What Is The Underground Economy?

The Underground Economy in One Page

The government's "war on drugs" has been both a tremendous triumph and an abysmal failure. Drug warriors have been very successful. We have all seen media images of police stings involving massive amounts of money, drugs, and firearms. However, this has had no impact in local markets. Illegal drugs are available just about everywhere and at prices that have fallen in real terms over time. The amount of pot that could be bought for $10 at a local high school in 1980, for example, is likely the same quantity that could be obtained for $10 today.

Underground Economy @ Wikipedia

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences) by Philippe Bourgois

Policing for Profit (The Economics of Civil Asset Forfeiture Laws)

In most states and under federal law, law enforcement can keep some or all of the proceeds from civil forfeitures. This incentive has led to concern that civil forfeiture encourages policing for profit, as agencies pursue forfeitures to boost their budgets at the expense of other policing priorities.

Policing for Profit @ Cato

Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture

Forfeiture Endangers American Rights

The Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section provides centralized management for the Department's asset forfeiture program to ensure its integrity and maximize its law enforcement potential, while also providing managerial direction to the Department's components in prosecuting money laundering. The Section initiates, coordinates, and reviews legislative and policy proposals impacting on the asset forfeiture program and money laundering enforcement agencies.

The Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section

Same Quadrant..Different Test

My Political Views
I am a right social libertarian
Right: 7.13, Libertarian: 6.35

Political Spectrum Quiz


Political Spectrum Quiz

Jesse "The Body" Ventura, Milton Friedman and Trent (Fiscally Conservative, Socially Liberal?)

For the record..I am Fiscally Conservative AND Socially Liberal.

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The world is complicated, and an electorate so diverse in geography, race, class and beliefs can’t be shoehorned into two fixed templates. There is no particular reason why all advocates of fiscal restraint should also oppose abortion rights, or why supporters of a progressive tax code should necessarily favor restrictions on gun ownership.

Fiscally Conservative, Socially Liberal?

Party purges

And In This Corner!! Weighing In At 270 lbs....(Weight Classes for Prisons Revisited)

As discussed earlier in this section, a victim of prison rape is often much smaller and weaker than the perpetrator of the violence. Therefore, while prior violence should certainly be taken into account, the classification system should incorporate the strength and size of the inmate as well. This Note encourages prison officials to continue to use degree of violence as a factor but within that violence classification, to check each inmate for height and weight, and classify each according to a sliding scale, the details of which will be discussed later in this section.

Weight Classes for Prisons Revisited
Bryan Caplan

Beyond the Border: A Comparative
Look at Prison Rape in the United
States and Canada
PHILIP ELLENBOGEN

Bourbon, Loose Women and Cigarettes (The Relentless Subjectivity of Value)

Consider Waits and Weil. Waits is a musician who has lived much of his 61 years on bourbon, loose women and cigarettes. Weil, a 67-year-old holistic physician, thrives on organic food and yoga. Each, from his own perspective, leads more or less the kind of life he wants to. Both can be fulfilled. Without actually being them, how can we tell? Waits sings bitter-sweetly of his 'misspent' life. Weil writes, in self-help books, about healthy living. We could observe their behavior or ask them to take an MRI. Otherwise, we have to trust each man's report to determine whether or not they are well or fulfilled. When the government embraces some idea about how people ought to live (value), the instinct might be to tax Waits and subsidize Weil. But why?

The Relentless Subjectivity of Value

The Earworm Chronicles 2.10

Created a new blog to catalog my earworms. Mostly movie and tv clips/samples...

The Earworm Chronicles 2.10

The Opener (Ode to the Knuckleballer)

This is kind of an interesting concept...........

If you have a hot reliever who is not your closer and can pitch two innings consistently (as in Mariano Rivera in 1995), why not start the game with that pitcher? If you could get two solid innings out of a reliever at the start of the game, your actual starter would only need to pitch seven innings to finish the game. Or, that actual starter could pitch just six innings and hand it over to the closer for the ninth.

I would suggest calling the new relief position “The Opener.”

A New Kind of Starting Pitcher?