For Whose Good?

Hemp.

An agricultural product that dates back 50,000 years and that appeared in the earliest human civilizations, it has myriad uses, including textiles, rope, paper, food, biofuel, plastics, clothing, insulation, and more. It is a hardy and fast-growing crop, it is an effective sequesterer of atmospheric carbon, it can handle arid conditions and requires fewer chemicals and pesticides, and fortifies the soil in which it grows. All this stands apart from the medicinal properties - real and purported - of CBD, and all this stands apart from the psychotropic properties of THC. While hemp and marijuana are variants of the same species, Cannabis Sativa, agricultural/industrial hemp has little to no THC in it.

Hemp was introduced to the New World in the early-mid 1500s, and was a significant agricultural crop in the Colonies and the United States. Some drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written on hemp paper. George Washington grew hemp at Mount Vernon, for industrial uses that included ropes and sail canvas.

Despite this, growing hemp was banned in the United States in 1937, with the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act.

Today, hemp is a major crop in Europe, China, and South Korea, among other places. Canada has a burgeoning hemp industry as well, since its legalization there in 1998. The US took a baby step toward legalizing hemp with the 2018 Farm Bill, but cultivation still requires a whole lot of government red tape.

There is no logical reason to continue to restrict hemp production, even if one remains adamantly opposed to marijuana legalization (now up to 37 states, for either medicinal or recreational use, though federal Class 1 designation trumps the states). Hemp is legally defined as having less than 0.3% THC, and farmers are certainly able to grow the low THC variants without running afoul of the Drug War. For reference, pot from the 1980s ran about 4% THC, and is up to 15% today (thanks to science, market forces, and the Iron Law of Prohibition), and edibles can be up to 50%.

Nor was there a logical reason to ban it in the first place. The history of pot prohibition is one of racism, lies, Congressional disinterest... and competing interests.

I recall hearing that breweries and other alcohol-related industries were all in favor of criminalizing pot, since the 1933 repeal of Prohibition meant they were back in business. Marijuana was a popular intoxicant among the growing Mexican immigrant population in the American Southwest, a growth spurred by the Mexican revolution and the strong American economy of the 1920s, and the nativist elements. If you were a seller of a particular intoxicant, it'd be in your interest to see others prohibited by the government.

Such rent-seeking behavior has been standing in the way of 21st century legalization as well. In 2016, a beer PAC stood in opposition to legalization in Massachusetts. Similar lobbying took place in California and Arizona, among others.

Also worth noting is that the biggest opponents to pot legalization in California were police and prison guard groups. Intertwined with this opposition was opposition to forfeiture reform. The two together tell a truly sordid truth: pot prohibition meant money and jobs for the enforcers, no matter that people's lives were being ruined.

However, today's post is not about legalizing hemp. Or pot, or other drugs. I'm covering all that in the e-book I'm serializing here on Sundays (see below).

Instead, it's about how government policies and "help" should not be trusted as being science-based, or public-interest-based, or even good for the country.

Hemp is just one of countless examples of people leveraging government's power for selfish gain at greater public cost.

Businesses (yes, that includes unions and "public service" industries such as policing and corrections) lobbying against the public good is as old as government. Consider the USDA's Food Pyramid, whose initial iteration was very heavy in bread, cereal, rice and pasta. This wasn't poor science - the sciencey people knew better - but the grain lobby won the day. Now, we're all carb junkies and we're all fatter than ever, despite (well, because of) government do-gooders giving us justification for gorging on breads.

A list of such "not in our best interest behaviors and outcomes across history might rival the Federal Register in size. We are awash in laws and regulations that benefit the well-connected and stand in the way of progress and prosperity. Hemp prohibition, today's "inspiration," isn't even near the top of any such list, yet its full repeal would be of substantial economic benefit. As another example, I could delve into the Jones Act here, but the Cato Institute has that covered.

Instead, I offer one more nugget: the Long Beach shipping bottleneck that cascaded across our supply chain during the pandemic. It was the product of several against-the-public-interest government or government-supported things. The port itself, in thrall to unions that have successfully resisted modernization, both today and in the past (when containerization started, unions strong-armed ports and shippers into guaranteeing longshoreman staffing levels would not decline). Foreign ports are much* more automated and efficient than ours. On top of that were green mandates for the trucks that haul containers across the country - mandates that created such a shortage of California-compliant trucks that shippers would swap containers onto other trucks at the state borders. Time, effort, fuel, all wasted. Stack onto that California's anti-gig-economy laws, and independent truckers were mostly locked out - only fleet operators (whom the unions could dominate) were able to haul those cans from the port.

President Biden could have alleviated that bottleneck with a couple executive orders declaring emergency suspension of those restrictive rules.

Did he?

Some of this behavior falls under the label "regulatory capture," and the rest is properly called "cronyism" or "corporatism." It is a near-inevitable outcome wherever government sticks its nose, because the concentrated interests of a vested few are almost always more powerful than the diffuse interests of the broader public. I covered yet another iteration of such behavior a few weeks ago, in discussing how New York City's public school spending, already among the highest per-student in the nation, could not be trimmed despite a decrease in enrollment, and earlier this year in discussing New York's accidental governor, Kathy Hochul, handing a billion dollars in public largesse to the billionaire owner of the Buffalo Bills football team.

We suffer, every day and in countless ways, under distortions imposed by those who don't give a flying rat's patootie about the public good, or have the slightest compunction about leveraging government's monopoly on force to put Other People's Money in their pockets or to give them an unfair advantage, no matter who it hurts. Next time you hear or see some sort of restriction or regulation of an otherwise consensual activity or exchange or endeavor, ponder first who benefits most from that restriction. Odds are very good it's not you and me.

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Chapter 1 - A Catastrophic Failure
Chapter 2 - A Brief History

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Peter.