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Comment by yaa_minu | Hacker News Reader

45% of incarcerations in the US are due to the drug war [1].

https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

Which greatly benefits the private prison–industrial complex, which can lobby in favor of such war, and increase its profit.

keyword: lobby.

So the solution is to abolish capitalism right? Assuming you're right with your "lobbying" claim, how can you solve this by increasing government involvement in the economy? won't it be the same corrupt politicians who would be more empowered to pass laws to benefit their cronies?

Criminal justice reform or simply decriminalizing drug use will eliminate this problem entirely.

At 13:42 Milton Friendman questions whether "socialism failed because it's good qualities were perverted by evil men" and goes on to claim that the both socialism and capitalism have failed or succeeded by each system being true to its own values. By that same argument, capitalism has failed by being true to its own values regardless of what the precise reason for the current high incarceration rates are.

His argument and his positions are horribly simplistic. Neither capitalist nor socialist structures can meet all of the needs of a society.

How does this relate to the incarceration rate which is what this thread is all about?

This thread is not about the incarceration rate. At least my initial comment (the one you responded to) was not specifically about that. The point was that Milton Friedman threw out two metrics to measure the success of capitalism in the United States compared to socialist countries. The United States is now worse in both those metrics than democratic socialist countries. Therefore, by MILTON's metrics, the economic / social systems that those countries use are better than ours.

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