The Mastermind Delusion

Criminal justice reform has been a Democratic hobby horse for a few years now. It suffered from near-instant institutional capture, with Soros left-anarchists infiltrating District Attorney offices in blue cities, with deluded activists insisting that policing causes crime, and with Cloward-Piven scions scheming for ways to collapse society via identity wars. The resulting chaos and localized spikes in criminality have caused many to sour on that hobby horse, and I still believe that Biden picked Kamala Harris as his running mate to signal he'd be "tough" on crime.

Meanwhile, real, productive reforms that should happen, don't. I spilled much digital ink on those in the wake of George Floyd's murder, but I've yet to see any of the reforms that I and other liberty-lovers suggested happen.

Instead, we get the opposite.

The latest is the government's pursuit of a ban on menthol cigarettes.

As history has shown us, time and time again, bans spawn black markets. Action-reaction, as certain as anything Newton ever conceived. New York sought to curtail smoking by imposing hefty taxes on cigarettes. As a result, fully 60% of cigarettes sold in the state are either smuggled (drive down to Virginia, load your trunk full of cigarettes at $7 a pack cheaper than NY, return, sell to NY bodegas for a couple bucks more than you paid, pocket thousands per trip), or counterfeit (China exports 400 billion counterfeit cigarettes per year). As a result, people like Eric Garner risk running afoul of the law, sometimes with tragic results (for those unaware, Eric Garner was a black Staten Island man who was killed during an attempted arrest for the crime of selling "loosies," i.e. individual cigarettes whose tax provenance cannot be proven).

That menthol cigarettes are the preferred product of black smokers (60-75% of all black smokers choose menthols. 90% of younger black smokers choose menthols) is both the impetus and the dissonance of the government's impending ban.

Does it make any sense to increase the likelihood of black-v-police encounters by targeting their preferred product for prohibition?

Examples like this is why I don't buy into the "mastermind" forms of conspiracy theorizing. Screaming about a justice system that's stacked against blacks, insisting that the Right has institutionalized racism in law enforcement, and then writing more laws that will put blacks on the wrong side of the law is bonkers.

Unless you envision government as a seething mass of disparate goals, dissonant beliefs, and "herding cats" chaos. Which explains everything, perfectly. No puppet master would act in so many stupid and head-scratching ways. No sane person could conclude that the Afghanistan withdrawal was anything other than debacle born of idiocy and mismanagement. Ditto for countless spending initiatives. No puppet master, even one who was profligate in spending to buy vote, would be as idiotic as our government is in its wastefulness.

Failure is government's middle name, and were there some secret cabal of cunning at the top, its sheer incompetence would assure its exposure.

If you're among those who reflexes to some sort of secret "they" in trying to suss out why government behaves as it does, please stop.

Sadly, I know this will fall on deaf ears in too many cases. I'm sure someone has already theorized that the menthol ban is intended to increase strife between blacks and cops, in order to accelerate societal collapse. Yes, that outcome appears to be the goal of certain activists out there, but they are known to us and operating in the open, among a plethora of other activists with other goals and agendas, and not part of some Reptilian-Rothschild star chamber. The political arena is a bucket of crabs, not a marionette show.