This reminds me of the story in Freakanomics about the street level drug dealers making basically minimum wage, with the majority of the money going to high level traffickers who are typically firewalled through layers of middlemen.
The idea of a full time 'career criminal' guy who works at it full time without another job seems less common than people seem to think.
That whole gangster rap testosterone street $900 shoe guy.
In college, I moved into a very cheap apartment. I had no idea, it was the worst part of Oakland. I saw some things that didn't make any sense. Some successful dealers had other opportunities. Most probally didn't. I was so naieve, I didn't know my roommate was selling until my second semester. I just though he had a lot of friends. He finally told me what he did one night over a video game.
Where is he now? He's in a midwest prison over dealing pot. Yes, dealing pot. Why? He heard Potheads pay triple for what Californian's pay. He got his brother to come along. I remember him telling his brother, "you don't want to be a Waiter for life?"
He, and his brother go to Ohio. They set up shop. They weren't violent, and didn't fit the stereotypes of a drug dealers.
Everything was fine until they hired this little rich white kid who thought he was in a NWA alternative reality. He was "slinging" their product in his vernacular.
Will this idiot killed a guy over a small amount of pot.
The cops were more interested in the "kingpin" behind the operation.
Well the kid squealed, and the prosecutor threw the book at my friend. They made him out to be Pablo Chicone. He was anything but a hard nosed killer. He never even owned a gun.
Well, he got a long sentence.
You say they weren't violent, but violence is not the only reason we incarcerate individuals. He broke the law, he knew it, he got caught, and now he's living with those consequences. I hope he learns a lot from this and decides to no longer break the law in the future. I hope others can read your story and decide that breaking the law is not worth it.
People are very cavalier with "non violent drug charges" as if dealing drugs is value neutral. It is not. There is societal harm to dealing drugs and I'm grateful for laws that forbid it and punish individuals that do it.
Homosexuality was illegal not so long ago, but it also harms no one and is approximately the business of only those directly involved.
And yet we used to persecute people for... what? Something we'd been conditioned to reflexively disagree with.
Shameful.
Marijuana is legal or decriminalised in most of the developed world, including the USA. It's widely accepted to be relatively harmless, much less harmful than alcohol.
This guy? He was an entrepreneur, just another person running a small business with a couple of employees. He didn't deserver a long jail sentence for someone else's fuck up.
Just because it's illegal doesn't mean it's wrong / just because it's legal doesn't mean it's rigth.
Criminals.
And yes. Money talk. The less money one has the less chances to get justice.
Btw we don't.
Most law breaking in entrepreneurship is usually finable misdemeanours. Like 99.99% of it. We don't call those people criminals.
The government seemed to just decide to enforce the law differently because computers were involved.
As an aside, Americans like to think they live in a bubble. Like their actions are independent from everyone else's and my bad decisions don't impact other people. This simply isn't true in a society where we all interact. There are laws preventing banks from loaning money at high interest rates - because it is bad for society. There are HOAs that maintain neighborhoods - because it is good for the neighborhood. We mandate health insurance (sort of). Amd we have laws regulating drugs.
We can disagree with how the laws are enforced - but we should not pretend that other people's actions have no impact on us.
Oh I hate those with all my guts. And no, they're not good for the neighborhood. They're good for destroying whatever little self respect and dignity people have left. I wish those control HOA freaks will go to /dev/null .
People are allowed to be upset with how the law is unevenly applied.
But there's another consideration that's in tension with that one. No one ever ascented to the laws that they're governed by. Yes, there are endless backs and forth in the philosophical literature on this point, but I think the strongest case that governments can justly impose restrictions without explicit consent is going to have to say that there are some kinds of restrictions that governments can impose, but some that they can't. Otherwise you're committed to saying that governments can justly enforce regimes of slavery and so on. The question is how much less evil than slavery do you have to get before governments can justly impose restrictions on their subjects.
You say that selling drugs is not value neutral. I agree. It's value-positive. Drug dealers are heroes: they put their lives and freedoms on the line to let others enjoy the cognitive liberty that their governments would deprive them of. The idea of cognitive liberty is that it is a human right to have the freedom to shape your conscious experience as you see fit. It's not presently recognized as a human right by any nation, but neither was freedom of thought some centuries ago, yet we don't recognize historical rulers as particularly respectful of human rights. The legal scholar Richard Glen Boire has spent his career elaborating and promoting this principle.
You're, I take it, concerned that drugs cause harm to the people who use them and the people near those who use them. Drugs definitely do have the potential to cause harm (although cannabis, the drug in question, is especially weak in its potential to cause harm). But the idea that people have about the harm of drugs is distorted in three main ways:
1. Prohibition makes drugs far more expensive than they would be without distortionary market policy. Much of the harm of drugs comes from people being driven into poverty by addiction. This is almost entirely a consequence of prohibition, and would be a much lesser problem under a regime that respected cognitive liberty.
2. There's selection bias in the stories that we hear about users of drugs. Due to the stigma and legal risks around drug use, people who are able to keep their drug use private choose to keep it private, and we get an exaggerated sample of people who end up in need of an intervention or on the streets as a result of their drug use. See the recent book Drug Use For Grown-Ups by Dr. Carl Hart for more on this.
3. The lack of drug education, and the belief — widespread even among users of drugs — that drug use is inherently self destructive, leads people to be far more reckless in their drug use than is necessary. Certainly there will always be people who are reckless with drugs, but we can do a lot better than having young people learn about drugs from their peers in contexts where it's uncool to be concerned with safety, and half the point of the activity is to signal disregard for authority and rules.
I'm not sure that respecting people's cognitive liberty wouldn't result in more people suffering at the hands of their own drug use, but I suspect that it would be fewer than most people imagine. And cognitive liberty is something that's valuable in itself.
He got his degree and then went into some marketing and sales gig for a decade is doing quite well and I believe continues to sell on the side to trusted clients so not a street dealer (saw him last year at a buddies wedding).
The very top does well, even very very well. Most everyone else scrapes by--if that.
Most professional jobs aren't like that. Sure senior execs can make an outsized amount of money but most of the rank and file are still doing OK.
All those other ones you mentioned rely on popularity to determine one's paycheck, which is why they are all pyramids.
Law isn't quite so stark. You don't have to be at a white shoe firm to do OK (corporate counsel, prosperous practice in a smaller city) but a lot of lawyers certainly make pretty modest salaries.
And lawyers are very bimodal. You have a ton of lawyers who make less than <$90K/yr, and then a whole bunch making >$200K/yr, and not a lot in between.
I assume at some point the job was mostly offshored? It's one of those things that I wonder if people overseas would do a better job even at the same price, if they saw it as a great job, as opposed to Americans who see it as a badge of failure.
Historically, law schools were also something that folks from even elite liberal arts colleges went to because they weren't sure what they wanted to do when they "grew up." I know a lot of folks with law degrees that maybe worked as associates for a few years but ended off going and doing something else related to politics or whatever.
Though I recall ~20 years ago that MLB players on league minimums (~70k/yr) were able to collect state unemployment benefits during the off season.
Presumably there in cities with "drug problems", there are also a steady stream of relatively young kids with limited options, and no desire to stay in school.