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US Open Government Initiative Enters Phase Three
circletimessquare writes "The Obama administration opened a discussion forum in January of this year which has become an electronic suggestion box. It is now entering stage three, following brainstorm and discussion phases: the draft phase, in which the top subject matter is codified into suggestions for the government. 'Ultimately, the visitors advanced more than 3,900 ideas, which in turn spawned 11,000 comments that received 210,000 thumb votes. The result? Three of the top 10 most popular ideas called for legalizing marijuana, and two featured conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama's true place of birth.'"
Not sure if that's a brilliant idea or not, but surely removing it from schedule 1 status is the right thing to do.
That Nixon-era policy makes classifies it as having "no medicinal value" and is considered "highly addictive". Both are jokes.
The status above cocaine gives law enforcement more incentive to go after potheads than Colombian smugglers. Ridiculous.
"...But until then I don't see why it merits the time of our government."
I think that's part of the point. All this other crap going on and we're still arresting people for smoking pot!?!
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
And for some reason marijuana is an important issue? Are you kidding me? I don't see how it could possibly be more relevant than any of the issues I already listed. If we could solve all of them, then I would be comfortable with our national government looking into this "marijuana issue" (whatever the hell the issue is). But until then I don't see why it merits the time of our government.
Lets see... You legalize marijuana and you can cut down on the number of arrests made, cut down on the number of cops, when you legalize it you would also allow for new industries to thrive, tax dollars to collect, Assuming even only a moderate increase of marijuana consumption as a part of it being legalized, you open up an entire new industry, more jobs, less spending for the government, more freedom and more revenue.
There is no way you can argue for marijuana to not be legalized by a purely financial standpoint. Plus, legalizing it will cut costs, and spend less time looking at the issue rather than the more time you are foolishly suggesting.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It's not surprising people want to get get high.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Arresting pot smokers is an incredibly lucrative business! That's why it's still banned.
And, I'm sure if you spent enough time creating moral panic over alcohol, tobacco and easy to find over-the-counter drugs, you would find that the results are the same if not worse.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The only way to have a truly free government is to have a government that protects only against force and fraud.
If so, then people who ask for a "truly free government" should be careful what they wish for.
That way you have freedom to do whatever you want to while being safe because of the government.
Well, no, not quite. A ban on force and fraud is, itself, a restriction on your freedom: you aren't free to do whatever you want if what you want involves force or fraud. It's a perfectly justified restriction, but it's still a restriction.
More importantly, a government that only protects against force and fraud is a government that doesn't regulate industry. We've seen where that leads, from healing tonics to meat packing to investment banking. There's plenty of deception and destruction that doesn't quite fall under the umbrella of "force and fraud".
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I'm fairly certain they're still ignoring the issue that the most people who participated in this poll and who are in all likelyhood are not representative of the voting publicwere interested in changing, legalization of marijuana.
Fixed that for you.
An online poll conducted like this is going to be ridiculously skewed. Even if no one cheated, voting hundreds of times for their own "legalize pot" suggestions, the demographic here is going to be much MUCH younger than the average voting population. No age restrictions. And half the people who posted on there probably sent a link to all their friends and posted it on like-minded forums. Those people who are really REALLY opposed to legalization are also less likely to participate in this. Likewise, a lot of those people most in favor of legalization don't vote or can't vote yet.
I think it's more likely this was actually a way of getting younger voters interested in government.
Of course, so would be taxing pot smokers.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Ok, if the healing tonics say that they work and they don't you can sue them for fraud. If the meat packing industries claim they are safe to eat (or insinuate it due to advertising or product placement) and they aren't you can sue them for fraud. If the investments aren't as secure as their ratings say they are, you can sue them for fraud. Eventually, businesses will regulate themselves [...]
That's easy to say, but in practice it hasn't worked that way. It took the establishment of the FDA and SEC to actually make food and investments safer, and even now it still isn't perfect (witness the recent banking fiasco).
Think about how much more third-party regulators would do for things that might actually cause illness.
It's nice to imagine things like that, but again, if it's as simple as you make it sound, why haven't third party regulators actually sprung up and done anything? No one stopped third party food and drug regulators from coming into existence before the FDA, so where were they? Where were the independent securities rating agencies during the recent banking fiasco? They were in the pockets of the very institutions they were supposed to be rating.
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The reason why third party regulators didn't step in before the FDA is because people back before The Jungle was published were blissfully ignorant. [...]
For the investment firms, most Americans didn't really care how they were investing. Rather than doing research they decided to hire someone to put their money in a bunch of stocks that they didn't pick out. Thats what carelessness gets you.
So, we should just resign ourselves to endless cycles of "get screwed, pay a little more attention, wait for third-party rating firms to spring up, put your trust in a third party rating firm that seems OK (not that you can tell, because you're not an expert on the subject, which is why you need them in the first place), pray they don't become corrupt, eventually become complacent, get screwed again"?
I, for one, would rather have an organization with a government mandate that's transparent and accountable to the people, not a smorgasbord of private organizations where I'll have no idea which ones to trust and where none of them are really accountable to anyone.
Managed funds serve a vital purpose: it's unreasonable to expect everyone to hand-pick every component of their portfolio, and most of them would do a terrible job anyway, because they aren't professional investors. Likewise, it's unreasonable to expect everyone to be an expert on medicine, auto repair, or any other service they're considering. If you lack the knowledge to be a doctor, you probably also lack the knowledge to recognize whether a doctor knows what he's doing, as well as the knowledge to recognize whether the third party telling you that a doctor knows what he's doing actually knows what they're doing.
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And all you prohibitionists can think about is getting stoned.
No, they're thinking about their jobs. Fewer people to arrest, fewer people to jail, fewer people to track once out on parole. Hell, the prison guard's union in california consistently lobbies for harsher sentencing for drug offenders. That's repugnant.
I think it needs to be made clear that the two main supporters of prohibition are bad cops and drug dealers. That really tells you all you need to know.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
The irony of this is, twofold: One, this is the administration that that had added a huge increase to tobacco taxes, and these people think that the government is actually going to legalize marijuana? Hah hah hah! Good one.
Two, it's just sad that our country's main concern is legalizing some drug that's major benefit is to get people high. While marijuana has a lot of medical uses, and banning it is pointless, it's just pathetic that nobody cares about inflation, an overzealous foreign policy, the sick demented system of child "protection" services ruined to scam parents and ruin the family, the court system being a guilty-until-proven-innocent fiasco where the court orders you to prove your innocence and you have to pay for court costs, drugs tests, psych exams, and etc. to prove your innocence, and freedom from censorship. Nope, us Americans gotta have our weed! Gotta get high so we won't have any other problems to worry about, just pretend they don't exist with a nice pipe in front of us.
I guess there is also a third point of irony: Weed stupifies you, you'd think the government would favor deregulating it so they could tax it to the sky's limit and get more money off of you that way, while having a bunch of people too high to care about the other rights the government keeps taking away.
and give rise to revolution or a strong man who throws out all the rights in the republic to reestablish order, leading to autocracy
if you aren't explicit about the whole democracy thing, you wind up with an aristocratic elite with a firm grip on the government. study the history of all republics, this is a natural evolution. for all of its flaws, democracy has a feature which trumps everything else: it manufactures legitimacy. the will of the people is consulted, and the government is chosen from that will. the people are happy they have their say. there is always malcontent, in any system, but it is held at a minimum in democracy
without the explicit consultation democracy provides, the will of the people and the agenda of the ruling class begin to drift apart over time. simple miscommunication and entropy can be the culprit, no real malice, although there's always enough of that around. mistrust and illegtimacy is the result, and social stability decays, eventually leading to outright revolt or an incredibly weak government that gives way to a strong man and autocracy who reestablishes order, but at the cost of all the precious rights you look to a republic to guarantee
so you're stuck with democracy. it provides stability. a republic without democracy isn't stable, it decays
and i really have to wonder what makes you so distrustful of your fellow man. some sort of blind conceit on your part probably, a personal failure of yours
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Which is exactly why it WON'T happen.
There are big industries making obscene profits due to hemp being outlawed. You think for one second they'll let it be legalized without a huge fight?
Any politician who so much as suggested it would be committing political suicide.
In a world where BILLIONS of consumers can rate and review the efficacy and truthfulness of products on the web, government regulation of healing tonics is worthless.
Tell that to the people who lost their sense of smell by using Zicam.
Meat packing? Do you really think government regulations has made food safer, or market forces?
Government regulation.
Market forces can't go into a food processing plant and see what's going into the vats. Health inspectors can. Market forces can cut off your future profits, but they can't put you in jail or take away the fortunes you've already earned by turning your employees into sausage.
Investment banking is a world regulated by government's manipulation of their near-worthless fiat currency. I don't blame the banks, I blame the people in charge of creating the fluff-money most people think has value over their lifetimes.
As opposed to, say, gold, which is a fluff-metal most people think has value over their lifetimes. The only difference is the gold supply is controlled unpredictably by mining companies, natural deposits, and industrial use, rather than regulators who control the supply intentionally to achieve policy goals.
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A well armed society is a polite society.
I'm guessing this is why the English have been, for centuries, known around the world for their ignorant, rude, brashness whilst the Americans are recognized far and wide for their dainty manners and eccentric etiquette?
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Of course you're describing exactly the system that the US has already. How clever of you.
Except you've omitted one tiny fact: the US system costs the US government (and thus US taxpayers) approximately 4 TIMES MORE per citizen than socialized systems, and the quality of care is demonstrably lower.
You don't do socialized medicine because it's kinder to poor people (although it is)
You don't do socialized medicine because it creates a healthier and more productive population (although it does)
You don't do socialized medicine because it removes the profit motive (i.e. denial of care) from the healthcare equation (although it helps to do this)
You do socialized medicine because it's cheaper.
Anyone who tells you that socialized medicine is more expensive, and/or will lead to a poorer standard of care, either works for a US insurance company, or is willfully ignoring all the evidence from every other industrialized 1st world country, or, like you I suspect, is just a fsckwit.
... and a point is made. The United States is NOT a Democracy. We are a Republic.
You say that as if they're mutually explusive. They're not. Dictatorship and democracy are mutually explusive. Monarchy and republic are mutually exclusive. But all democracies are either a republic or a monarchy, and the US is not a monarchy. It's a democratic federal republic (although you could argue about how democratic it really is, considering how the system is organised to effectively only allow two parties to be represented in Congress, and a president can be elected on a minority vote).
Under a Democracy, the majority forces their opinions on the minority and it eventually turns into an Oligarchy.
Not necessarily, although it is what's hapened in the US. But that's more because of the lack of real democracy in the system.
In our Republic, laws are set forth through a strict set of procedures to ensure fairness to all parties involved, not just the most popular.
In which republic exactly? Definitely not in the US, where only the two biggest parties have any real chance of representation.
That's an absurd overstatement. Or naive. No public policy of any type can ever truly be a "good idea in virtually every imaginable way."
Actually it's quite possible, you see, because Prohibition is such a bad idea in every imaginable way.
I use friend/foe to signal strong [dis]agreement instead of mod points. What else are f/f good for?
Remember it's the burden of proof of those that want legalization not those that view it as being harmful.
Wrong. The burden of proof falls on the accuser, not the accused. That's quite some backwards logic you have there.
The illegalization of marijuana was never based on proof. It was outlawed to protect business. The main supporters of it's illegalization used the public's fear of minorities and anti-marijuana propaganda to accomplish that.
If you'd like you can read up on Harry J. Anslinger for some examples of what kind of "proof" was originally used by the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to describe the problem and afford more power to his position. I've posted some of those examples below.
There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others.
The primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races.
Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men.
You smoke a joint and you're likely to kill your brother.