Arnold, I posted earlier about how European laws often require wealthy people to give most of their wealth to their children. Here is an example:
Pierre-Edouard Sterin, founder of Smartbox and worth about €1.4 billion, told French senators he wants to disinherit his five children and donate everything to charity. French law, under the Napoleonic Code, mandates that with five children, three-quarters of his estate must go to them, leaving only one quarter freely disposable. Sterin argued for complete freedom to decide the fate of one’s assets, saying it is ‘a real freedom to start with nothing in life’.
Tyler and Alex Speak to OpenAI
We were honored to speak to OpenAI about the economics of AI. Lots of good material here. Self-recommending.
Should we recriminalize marijuana?
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. Here is one excerpt:
The present and also future of mankind is a world where reasonably high levels of self-discipline are needed to do well. The journalist Daniel Akst pointed this out in his 2011 book Temptation: Finding Self-Control in an Age of Excess, and we are now living it full force.
I would rather cope with that world than face the full nanny state, backed by modern, AI-intensified surveillance techniques to boot. Concentrating more power in political authorities hardly solves the basic problem. If marijuana and sports gambling can manipulate weak individuals, so can unscrupulous political leaders. A greater realization of individual weakness does not translate into a case for more government action; if anything, it suggests the opposite. Better to allow our social problems to fester in a more decentralized fashion, rather than reinforce our social pathologies through a manipulative and dysfunctional leader at the very top.
In the longer term, we may need to look to medications, such as GLP-1 drugs and their offshoots, which seem to curb some forms of addictive behavior beyond the appetite for food. Alternatively, some individuals may choose self-surveillance, with self-imposed penalties for bad or addictive behavior. Perhaps your AI, or a hired third party, docks your bank account every time you puff on a joint. I am not convinced such services ever will become popular, but that should be taken seriously as an indicator of what people really want to do. We can at least give them better options for self-constraint. If they rarely choose such options, then perhaps for many of those people, marijuana consumption is not a matter of weakness but a very well-established preference, whether we like it or not…
In short, it is time to realize that paternalism is far less workable than in times past. Our government does not have the credibility, the control over information, or the control over our lives to pull it off.
I do understand that is in some significant ways bad news, as voluntary choice is overwhelming some of us with bad outcomes.
My response is to start by accepting some steps backward, holding paternalist tyranny at bay, and hoping some longer-run cultural and technological adjustments will make this all more workable.
If you have a better solution, I would love to hear it.
Recommended.