Crime and Punishment

I have to say that I’m not a big fan of the bloggingheads concept. I just personally prefer to read at my own pace than watch bad video of people talking, and it’s so hard to skim video.
But I did want to check out this bloggingheads.tv piece: Crime and Punishment with Mark Kleiman and Glenn Loury. Mostly I focused on the last section on prohibition, where Mark, as usual, simultaneously slams and defends prohibition, in seemingly incoherent ways. Once again, he does his cocaine/alcohol dance when it comes to legalization, where he “demonstrates” that legalization of cocaine will cause the increase of cocaine abuse to the level of alcohol abuse, while also causing an increase in alcohol abuse.
Here was the closer — and the most bizarre argument against legalization possible.

But there are things we can do about drug policy that would reduce the number of people in prison, and the extent of drug abuse and drug related crime. Legalization isn’t one of them because there’s not public support for it. And if we acknowledge the fact that, from the point of view of the majority of the population it’s a loser, um, then it’s not as if we can talk them out of that, so I think the legalization debate is mostly a distraction from doing the real work of fixing our drug policies.

If the majority doesn’t support something, then there’s just no point talking to them about it? What kind of mindless crap is that? Apparently the only proper way to debate something is if people already agree with you.