07/17/14 – Mark Thornton – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
Went a little bit over time with Kelly and with Jim, so you can find those whole interviews later on in the archives at scotthorton.org.
I'm really bad with the discipline about the breaks there, man.
I just hate them.
Anyway, so to wrap up the show today, we've got the interview that we were supposed to wrap the show up with yesterday.
It's Mark Thornton from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
He's a senior fellow there.
And I just screwed up the phone numbers, what happened yesterday.
But now we got him on the line.
The great article, very important article, is called How the Drug War Drives Child Migrants to the U.S. Border.
Welcome back to the show, Mark.
How are you?
I'm doing great, Scott.
It's great to be back on the program with you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
And, well, very happy to have you teaching people economics.
Who would have thought that economics matter when it comes to things like wars and drugs?
But you're telling me that something you know about economics teaches you about the war on drugs.
So what lesson are you learning here?
Well, you know, it's a big story about these children from Central America, in some cases walking 1,500 miles to the U.S. border trying to smuggle themselves into the United States.
And the number of children unaccompanied by an adult, or at least their parents, has been surging over the last year, in particular the last six months.
And the number crossing the U.S. border that are apprehended by law enforcement has just been accelerating.
And so it's a crazy situation where you've got these young children taking a dangerous journey.
And Central America and Mexico are very dangerous countries to begin with.
Their transportation is very dangerous.
There's a lot of crime and criminals, as well as terrorists and guerrillas, jungles.
You know, it's just an amazing type of idea.
It would be like, you know, me walking to your place to do the show.
I mean, it's just an incredible journey.
And the media has been reporting on it in the last couple of weeks.
It's been one of the hottest stories.
And they never mention what causes this incredibly, you know, mind-blowing type of behavior on the part of these people.
And so there's a lot of talk about, you know, the humanitarian conditions and what's the U.S. policy response going to be.
But the mainstream media has got hardly one word to tell us about the cause of this event, Yeah, it's amazing how you say they don't even really ask.
I mean, in a way, they just sort of imply, well, look, because USA is exceptional and everywhere else sucks.
So, you know, as I've heard conservatives tell me my whole life, if it wasn't for the American police to keep them out, the whole world, all of them would move here.
All seven billion.
That's, you know, like they're all just these hordes coming from the east that must be held at bay by our warriors and all this kind of crap.
I don't know what movies are watching, why they believe that, that everyone would rather leave wherever their home is to be here.
But I guess if that's kind of the assumption, you don't ever have to revisit it.
It's just that's the answer.
Of course, everywhere sucks.
So what else do you need to know about the places that suck, that people are trying to flee?
You know, Scott, I think that these people from Mexico and Central America would be very happy to stay in their native lands, to stay where they were as long as there was safety, social order and jobs.
But the problem is, is that the U.S. war on drugs has made Central American countries in Mexico a very dangerous place to live.
We've shut down, you know, air flights and water routes to drug traffickers.
And so the drug traffickers and cartels have switched to the land route from South America through Central America, Mexico and into the U.S. as the primary route of running illegal drugs into the United States.
And as a consequence, these drug cartels have set up bases of operation in the Central American countries of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and so forth, as well, of course, is Mexico.
And these drug dealers, these drug cartels have taken over civil society in much of this area.
So they've been bribing politicians, law enforcement, judges, the military.
They've been, you know, making threats to these politicians, judges, law enforcement and military.
They've hired people from the special forces of the militaries of those countries.
They have insiders on the police departments and the courts and the militaries.
And they're using violence as a way of gaining this foothold in this area with the purpose of transporting illegal drugs into the U.S.
And so people just don't feel safe in these countries.
The rule of law has been thrown out the window.
The Central American countries that I referred to have the highest murder rate of anywhere in the world, nine times higher than in the U.S.
In Honduras, in the last year reported, there was one murder per thousand Hondurans.
And to give you some idea what it is in the U.S., it's about five murders per 100,000 Americans.
And so the murder rate is just astronomically higher in these countries.
And it's all because of the war on drugs.
You've got the drug cartels and the drug gangs.
They're running everything.
And so people are running away.
They've got any chance to get out of those places.
They're looking for their safety.
And they just don't have safety, safe harbors in their native lands.
And that's the primary reason why the drug war is encouraging these children and in some cases their families, their parents, to get into the U.S. any way they can.
You know, there's a famous, well, I don't know how famous it is.
It should be infamous anyway, this clip of Hillary Clinton saying that, listen, I understand some of your arguments a little bit, Mark Thornton types out there who point out the flaws of our strategy, but we can't legalize drugs because there's just too much money in it.
Now, obviously, just like hating Hillary, it's fun to spin that whatever way you want, but I'll spin it in the most positive light for her.
And it's actually what I truly think she meant, which was if we legalized the drugs, then we would be basically legalizing the guys who right now are the most vile criminal drug lords in Latin America.
We would be, you know, in effect saying, you guys are all OK now and it's fine.
You can keep all your money and all your power that you've made through this black market and oh, well, welcome to capitalism or something like that.
And so we just can't abide that.
So maybe that's a real problem.
What do you think of that?
Well, I think that if we leave it up to Hillary Clinton, we're never going to legalize drugs in this country or any of the people in Washington, D.C.
The people in power love the war on drugs because it benefits them, even though it imposes tremendous costs on your average American and your average Central American, South America, in Mexico.
They don't care how much cost they have to throw off on us.
But let's take Hillary's statement and your best interpretation of it, that she doesn't want to legalize drug cartels and all the violence that goes along with them.
But if we look at the legalization of marijuana that's taken place in Colorado specifically because it's gotten off to a much faster start than in the state of Washington, what we find is what we can expect with legalization.
And that is basically that the people who are growing, producing, manufacturing marijuana in Colorado and the people who are selling it are basically good people.
They're business people and they're not out to harm anybody.
Right.
And all the criminal drug dealers in Colorado, they're not the ones who've gone into business.
They're all moved out of state.
All right.
We've got to take this break.
MarkThorntonMeeses.org.
We'll be right back.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Welcome with Mark Thornton from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Senior fellow there, Mises.org.
And I did mention at the start of the interview, but I should have, that he wrote the book, The Economics of Prohibition.
It's sort of like he knows a little bit about this subject.
Also co-author of Terrorist Blockades and Inflation, The Economics of the Civil War, and is the editor of the quotable Mises.
All right, so the drug wars here.
I saw this article, Mark, in the New York Times that came out, oh, I don't know, maybe four years ago now or something like that, where it was one of these real long-form kind of weekend pieces, I guess, about the DEA.
And it's funny, the lack of self-awareness, I mean, it could have been you writing the story had you got the interviews and put together the story making fun of these people for their ignorance or whatever.
But the way it's written, it's completely straight-faced, as these guys talk about the history of how, you know, it used to be that the cocaine smugglers, they were sort of these Jimmy Buffett types who just wanted to have a good time and wore open button-up shirts and straw hats and flew around the Caribbean in their private planes and made a little money and did some blow and liked pretty girls and this kind of thing.
And then, so we crack down and we put those guys in prison.
And then, and then they just go through the story, they're talking about, you know, that's like the early 70s or something, right?
And then they tell the story.
And it's just as simple as it could possibly be.
The harder they crack down, the more and more ruthless the drug kingpins become, to where eventually only the most ruthless criminals with the very shortest time preferences, right, who are willing to risk everything for the very highest short-term profit, become the ones, the only ones willing to participate in the drug trade.
And then they eliminate anyone else, and you end up with full-scale wars like we have going on in Mexico.
And like, it sounds like you're sitting down in El Salvador and Honduras right now.
Oh, yes, it's unbelievable.
The weaponry has all been ratcheted up.
And of course, they've gotten some weapons directly from the U.S. government.
And so, you know, and they're getting the people in the military, they're saying, hey, look, we'll give you 10 times your salary and we won't kill your family if you join us.
And so the members of the special forces, you know, some of them are openly working for the drug cartels.
Some of them are just staying inside and keeping an eye on things.
But it's all ratcheting up.
These drug cartels have heavy weaponry.
They have ground-to-air missiles.
They have helicopters.
You name it, they've got it.
And they've overwhelmed civil society, basically.
And the government, the law enforcement, the military knows that they're in a very precarious position.
And so only Mexico can really send forces and law enforcement from the central government to infiltrate and to wipe out one particular drug cartel.
But the one drug cartel goes down, and it just reemerges in the hands of the next most ruthless person in the organization.
And so we've created just a nightmare for these people down there.
And, you know, when you look at Colorado again, it's all peaceful.
There's no shooting.
The customers go in stores, and they're treated just like they are in other stores, like a liquor store or whatever.
And the funniest thing that emerged from all this is, a few weeks ago, Mexican marijuana farmers were complaining that they weren't going to plant a crop, a fall crop, because the price of illegal marijuana had fallen so much.
And so, you know, that directly proves that legalization puts the illegal operators out of businesses, or it forces them into other pockets that remain still criminalized, and just ratchets up the problem in other sectors of the economy, where the legalization, you know, what we've seen in Colorado is a more than a 5% decrease in violent crime, and as much as a 40% decrease in murders from the previous year.
Now, you can't attribute all that to marijuana legalization.
There's a lot of factors that go into how many people are murdered in an economy, but it's a very good sign that the state of Colorado is taking in a lot of money in tax revenues.
They're creating hundreds and thousands of jobs, really, when you look at the whole picture, and they're getting reduced crime.
They're saving money in their court system, in their prison system, and the police are now able to eliminate 50% of their workload and concentrate on the 50% that really matters, which is protecting life, property, you know, things of that nature, and so we can expect even further decreases in crime, and that Colorado may become one of the safest states in the union.
Yeah, I think that's just great that hardly anyone can point to anything.
I guess they say one stone kid who ate some brownies fell off a balcony, or something like that was the one bad consequence that anyone could point to during the whole thing, but as Bill Hicks said, if you think you can fly, you ought to try to start off from the ground first.
Don't go blaming weed on this idiot.
Well, you're going to get, you know, aberrations like that when you open up a market brand new like this, when it's a dangerous product, obviously.
You're going to find people who aren't used to certain things, and eating marijuana-based products can actually produce a much significant high, but it takes a long time for it to happen, and so if a user takes one dose and doesn't get high, they very often might try to take the second or third dose, and if you get the third dose in there, and then it all starts to take an effect, you can create a very dangerous situation, but what's happening in Colorado is very instructive, I think, because the manufacturers, the growers, and the wholesalers are trying to produce uniform products with known dosages, and they're doing this by measuring the amount of THC that goes into brownies, and cookies, and candies, and chewing gum, and they also have developed the equivalent of an electronic cigarette.
They have electronic marijuana cigarettes that have a given dosage with it that's a pure chemical high, and so they're making efforts to try to standardize the dose so that everybody knows what they're getting.
Well, what about cocaine?
What if we just really had a free market, an open legal market in cocaine?
You know people are going to freak out over that, Mark.
Yeah, they are.
I mean, there's no doubt about that.
Which I don't see what's so wrong with it.
You know, I've had one friend who completely burned himself out on cocaine, and then he was all right again after that, so it's not that freaking bad, you know?
Well, a lot of the cocaine is really bad that's produced in the black market, because they cut it with other chemicals, and you never know what's going to be in that cut.
It may just, you know, inflame your nose, but it may have a toxic effect on heavy users, and so that is a problem.
But, you know, before all this government intervention in the Harrison Narcotics Act, the biggest form of cocaine consumption was in Coca-Cola, health remedies, teas, things of that nature, so that in a marketplace, in a free market absence, all the government intervention, there really wasn't a lot of people snorting cocaine or snorting, you know, vast amounts of cocaine, and so we don't really know what's going to happen.
But cocaine is dangerous, black market cocaine is particularly dangerous, snorting pure cocaine is very dangerous, and so there are those problems.
There's no doubt about it.
But what we would expect with legalization is, again, product standardization, dose standardization, corporations worried about killing their customers and facing lawsuits, and so they would provide cocaine products that couldn't kill you, and then you would also not have all the murders associated with the black market.
Yeah, and it seems like the same thing for heroin, too.
There were accidental heroin overdoses are such a big deal because of the hit-and-miss nature of the quality, compared to the quantity.
So people shoot up thinking it's just a little, but it turns out it's way more powerful than their last dose, that kind of thing.
Yeah, and I'm going to be lecturing about this next week here at the Mises University.
It's our biggest program of the year, and I have a special lecture on illegal drugs that I present later in the week.
You know, Ron Paul liked to point out, too, about the importance of AIDS, you know?
Yeah, and we have a virtual Mises University where you can go online and watch all that stuff or at least listen to it.
Oh, great.
Yeah, and is there a more specific address than Mises.org that you can tell us about?
Go to Mises.org and you'll see the link.
You can get signed up and registered for the class or just watch it on the internet or our site or YouTube later on.
Okay, great.
All right, everybody, that is the great Mark Thornton from Mises.org.
M-I-S-E-S.org.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Hey, Al.
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