True. It sounds like the site was mostly dealing in drugs, which for small time dealers I feel is a waste of time to prosecute... But the problem is that larger organized criminals often get their funds to do worse things from the drug market.
That is, I don't think it's very common for someone to say "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I can't afford to kill enough people otherwise," rather than what I think is more common, "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I want to buy a house without a lot of effort."
No. I'm just saying that the people upstream manufacturing massive quantities of meth and heroin probably aren't the kinds of organizations that you want to be making that kind of money.
They have the muscle to stay competitive in a market where there is no state authority to give you guarantees on anything.
This isn't an outrageous claim at all, rather it's a well-known fact: https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Studies/Il...
That's why prohibition is such a bad approach, it creates exactly the kind of black markets where these organizations make their massive profits.
Who do you think provides them with the drugs?
Selling to end users is practically a mug's game, so there is no end to the number of people wanting to act as middlemen to avoid it.
A while ago Arte France released a series titled "Cannabis", where the plot revolves around a shipment of Morrocan hashish lost on the Mediterranean sea, with the consequences playing out all over Europe. And while it's a fictional plot, it still paints a somewhat accurate picture how a lot of this business goes down.
That's not how I was using "single point of failure." The failure I was speaking to was identification by law enforcement.
In a broader sense: We can acknowledge that there's an underlying problem, and how to fix it, while at the same time being willing to advocate a temporary fix until the underlying problem actually is fixed.
Think of it like polyfill: The underlying problem is that old browsers exist, but we can't boil the ocean and make everyone upgrade, so we use polyfills to gain the functionality we want on those old browsers.
Remember Prohibition? That wasn't lifted because people wrote to their Congresspeople, but otherwise respected the law and followed it. It was lifted because it was widely disrespected, and a huge black market for alcohol was created, along with a lot of brutal violence. Same goes for civil rights for black people in the 1960s. Same goes for civil rights for gay people (like legalizing gay sex, previously criminalized). People committed the crimes and got caught, it went through the justice system somehow, and either a law was passed or the Supreme Court rule on it. It took a Supreme Court case to nullify the anti-gay-sex laws when some people in Texas were prosecuted for it and it got appealed up to the supremes as a privacy/freedom issue.
Changing the laws is the long-term solution.
Not buying drugs from big cartels is the short-term one.
According to you, the people in the Underground Railroad were doing the wrong thing, and should have followed the prevailing laws on slavery, and it was wrong for slaves to rebel, even when they were being brutalized and murdered. Your position is disgusting and repugnant.
This depends very much on who you're talking about.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ana-davila/drug-cartels-where-...
The solution will never be shutting down darknets and arresting people.
Either way, there's a lot of violence happening directly because of drug cartels, foreign and domestic.
I wonder if anyone can point to place where drugs are legalized and violence increased? Where addiction increased?
Seems absurd, yet people don't think the drug war is absurd-- they don't immediately see this takeover of Hanza as the government illegally operating a black market for weeks and thus committing massive crime, and they don't see the shutdown of the market as a further crime violating the rights of the sellers to sell something that morally and practically their buyers should be able to buy (when it comes to drugs anyway)
Here's a reference for your reading pleasure (though this is, I believe, U.S.-centric, so not exactly the case here)
https://www.quora.com/Are-undercover-cops-allowed-to-break-t...
https://www.eff.org/pages/playpen-cases-frequently-asked-que...
This is an especially big danger if you're talking about a gang that currently deals mostly drugs but also smuggles forced prostitutes over borders on the side. Take away the drugs and they're likely to expand the side business.
The Mafia was all about prostitution, gambling, and protection rackets. The prohibition gave them a business where you could make far more than all the others combined, and all you needed to do was to kill people who got in your way.
Gangsterism is funded by various econmic oppornities which for one reason or another are illegal. Some things like assasination and extortion need to be illegal by their very nature.
But by passing laws that make new things illegal, we increase the amount of resources available to fund criminalality.
Sure, we can't possibly legalize murder for hire and still have a functional society, but how much profit can you really make filling those kinds of contracts, especially in a world with no illegal drug trade and no human trafficking because hookers are now clean and legal? They can try to expand side businesses all they want, but some of them have a natural cap to how much demand there can be.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bloody-struggle-erupts-over-avo...
Is that a counter argument? There are bad actors (in society). Some bad actors have social, moral, physical, intellectual barriers that prevent them from acting WORSE. Raising the social barrier (marketplace) isn't any different than the social barrier (legality). If you rather not compete bad actors out of the market because of what they might do, why legally punish them out of the market? Why bother trying to stop them at all?
Allowing a marketplace for murder or human trafficking (or the other nefarious things organized crime gets up to) allows the most efficient and effective bad actors to prosper, as markets are designed to do. But society doesn't want bad actors to prosper, it wants them prevented from acting badly.
I think there's also value in defining what people mean by 'small time dealer' in this context. To me, that connotes someone selling a bit of pot to their friends so they can smoke for free or something. People who ship misc. substances internationally and in some cases earn six figures plus annually don't fit that definition in my eyes.
You legalize drugs, you take away their massive cash flies and cripple their organizations.
I'm not convinced this is true, there's lots of ways to make a big profit illegally, drugs are just comparatively easy. I'm a proponent of full drug legalization (it's a space where I have large amounts of first hand experience that won't be discussed on HN), but it's still important to separate an ideological position from reality. The international drug trade is directly tied to human trafficking. Turning a blind eye to one is turning a blind eye to both.
And human trafficking is for a purpose, take away it's incentives and it mostly goes away too. Legalizing prostitution eliminates a big incentive for human trafficking. Rationalizing immigration laws eliminates most of the rest.
> Rationalizing immigration laws eliminates most of the rest.
This is indicative of what I'm taking about, approaching these problems in an extremely reductive way. Did you know there's an estimated 21 million slaves in the world today?