Drug pushing hooligans in Mexico hate the competition too and would rather have a forceful monopoly:
MONTERREY, MEXICO— La Letra (what we call the Zetas these days because we’re too terrified to call them by name) is at it again. It’s getting worse than ever, thanks the lower ranks of the cartel business–made up of young, impressionable school dropouts and assorted jobless little ****. Now, these scumbags are letting their presence be known like never before. In Monterrey, the Zetas have started using them to police the drug use of the general population to make sure that people are consuming the right drugs and buying them from the “right sources.” As in: them.
Nothing new here. Just rival gangs attempting to maintain a monopoly through the only means available: Force. The US Government does exactly the same thing. It just does not use violence as the first method of getting rid of competitors. It uses it second.
It goes to show that people who despise competition and freedom want the same thing: control, and to get that they use force to make their subjects do as they’re told. They’re not really that much different from most governments these days when you think about it.
You know, if we must have state regulation why not at least have logical regulation.
I always thought it would be a worthwhile endeavor to invest in drugs that lower the tolerance levels of addicts. Addicts seek the high they initially received before the increases in their bodily tolerance, thus, why not give them prescribed ‘tolerance lowering’ drugs that allow their body to receive that initial high while still maintaining low doses of drug consumption. For example, certain drugs for depression and anxiety increase the effects of alcohol (allowing someone to get drunker on less alcohol if they please)
Usually the gangs fight each other, not their consumers.
When insurgent groups turn on the people, it doesn’t take long for the people to sell them out. I expect those gangsters will suddenly find themselves very exposed.
The problem though is to whom do you sell them out? The local police is on their payroll or intimidated by them. I guess that just leaves the federal government or rival gangs. Crazy world.
It’s what Sam Francis called ‘anarcho-tyranny,’ where the government is unable or unwilling to protect the law abiding from criminal gangs, and indulges instead in graft and the prosecution of non-crimes. It is the socialist State’s terminal stage before its devolution into chaos and then actual anarchy. Disaffected police and soldiers start leaving the government and hiring themselves out to the productive sector, and the government’s monopoly on the defense of property rights is broken. Bottom line: anarchy is coming, whether the statists or even the anarchists themselves want it or not.
How do you know they don’t hire themselves out to the gangs instead, or just blackmail the productive sector? The Zetas themselves were reportedly formed by ex elite Mexican soldiers.
First, the gangs’ hold on things is dependent upon a black market for drugs. If the State can no longer enforce prohibition then the criminals lose the market to businessmen. A good example of this is marijuana, where most middle-class people and students can buy the product from their peers and nobody bothers with carrying firearms to a transaction. Second, blackmail is a dead end; you can’t coerce productivity. People move away or hire a bigger, badder security guard. To the extent the rackets persist, it is because they have the criminal drug market and city government/unions to carry them. Without that, the local mafia gets stuck in the middle of a bunch of derelict properties. Nobody left to extort.
And frankly, once it’s clear the State isn’t around to provide a bunch of made-up rights and procedural protections, the very small percentage of most population groups that are pathologically criminal end up dead or vagrants.
Let people off the leash against the criminal class the State forces them to tolerate, and that friendly guy who sells you your groceries will gladly wield a machete. People in Chile are barricading their neighborhoods and arming themselves. Too bad the State will force them to de-mobilize later.