It takes a bit of ranting to get him warmed up, but Karl Denninger makes a good case for legalizing all drugs. From Denninger at theburningplatform.com:
Let’s talk about the screamfest that is already starting, amplified in the media, about Trump’s budget and the cuts to Medicaid that are embodied in it.
Oh, cuts you say? Yes, cuts. See, Trump knows as do the other politicians that medical spending growing at 9% a year, which is the pattern over the last three decades, will bankrupt the United States. Congress pretends this “won’t happen” but I can tell you with utter certainty they are well-aware of it and in fact senate staffers admitted to me, in person, that they both were aware of it and intentionally ignoring it roughly five years ago.
What Trump is trying to do with his budget, and what the Republicans and Democrats eventually will do is toss the grenade to the States. Medicaid is the vehicle to do so; it is a federal and state joint program, so tossing off “block grants” to the states which are an effectively-fixed chunk of cash throws half the ticking bomb at them and thus blows up both federal and state budgets instead of just the federal side.
Isn’t that special?
You, for your part, will not and have not bombarded and demanded, under penalty of whatever action is necessary to enforce the demand, that both federal and state law enforcement go after the medical industry for practices that in any other business would land people in prison immediately. Specifically, refusal to quote a price, discriminating in price between like kind and quantity of purchase by a factor of 10, 100 or even 1,000% or more based on “what sort of insurance” someone has (or whether they have it at all), billing people for things they never consented to, billing people for events that didn’t happen or products that weren’t even used, allowing a doctor to call sticking his head into a room and saying “hi” as a “consultation” and billing that at several hundred dollars and more. You allow drug companies to take a drug that costs $500 for a year’s supply in other developed, first-world nations and charge $70,000 for it here instead of such an action being deemed an unlawful restraint of trade made illegal in laws that are over 100 years old resulting in indictments.
To continue reading: Addiction, Trump’s Budget And Justified Anger
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 