Bill Maher began the panel segment of his latest Real Time with Bill Maher episode taking on the “children at the border” problem. He identified the underlying cause: drug cartels.
His solution? Legalize all psychoactive drugs, particularly cocaine.
Wait a minute. The best response to a border crisis is to legalize drugs?
Seems orthogonal to the issue. “Out of left field.”
Which is not to say I don’t support legalizing drugs. But I try not to bring it up every discussion. Could Maher have drugs a tad too much on his brain?
Be that as it may or may not, for the facts I then turned to … Cato Institute.
Only to have the good folks at Cato back up Maher’s assertions.
On July 8, Ted Galen Carpenter, a Cato senior fellow, pinpointed the growth in drug cartels’ power in Central America as central to the whole issue. The drug cartels are “driving vulnerable populations northward to the United States to enhance their own profits.”
But the whole picture is more complicated.
A month earlier, Alex Nowrasteh, Cato’s immigration policy analyst, focused on two American border policies that “likely” and “unintentionally” incentivized “some of the migration and the smugglers that carry many of the migrants,” leading to the current debacle of thousands of unaccompanied minors now being housed — in poor conditions — in detainee centers.
True to form, Nowrasteh notes that “some American politicians who blame American law for the surge actually voted for that American law in the past.”
Which is more horrifying: The idea that politicians make things worse? Or that comedians make more sense than our elected representatives?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.