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This subset of the population has very negative externalities. If you don't do anything about them, they undermine the whole country. See Mexico or other narco-states. And they commit a hell of a lot of violence as well.
Yes, mistakes happen. In the long run, fewer innocent people will die. If we don't get rid of the problem people, they'll keep killing harassing and immiserating innocent people.
How would you do this? Would you have 24/7 surveillance on everyone, as opposed to focusing just on the bad people? Put police everywhere? Give the homeless people houses (creating the mother of all perverse incentives, amongst other things)? Would you take a leaf out of Britain's book and confiscate all the weapons until they're stabbing people with knives (and then try to get rid of the knives)?
The US is already an authoritarian shithole. They've got hardware level surveillance on every modern processor and I'm willing to bet Windows 10 is riddled with spyware. People are getting their lives wrecked because they dared to have sex with a friend at work, there's a government-legislated apparatus that exists to suppress these people. Another government apparatus does the same thing, siccing lawyers on anyone who says anything negative about favoured groups like blacks or women: https://betonit.substack.com/p/lawsuits-are-the-deep-state
What downside of authoritarianism isn't yet present? It's already very difficult to recruit for US police because they're so jumpy and nervous. I've seen videos where they just randomly shoot people, one guy who popped his head out of an overturned vehicle. There's already persecution of whistleblowers of aforementioned thoughtless wars, there's already suppression of political dissidents like Trump. Payment processors are encouraged to suppress people in a coordinated fashion, presumably by some govt-coordinated mechanism.
If you're going to be an authoritarian shithole, you might at least reduce crime.
A lot of this results from the fact that these drugs being illegal causes them to be tremendously profitable to manufacture and distribute. There are no cartels fighting each other in the streets over the right to distribute alcohol.
Yes, the US is already authoritarian in many ways but it is also extremely free in many ways. For example, on the one hand a person can go to jail just for manufacturing LSD. That's really authoritarian. On the other hand, the US has the world's finest free speech protections as far as I can tell. That's really liberal.
The US would become significantly more authoritarian if we followed your ideas about how to reduce crime.
The approach that I favor is to significantly increase police funding and to use the money to improve the standards of police work. For example, I would pay police more so that I could hire a higher standard of person and so that the hires would be more incentivized to do things right rather than to cut corners. At the same time, I would completely legalize all recreational drugs except maybe a few rare ones like fentanyl that are so concentrated that they can essentially be used as weapons. This would free up police resources - maybe not immediately, since there would likely be a spike of drug-fueled asocial behavior following legalization - but eventually, as those drug users who truly could not handle their shit without being asocial would get taken off the streets. I would have more cops patrolling the streets. I would also create special tent city areas for homeless people on the peripheries of cities and provide them with police and medical services, while at the same time using police to crack down on stuff like aggressive panhandling and making a mess on the sidewalk everywhere else.
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