This is what the Senate didn’t understand: There were small growers who were here first. Before the LPs. Growers who established the BC Bud brand.
Governments talk about the tax-revenue they’ve missed out on with prohibition. So, they’ve promised legalization and even gotten into the game. Thinking, hey, this should be easy money.
Thinking the money is there ready to be siphoned. It’s an ignorance about where wealth comes from and how it’s maintained.
Are you surprised Canada’s sober second thought fell for simple socialist fallacies? Ignoring the capitalist structure of production, of interest rates and time preference. It’s the real-life tale of Atlas Shrugged.
Senators, like the lower-house MPs, believe they can tax and regulate, even eradicate and replace, an existing cannabis market.
And replace it with their people, too boot. Former cops and politicians, people who made careers from the drug war are now looking to cash in.
The same people who threw cannabis connoisseurs in jail and now wish to continue the process while they cash in.
It’s the tale of the golden goose.
They see the golden eggs that BC Bud is producing, so they promise legalization.
Cannabis connoisseurs mistakenly thought it was an opportunity to produce and sell golden eggs without prosecution. But politicians saw it a different way.
They want to rip open the golden goose and get the eggs, but just like the fable, all they’ll end up with is a dead goose.
So here we are.
They are extracting wealth from Canadian communities, they are handing over it to multinationals. This is what the Senate didn’t understand. They aren’t transferring wealth “from the black market” because that’s not how wealth works.
And even if it did work like that, wealth derived from cannabis won’t always go to Canadian companies.
These LPs are financial paper tigers. They’re leveraged up. They’re ready to get bought up by the large multinational pharmaceutical companies. This is a multi-step process. The goal has been and has always been to extract the plant genetics from BC farmers.
This is a redistribution of wealth and a destruction of BC’s economy. But is it a redistribution of wealth? Because BC farmers are getting hollowed out and with all the strains going to the LPs, it will for sure get destroyed. The wealth won’t have a chance to be redistributed because that’s not how wealth works.
It’s not like some giant pool the politicians can dip into and draw from. It’s a complex structure of complementary factors, all scarce, all existing as they do on a plane of existence brought into being by the mere act of valuation by individual human beings.
The free market is quite an enterprise, like birds directed by electromagnetism, flying as one unit and never bumping into each other. We human beings trade instead of warring with each other, and so we fly as one unit as it were, building the foundations of civilization.
This is what the Senate didn’t understand.