The discredited fantasy of Richard Nixon

by hakmao, 6 October 2008

[A] smarter strategy would be, in the long term, to invest a great deal in reforestation and especially in the replanting of vines. While in the short term, hard-pressed Afghan farmers should be allowed to sell their opium to the government rather than only to the many criminal elements that continue to infest it or to the Taliban. We don’t have to smoke the stuff once we have purchased it: It can be burned or thrown away or perhaps more profitably used to manufacture the painkillers of which the United States currently suffers a shortage.

Comments

  1. Anarch

    Monday 6 October 2008 at 23:27

    I just put this onto the Slate comments bit, but then I thought ‘are any of their usual commenters going to understand what I am talking about?’ - likely not, so you can have it as well:

    The economics is fairly simple. The analogy is with the other price fixing and subsidy schemes operated around the world, particularly in the European Union and the United States. An easy European example is wine grapes, which are massively over-produced, bought up by governments and either converted into industrial alcohol or simply poured down the drain. US examples include corn (’maize’ in British dialects), rice and oranges. Examples common to both include tobacco and rape seed. These schemes work very well politically, which is why they haven’t been stopped despite the massive damage they do to farmers in poor countries, like Afghanistan, so there is no reason we shouldn’t, just for a change, set up a similar scheme which actually benefits people who are poor and oppressed. Any newly minted economics graduate could devise you an outline scheme in about an hour. In fact, why not integrate this scheme with that other favourite, ‘bio-fuels’, and mitigate the evil effects of that piece of stupidity by converting opium into fuel for motor cars.
    There’s a thought. Opium powered cars would smell pretty good as well. And don’t you just hate all these sanctimonous scum-suckers who pretend they have never taken an illegal something in their wizened, half-lived, wet-nelly, inadequate lives. Or worse, don’t admit they enjoyed it.

    Also, the bit where Hitchens writes about Afghan grape production fits in as well. Just goes to show how evil rich country protectionism is. Just a reminder for all those non-internationalist ‘lefty’ arseholes who bleat about ’saving our jobs’ without ever thinking things through. Losing jobs in Britain or the US so the profits will go to some Chinese sweatshop owner or big, feudal, Punjabi landlord is bad, but losing some of ours to boost Afghani farmers (or likewise Guatemalan farmers, or some half decent factory in Morocco, etc.) is a good thing, and in all our long term interests.

    ‘Anti-globalisation’ my arse. Smug, complacent, hypocritical (Afghanistan is non of our business) bastards.