More productive uses of your tax dollars

I see where "authorities" (no one even tries anymore to list all the outfits currently operating under the rubric of either the "multi-agency narcotics team" or the "High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Program") began removing another 9,400 marijuana plants from the mountains west of Las Vegas on Tuesday morning.

News accounts called it "a big haul for local law enforcement." The metaphor is meant to remind us of commercial fishermen, who are pleased with their "big haul" if they winch in their nets and find them loaded with edible fish.

The fishermen then sail for home and sell their catch to willing buyers, using their profits to buy stuff, with the net effect (sorry) of adding through their labors to the wealth of the nation.

Will all these police agencies now auction off their "haul" to the highest bidder, using the proceeds to reduce the amount they need to seize next year from local taxpayers?

Of course not. Barring corrupt diversion, which would be preferable, they'll destroy this cash crop. Possessing pot is illegal, they will answer sarcastically.

Actually, not. Nevada citizens voted overwhelmingly, five years back, to legalize possession and use of marijuana for anyone with a "doctor's recommendation." This "haul" could be auctioned or sold to anyone with such a doctor's slip. Should police wish to limit the opportunities for re-sale (a goal which is itself anti-entrepreneurial and therefore un-American), they could limit sales to one kilo per person. Such sales would be less likely to get the sellers arrested, since they're, you know, the police.

But if even the police are afraid of being arrested by the fednarcs (there really should be special lunatic asylums for these Fearless Drug Warriors, don't you think?) for selling this stuff to people with proper prescriptions, given that the federals keep meddling in this intra-state commerce with absolutely zero constitutional authority, they would still have the option of announcing where medical marijuana patients can come pick some up for free, for as long as supplies last.

That wouldn't be "commerce," even under the consummately wacky 1942 Willard v. Filburn ruling (Farmer Filburn couldn't grow wheat to feed to his own stock because, by freeing himself from having to buy the stuff on the open market, he might "impact" interstate commerce.) You can't "impact" interstate commerce, see, if there's no licit interstate marijuana commerce in the first place.

Oh, wait. Spokescritters for the Multi-Agency High Intensity Narcotic Drug Trafficking Areas Regional Command and Synchronized Humvee Insertion Demonstration Team say this marijuana grow was illegal because it was conducted on federal land -- the Spring Mountains National Recreational Area.

First off, could we see the bill of sale giving evidence that the federal government ever "purchased" said lands "by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be," as required by the Constitution?

And second, if it's the use of the "common lands" that made this crop illegal, that would clearly imply the growers would have been perfectly OK if they'd simply planted their garden on their own, private property, because it can't reasonably be held it was the intent of the voters to legalize medical marijuana possession and use but then create no way for patients to actually get the stuff -- right?

If someone from the MAHINDTARC &SHIDT will send me a letter to that effect -- merely saying it would have been OK for the growers to plant their own, private land -- signed by Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie and District Attorney David Roger, I'd be glad to post it here, just to get this whole mess straightened out. Because I'd hate to leave anyone confused.

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A number of readers have suggested that the new Nevada state flower should be the orange highway cones. Why are there so many construction zones marked off with visible work taking place in so few of them? Yes, I see your hands waving in the air. It's all that "stimulus" money from Washington.

State and local authorities can't resist spending Someone Else's Money, so they rush to apply for federal funds for anything from repaving stretches of pavement just laid down a few years back, to that huge HOV Flyover Lane to Nowhere currently going up at the Rainbow Curve.

That's a "green project," you see. In this case, drivers on westbound U.S. Highway 95 approaching Summerlin Parkway will suddenly realize if they had a second person in the car, they'd be able to travel several hundred yards on this new HOV flyover, at which point they'd have to gear down and churn out extra smog as traffic sits, swaying back and forth on this scary new bridge, waiting to merge into precisely the same number of non-HOV lanes that have always existed on the westbound Summerlin. Net "energy savings"? Negligible. But it's Someone Else's Money, see? It's not like everyone subject to the federal income tax will eventually have to pay China back!

Meantime, who cares how many more local businesses, hanging on by their fingernails, call it quits because their access street has been blocked off for months with orange cones? Let's get our priorities straight, here.

All this federal orange cone money is about creating new jobs, right? The same small number of construction firms that have always won these contracts, instead of finding themselves with two or three such jobs to do, now find themselves with eight or 10. So they race right out and hire about a hundred new workers, putting those laid-off cocktail waitresses and computer programmers and Cirque de Soleil acrobats back to work grading asphalt and putting up concrete flyover towers. Right?

Wrong. That would be beyond dumb. It would be life-threatening. Of course you use the same core crew of 30 or 40 reliable, experienced workers you've always used, sending one guy around to move the cones every couple of days on the other sites till you get around to them. After all, once the state Labor Commissioner figured out you'd just laid off 100 new quasi-temporary workers because this latest batch of federal "stimulus" money ran out, your unemployment premiums would skyrocket, wouldn't they?

Total new jobs created?

What do you think?

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal, and author of the novel "The Black Arrow" and "Send in the Waco Killers." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com.