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Is this what you call price fixing?

Jhhnn

Active member
Veteran
Just the kind of thing I wanted to know... ty!

People outside CO don't seem to understand how well the State has dealt with legalization. It's not like the authorities wanted it, but they know they're stuck with it, so they need to make the best of the situation. They don't want to deal with bullshit from the Feds, so they're doing their best to make it work.

That's due, in no small part, to the fact that A64 is extremely well written and that it allows personal growing. That last part anchors it all to reality as nothing else possibly could. Both retail and med suppliers have to compete with that & with the black market, as well.
 

BigBozat

Member
People outside CO don't seem to understand how well the State has dealt with legalization. It's not like the authorities wanted it, but they know they're stuck with it, so they need to make the best of the situation. They don't want to deal with bullshit from the Feds, so they're doing their best to make it work.

That's due, in no small part, to the fact that A64 is extremely well written and that it allows personal growing. That last part anchors it all to reality as nothing else possibly could. Both retail and med suppliers have to compete with that & with the black market, as well.

Yeah, glitches & complaints notwithstanding, I think CO's implementation & strategy is easily the better than what WA is going thru.

Ultimately, the State's interest (besides the obvious tax revenues, of course) is to kill the black market (or at least minimize it to some level below what existed before rec was made legal) via price compression.
 

bentom187

Active member
Veteran
Agreed, there will always be a black market as long as the state tries to regulate and tax it.
It is the problem. They are making money for locking people up for the violations of regulations and getting paid for taxing it. Its a win ,win for them.
 

ApolloAK

Member
The State is The Problem!

There are to many uninterested parties creating a stake in the game where they should be completely un involved. Namely the tax collectors that would otherwise be unemployed without these bull shit laws in place.

If this plant were truly legalized, there would be zero money in the game other than possibly a few well known legit as tomato seed companies & botiques to serve those that choose to patronize them.

You realize tomatoes are a billion dollar a year industry...
 

MJPassion

Observer
ICMag Donor
Veteran
^^^I absolutely do...

Cannabis should follow THAT model...

after all.. it is just a plant... RIGHT?

Papaver Somniferum isn't against the law to grow!
Why should cannabis be?

& I reiterate... THE STATE IS THE PROBLEM!!
State would not exist if not for "WE THE PEOPLE" creating this beast of burden.
 

BigBozat

Member
& I reiterate... THE STATE IS THE PROBLEM!!
State would not exist if not for "WE THE PEOPLE" creating this beast of burden.

So,ipso facto, "WE THE PEOPLE" are really the problem?
:jawdrop:

That's an *interesting* take... ahem...
:wallbash:

So, how then do you propose the great unwashed masses regulate relations amongst themselves without a "State"?
:dunno:

I believe Hobbes referred to such a state (see what I did there? pun!) of affairs as a life that is nasty, brutish and short. I'm no Hobbesian, but his characterization seems right on the money to me...
:fight:

THE STATE you decry has been the nigh universally arrived-upon solution (in various forms) to the problems of governance & ordering of relations amongst atomistic individual members of any given society since the time we first outgrew our Neolithic communitarian roots some 5,500+ years ago... is that libertarian Utopian fantasy land I'm smelling here?
 
A black market for cannabis will always exist.Cannabis is too easy to produce.IN the deep south if you know people you can buy an oz of premium bud for less then 250.I know at least 3 growers.And friends of mine know growers.

We need to legalize without out all the hoops to jump through.IF its been legalized let us grow and sell it for whatever we deem necessary in the quantity we desire.
 
This is Wisdom.

This is Wisdom.

A black market for cannabis will always exist.Cannabis is too easy to produce.IN the deep south if you know people you can buy an oz of premium bud for less then 250.I know at least 3 growers.And friends of mine know growers.

We need to legalize without out all the hoops to jump through.IF its been legalized let us grow and sell it for whatever we deem necessary in the quantity we desire.
Frankly speaking as a pro grower who has worked like a mule for venture capital MBA types in the past, this observation is true and touches the heart of the commercial future of cannabis in the US.
If I had my way, cannabis growers & providers would be in Everytown,
like pizza and convenience stores.
The best model would be local, small to medium size businesses within each community.
Will it happen? Probably for some in select places, but I'm afraid the numbers work against this under the current system. But A+ for a bit of truth and hope!
I see big ag.and business dominating if the present trends continue.
 

br26

Active member
Dispensaries in michigan don't even want to give hundred / oz. They are low balling us so bad , the only product on the shelves is either too much money or school grade ragweed. Dispensaries are literally making a 300 -400 % mark up, while the farmers are barely scraping by to produce it. What is legal and illegal? Fuck, i guess it's ok for them to make all the money and us to take all the risk if something goes wrong.

We deserve more respect and should have unions.
 

bentom187

Active member
Veteran
So, how then do you propose the great unwashed masses regulate relations amongst themselves without a "State"?
:dunno:


People voluntarily interact. No force or coercion from the state is needed or wanted.

Praxeology - Episode 1 - Introduction
[YOUTUBEIF]MoNU_-__LlQ[/YOUTUBEIF]



THE STATE you decry has been the nigh universally arrived-upon solution (in various forms) to the problems of governance & ordering of relations amongst atomistic individual members of any given society since the time we first outgrew our Neolithic communitarian roots some 5,500+ years ago... is that libertarian Utopian fantasy land I'm smelling here?

The state has been used for a long time, it has always failed consistently as well. It usually has something to do with putting violent and coercive people in positions of power, then expecting nothing bad to happen.

Governance/the state is the problem, not the solution. Society exists with or without it. You need the state about as much as you need a mafia in order to live.
 

BigBozat

Member
Get Real

Get Real

People voluntarily interact. No force or coercion from the state is needed or wanted.

Praxeology - Episode 1 - Introduction
[YOUTUBEIF]MoNU_-__LlQ[/YOUTUBEIF]


The state has been used for a long time, it has always failed consistently as well. It usually has something to do with putting violent and coercive people in positions of power, then expecting nothing bad to happen.

Governance/the state is the problem, not the solution. Society exists with or without it. You need the state about as much as you need a mafia in order to live.

:laughing:

Yes, people interact voluntarily... until they don't.

Human nature being what it is [in a nutshell: flawed], inevitably & eventually one or the other of the interacting parties (or both/all) resorts to coercion of one form or another. In the absence of the State (and the laws that by definition flow therefrom - including the laws of private contract), what happens then? We have seen this movie before: it was called feudalism.

People also interact involuntarily (think, e.g., [among other things] private boundary disputes, pollution). Information and power asymmetries are ubiquitous in the private sphere... not just in the public (government/State) realm. Force/coercion is often needed (think, e.g., externalities & market failures: the Tragedy of the Commons) and frequently sought (see Adam Smith in re: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices").

Ah, a von Mises disciple, I see.
Excuse me while I :puke:...

What's next? Perhaps some sophomoric Ayn Rand quotes from The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, or perhaps a bit of juvenile sophistry from the school of Social Darwinism-disguised-as-philosophy known as Logical Positivism? Puh-lease... let me know when you've awakened from your puerile daydream...

I know all about praxeology, thank you very much, no intro kiddie lessons necessary.

Praxeology is the notion that economic theory can be built up a priori from [von Mises'] human action axiom, which - in case you couldn't tell - doesn't hold much water for me (and, FWIW, Hayek and Schumpeter didn't seem to think it valid, either, nor do many/most of the Austrians who followed after [Nozick, Rothbard et al]). While it is fair to say human action can be a purposeful response to stimuli in order to obtain certain ends, that is not the same as saying that this is always the case. Action can be purposeful; it can also be knee-jerk, confused, accidental, arbitrary or even meaningless. Sometimes the action itself is the end. Full stop.

Praxeology is the worst kind deductivist absolutism, one that denies the significance of empirical evidence & the ability of inductive reasoning to contribute useful, valid knowledge. As such, it is not just unscientific (i.e., it fails the falsifiability test) but anti-scientific... it resembles nothing so much as a cult. Is that Imre Lakatos I hear laughing from his grave?

Moreover, even von Mises isn't even consistent in his elucidation of praxeology (see, e.g., his inchoate & incoherent ramblings on the disutility of labor, wherein he admits non-aprioristic postulates. [Beyond that, von Mises' - and Austrian economics in general - subscribes to the incoherent pseudoscience that is the marginalist tradition in neoclassical equilibrium economics.] I could go on... but, rather than regurgitate them herein ad infinitum, here's a relatively succinct deconstruction to peruse: http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/mises-praxeology-critique.html


The State has ALWAYS failed CONSISTENTLY? Really?
Evolution suggests such a poorly adapted creature should have ceased to exist a long time ago. You will have to explain, then, the pervasiveness of the State in the real word in which we actually live (not the fantasy land of libertarian Utopias). On the contrary, seems to me that the State has been a remarkably successful & durable invention [albeit one that has changed its institutional form] for something that is supposed to be such a consistent loser.

Putting violent and coercive people in positions of power is nothing unique to government/the state... there are plenty of sociopaths in the private sphere, and since money is power in our modern credit-based financial capitalist society (even moreso now that SCOTUS has declared that money is also speech & corporations are people), expecting nothing bad to happen by removing the only legitimate countervailing force to that private sociopathic power & violence seems at least as naive as believing, say, that Ron Paul understand monetary macroeconomics (he doesn't).

Society exists with or without it? Really?
Perhaps... if you're a nomadic hunter-gatherer clan or tribal society. If that's the form of societal governance you're advocating, methinks you're woefully ignorant of history. Real individual freedom relies upon the existence of a vigorous state devoted to the public interest... "the common weal". In the absence of a healthy state, humans naturally tend to create legal structures centered not on individuals but rather on extended family groups. (See, e.g., Mark S. Weiner, "The Rule of the Clans" (2013))

Whether modern society can exist without the state is entirely another question. I am extremely dubious.

The archaeological & anthropological record indicates "the state" emerged from stateless communities when a sufficiently large population [usu. tribally-related] settled together in a particular territory, practiced agriculture, and developed sufficient permanent surpluses to sustain specialization of work. There is a reason the state emerged - universally - as we marched towards civilized society...

As Steven Pinker says:
Adjudication by an armed authority appears to be the most effective violence-reduction technique ever invented. Though we debate whether tweaks in criminal policy, such as executing murderers versus locking them up for life, can reduce violence by a few percentage points, there can be no debate on the massive effects of having a criminal justice system as opposed to living in anarchy. The shockingly high homicide rates of pre-state societies, with 10 to 60 percent of the men dying at the hands of other men, provide one kind of evidence. Another is the emergence of a violent culture of honor in just about any corner of the world that is beyond the reach of law. ..The generalization that anarchy in the sense of a lack of government leads to anarchy in the sense of violent chaos may seem banal, but it is often over-looked in today's still-romantic climate.
- The Blank Slate, ppg 330-331

The State, per se, is NOT the problem.
Rather, the problem is how we govern relations amongst members of society in the face of flawed human nature.

From my perspective, the modern State is vastly preferable to the tyranny of clan-ism or the chaos of anarchy.
 
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MJPassion

Observer
ICMag Donor
Veteran
@BigBoz.

Read what ya wrote!

You, in a nut shell, said the state is the problem & even included the reasons why.

Unions are exactly the same as the state...
They're both regulatory agencies INSTITUTED BY HUMANS DESIGNED TO CONTROL OTHER HUMANS.

Statehood/government is designed to help but every single time it ends up becoming the enslaver of men. It matters not the form of state.

You can acquiesce to the demands of the state if you like... but I choose not to.

I can say one thing for damn sure...

These seeds don't care who's borders their within. They don't recognize the state either.
 

BigBozat

Member
@BigBoz.

Read what ya wrote!

You, in a nut shell, said the state is the problem & even included the reasons why.

Unions are exactly the same as the state...
They're both regulatory agencies INSTITUTED BY HUMANS DESIGNED TO CONTROL OTHER HUMANS.

Statehood/government is designed to help but every single time it ends up becoming the enslaver of men. It matters not the form of state.

You can acquiesce to the demands of the state if you like... but I choose not to.

I can say one thing for damn sure...

These seeds don't care who's borders their within. They don't recognize the state either.

You read but apparently didn't comprehend... critical thinking & reading failure...

I can see why praxeology holds an attraction for you... it & you share an affinity for aversion to empirical evidence...

Every single time it [the State] ends up becoming the enslaver of man? Really? That's a strong claim... Where's your evidence? Oh, I see, you have none since you don't believe evidence is relevant to knowledge... blinkered ideology (i.e., blind faith) is apparently enough to you... no wonder libertarians & anarchists remind me of nothing so much as a cult...

Unions are exactly the same as the State? Wow, really?!?
Unions are not a regulatory agency, and they were not designed to control other human beings... they are private, voluntary associations of workers designed for the purpose of collective bargaining of wages & work conditions/rules, and came about as a counterweight to the disparity in power that favors employer organizations. Double fail on that one...

[And don't bother if you're going to argue the voluntary bit above using 'right to work'-type claims that unions coerce non-members to pay dues... for to do so, you would have to grapple with the free-rider problem (externalities & all that, don'cha know... the Tragedy of the Commons all over again)... non-paying non-members in a workplace covered by a collective bargaining unit are free-riders, little more than leeches who want to get the benefit of [usu. significantly] higher wages without contributing anything to the effort to achieve such... and I've seen no evidence so far that you're actually interested in engaging in a good faith effort to think critically about the issues.]

What you're essentially telling me is that you deny the social nature of humankind. We are (and should be), according to your worldview, just atomistic individuals, and somehow the institutions of society are evil ephemera...

Good luck living on your own island...
 
Has anyone thought to compare the MJ craze to the Dustbowl and wheat farmers back in the day. Basically as the price of wheat fell during the dust bowl, farmers thoght it was logical to grow more in order to maintain their standard of living. What they ultimately did was create an over abundance and prices fell sharply. This is what is happening with cannabis. You cant get 3600 for a random brick anymore shit you can barely get 2400 for top notch OG nowadays. SO what do people do, try to get another spot going etc. ITs a shit show
 

BigBozat

Member
Has anyone thought to compare the MJ craze to the Dustbowl and wheat farmers back in the day. Basically as the price of wheat fell during the dust bowl, farmers thoght it was logical to grow more in order to maintain their standard of living. What they ultimately did was create an over abundance and prices fell sharply. This is what is happening with cannabis. You cant get 3600 for a random brick anymore shit you can barely get 2400 for top notch OG nowadays. SO what do people do, try to get another spot going etc. ITs a shit show

It was ever thus... classic fallacy of composition (what one farmer may be able to do [maintain std of living by growing more @ mkt price], is not necessarily true for all farmers simultaneously, esp. if aggregate demand satiation has been neared or reached)... ag commodity cycles have boomed & busted far longer back than the Dustbowl/Depression Era.

And the shit show has barely begun... price compression has a long way to go (esp. if/as other states follow suit & eventually drag along the feds).
 
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