A thought for those who think that bureaucracies – and government – should design and construct markets so that they work “properly”:
The other issue has been that the varied authorities didn’t just allow cannabis to become legal. They decided that they needed to “order” the market and, of course, tax it heavily. The net result of these “designed” markets has been that – as it is said at least – in California the legal weed is both more expensive and worse than the regular black market kind.
Bureaucrats seemed to have designed the optimum market. Cheap, high quality easily available weed you can’t get busted for possession of. Possibly not what they intended, but full marks all the same
Good point BiS!!!
It would be an interesting experiment to get bureaucrats to design an alternative food and drink market and then insist that they could only use that one, not the mainstream market. The rest of us could bet on when bureaucracy would crumble due to malnutrition and death by starvation.
California can fuck up anything.
In fairness, this is not just a Californian problem, the same happened in some of the Canadian provinces which legalised marijuana. They were falling over themselves at the prospect of tax revenue from regulated sales, but all that happened was that initial revenues tapered off because the quality, strength, cost and hassle-factor were a disincentive.
Illegal sellers found their risks reduced, because the police were no longer interested in pursuing marijuana users and the market for their product was actually increased, since more people were happy to try/use marijuana post-legalisation regardless of source.
The only way this could have worked was to offer the same level of quality, strength and variety of marijuana at a lower price with limited bureaucratic / regulatory interference (use registers, etc.), but that was never in the interest of the governments undertaking legalisation.
Canada can fuck up anything.
Ho! Just go and talk the UK’s Financial Catastrophe Authority about how to design markets….
Did my comment on Washington state’s lower prices since lgalization get banned?