Michael Friis Johansen

Introducing back-of-the-hand economics

by MICHAEL JOHANSEN

 

   These are the folks who will benefit from Ottawa’s new catch-all crime bill: your neighbours, your neighbours’ sons and daughters, your own sons and daughters, yourself. The old couple down the street, green thumbs both – she with the lovely azaleas out front and he with the prize-winning tomatoes in back – they’ll be better off. The housewife next door doing cottage-industry chores, she’ll see an improvement right away. The young entrepreneurs making a brave leap from school to business, they’ll get immediate pay-offs.

   Never mind the dropping dollar. Don’t worry that more and more people are applying for unemployment insurance while fewer and fewer get it. Forget the huge sums of money squandered on needless things while important state services are harvested to feed the deficit. Never mind the recession. It’s true our 39-per-cent prime minister looks like he isn’t a master of economics after all, but despite appearances he really has everything under control. The new megacrime omnibill proves it. It’s not just about pandering to base human fears. It’s also about supporting small businesses and employing the unemployed. On the outside Bill C-10 appears designed to fight a rise in crime, but since that rise is not actually happening, the proposed legislation’s true goals are revealed.

   It’s genius. Finally a government understands the best way to promote economic growth is not by throwing money at weaknesses, but by cultivating strengths; not by propping up bloated and outmoded corporations, but by supporting small enterprises that have a future, those that already enrich shareholders and employ dozens and sometimes thousands of citizens.

   As an economist, our 39-per-cent prime minister knows the most effective way to secure revenues is to control the supply of a commodity that’s in high demand. Thereafter, to increase profits one only has to make the commodity harder to get – which is where the billieclub omnicrime legislation comes in. By ratcheting up minimum sentences for anyone caught cultivating more than five marijuana plants, the 39-per-cent government is giving the country’s popular illegal drug industry an immediate and sustainable financial boost. Canada’s primitively punitive anti-marijuana laws have already ensured the drug business is not only lucrative, but so widespread that if everybody involved gets locked up we’d see a quarter of the whole population in prison. In their war against this industry the police tend to go after the high-profile busts that let them showcase big piles of contraband in front of media cameras. There seems to be nothing a police spokes-officer likes better than to proudly announce the high dollar value of the drugs authorities have diverted from the open market, or ‘removed from the streets’ as they prefer to say.

   These law enforcement practices achieve two things, neither of which is a restriction of the flow of product from the producer to the consumer – as the police themselves sometimes admit. First of all, retail prices are kept artificially high and that ensures the business remains healthy – not in spite of the occasional arrest, but because of it. More profoundly, police tactics have forced a reorganization of the entire industry, making it less centralized and concentrated, but also much larger. The big marijuana grow operations are becoming rare. That’s not how the plants are cultivated any more. Now instead of a few people growing a lot, a lot of people are each growing a few – just enough to make some money, but escape notice.

   In today’s market one mature marijuana plant, harvested but otherwise unprocessed, is worth $1,000. A farmer only has to germinate a dozen or so and scatter-plant them hither-and-thither to let them grow big and tall. There are probably thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of such farmers throughout Canada. They are your neighbours, their sons and daughters, your children and maybe even you. Sure, the new law will send some of you to jail for at least six months and up to 15 years, but the free ones will reap huge profits when marijuana prices skyrocket.

   Now, if our genius 39-per-cent prime minister only figures out how to tax these criminals, he’ll actually be able to pay for all his expensive new prisons.