Here’s a link to an article from today’s LA Times which I picked up off the Drudge Report:
The headline reads: California considers lower taxes on pot to help new legal industry compete with black market
It seems California’s pot dealers and producers are having a hard time competing against pot sold on the street, or sold by the many thousands of long-time California pot growers who never had any intention of going legal with their Marijuana farms, or of complying with regulations or paying taxes.
I found this quote particularly interesting. Perhaps you will, too.
Criminals do not pay business taxes, ensure consumers are 21 and over, obtain licenses or follow product safety regulations,” said Assemblyman Tom Lackey (R-Palmdale), one of five legislators pushing the bill. “We need to give legal businesses some temporary tax relief so they do not continue to be undercut by the black market.
I suppose this begs the questions, “Do criminals obey firearms laws? Do they obey the law at all? How many laws do they break? Break annually? Monthly? Daily?” They are, after all, criminals. I notice that Heroin’s Schedule I classification completely keeps it out of the country and off the streets, so no one is able to purchase it….right? No? Gee whiz! After all, its sale and possession is against the law. I suppose criminals are hard to control. The law certainly seems unable to do it.
It is remarkable that proposed legislation wants to make it easier for legal pot dealers and growers to compete with criminals, and that the same logic used by Assemblyman Lackey is abhorrent when applied to firearms. The right to keep and bear marijuana, particularly marijuana at competitive prices, is not protected in the constitution, or is that in the 2nd Amendment, too?
It is not without some irony that I notice that taxes and fees are being considered for waiver to allow competition with criminal activity, as if the criminals were controlling the real market by ordinary market principles, and the state coercion of taxes and fees now seems to be akin to the tariffs Trump wants to impose on steel imported from Asia. This is beyond bizarre in contemplation.
I am all for keeping criminals from breaking the law. I hope we can figure out how to make them stop.
Good luck, firearms rights encroachers. It is doubtful you will achieve what you hope to achieve because of the necessity of relying on the honor of criminals, who are, as it turns out, not so honorable.
Some criminals are malevolently evil. The law cannot cure them of the evil in their dark heart, but the law can indeed put a stop to it if it can get its hands on them, and judges don’t put them back on the street.
Best regards to all of us law-abiding citizens. Hopefully the government will not make criminals out of all of us, though they sure seem hell-bent-for-leather in doing so with a hundred-thousand-plus pages of laws and regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). It seems everyone is a criminal if one searches the CFR hard enough. Maybe that is their intent.
Romans 3:10 As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one…
The Apostle Paul’s point is well taken.
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