The Importance of the 4/20 Farmers’ Market

April 20, 2016 may seem like a long way away, but it’ll be here before you know it, and I trust the Pamela McColl’s of Vancouver, along with our “progressive” Vision Party at city hall, will be proactive in ensuring that it isn’t a repeat of last year.

That is, 30,000 people displaying what a free-and-fair market looks like.

It may be argued that since Justin and the Liberals won the federal election, we have nothing left to protest.

I couldn’t disagree more, and I hope others see why.

A common phrase I never hear anymore is “overgrow the government.”

Why is that? Is it because the government set up licensed producers to grow, therefore there is no need to view government as the opposition?

Government spent nearly a century lying about cannabis, jailing people and destroying lives, only conceding this error when it became clear prohibition was a mistake and waste of resources.

But they haven’t conceded in full — the Liberals admit that prohibition doesn’t work but it’s not because adults are self-owning human beings. They’re doing it for the children.

Doesn’t Justin know that 100 per cent of adults were once children!?

Therefore, the protest on Apr. 20 should be business as usual. The 4/20 Farmers’ Market is the protest. “Trafficking” cannabis is another law that needs to go.

Soon it will be legal to possess cannabis, supplied by the LPs and sold in liquor stores to anyone over 25.

Big whoopie-doo.

The fight is for a free-and-fair market, not the petty “right” to possess. Giving one group of Canadians the exclusive right to grow and sell, but not others unless they go through the expensive and wasteful Health Canada bureaucracy, is going to provoke a constitutional challenge.

I can grow tobacco on my own property without a licence. If I trade some home-grown tobacco for some home-brewed beer, state bureaucrats don’t get involved.

Nor should they, that’s not a free society works.

This is an issue relevant for all Canadians.

Cannabis is also hemp, the non-psychoactive plant that is ideal for clothing, plastics, fuel, food, and many other things.

A free market for cannabis is a realistic means to wean off fossil fuels and rejuvenate a middle class that is suffering under the weight of crony-capitalism, taxation and heavy state involvement into personal affairs.

That is why the 4/20 Farmers’ Market is the protest.

This idea that one needs a license to buy or sell, basically state-approval to be an entrepreneur, or that “public health and safety” as determined by police monopolies and health-care bureaucrats overrules personal liberty, is incompatible with the property rights of a free, independent people.

“Property rights?” you may ask. The Art Gallery is on public property!

Yes, and cannabis growers and sellers are taxpayers. This is a protest, in an actual free-and-fair market, business would occur on private property.

If one still considers paying “rent” to the government through property taxes compatible with the idea that you actually own your private property.

The 4/20 Farmers’ Market is about making a stand against unjust laws. The demonstration is a protest on trafficking laws just as much as it is about possession.

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