Mexico

Six or seven years ago, I was fortunate to have worked with a manufacturing company in Mexico. The plant I was working with was located in the central part of Mexico with a workforce of about 400. They were at work by 7AM and, as I left the plant at 7PM many were still working. Saturday was no exception. The wages were meager to say the least at that time. The city was clean, organized, and relatively safe. I vividly recall about 2 PM one day, having to go to the office and ask the AC be turned on as my skin had turned bright red and was not sweating. Yet, the people remained hard at work in the plant. I was told that "You get used to it."

The economy was governed by the very wealthy, there was little or no middle class, and a huge working class, living under Catholic education, and producing more working class. Due to pay and living conditions in the US and Canada, it was a given - from any study of economics - that there would be a push by the people to balance the incomes of the Americas. After all, the value added by an employee in Mexico was just about as much as that value being added in the US and Canada. yet the wages north of the border were ten to fifteen times higher.

With China coming to the fore with wages ten times lower then Mexico, the Mexico jobs went to China as did most manufacturing jobs in the US and Canada. This sucked the main producer of wealth into China from North America.

This left those very hard working Mexicans with families and no way to adequately feed and clothe their children. There were two options, first to flee across the border to America and Canada, which has been estimated I believe to be about 5+ million people, and take jobs that no one else wanted to do. Roofing, gardening, slaughterhouse work, construction, pouring and working concrete, all come to mind.

Still, there remained a large workforce that did not want to leave their homes and come north to work crossing a dangerous border to do so. With the push in South America to limit the drug trafficking from South America direct to the US, the road was opened up to go through Mexico. The loss of jobs in Mexico left an intelligent, willing, hardworking, and certainly able group of people to go into the underground armies of smuggling drugs north. After all drug smuggling to an affluent market in the US paid very well.

Now, not only are the major Mexico cities located on the major drug routs controlled by these underground armies, they are now moving and targeting resistance in the US and Canada. I read today where the police chief in Juarez, south of El Paso resigned because of the in ability to protect his officers.

Having worked in manufacturing for all of my career, I know the devastation caused in families by our present drugs of choice, cigarettes and alcohol. I have seen many a good career ended. So, consequently, I do not take the solution I propose lightly.

The founding fathers of the US believed in individual freedom and individual responsibility. There are some remaining in the US that still believe that our founding fathers were right, though the light is flickering and about to go out. In the early 20th century, we, the citizens of the US, started turning our responsibilities over to our government. This included taking care of our neighbors and educating our children among other things. For giving up these responsibilities, we gave up some of our freedom. We chose federal taxation to remove some of our compensation for our work effort to pay our government to do these things for us. Once this started, it never stops. Did you ever hear of any government that has reduced its scope, income, and reach into the lives of its people. (China?).

Now, because our government believes it has the soul responsibility for protecting its people, because they are basically irresponsible, for their own protection, we spend billions of dollars, fill up our jails, and are destroying Mexico by our total focus on protecting our people from the use of drugs. We tried this with alcohol back in the 1930's, and we have tried it with cigarettes - to little or no avail.

Let's get serious and face it. No government can legislate morality. Borne in an immoral world, either we learn what our family stands for morally as young children, or we go the way of our immoral world. Given our present view of instilling legislated morality in Wall Street where Stanford and Madoff are shining examples, to our federal government where numerous appointees have failed to pay their taxes, to our state government where senate seats are attempted to be sold to the highest bidder; we have hard examples of legislated morality. Consequently, we have no example that our war on drugs will bear any more fruit than our education system, government regulation, churches, or society in general has on achieving and enforcing morality.

Yet, like you, I have no desire to pay anymore to the government to medically assist those that have injured themselves by knowingly to have taken or consumed alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs. This means that if you wanted to take the personal risk to ride a motorcycle (without a helmet, the docs call them organ donors), you must have covered yourself personally for insurance to take care of you medically should have an accident. The same is in effect in order to drive a car in the US. This is a simple act of personal responsibility. It is not a society responsibility. Likewise, the same for alcohol, cigarettes, and - if you desire -drugs. If you knowingly do something that impacts you personally, you should pay for the act yourself.

This means that if you have to get medical attention for ingesting some chemical you know was dangerous and, because of your individual freedom, did it anyway, you should be individually responsible enough to have medical coverage or damage coverage to have protected yourself with insurance.

So what does this have to do with Mexico and the US situation? Simple, admit we have lost the drug war, that we can not stop our citizens from using their individual freedom, (listed under our Bill of Rights) to use what ever they really want, as long as it doesn't impact the individual freedom of another citizen.

Therefore, let our drug stores sell taxed drugs and call the drug wars over; recognizing our government is defeated in stopping people from doing what they want to do, as long as they don't hurt others physically or financially.

What does this do for the US? It ends billions of needless dollars of government spending and allows that money to be used to build infrastructure on both sides of the borders and put good people to doing real work in manufacturing and construction as well as medical rehabilitation. It allows tax collection on the sales of drugs that might be used for drug education or medical insurance for those unable to afford it. It will substantially reduce the cost of our courts, prisons, and allow our police to concentrate on terrorism, corruption, personal injury, and fraud.

In Mexico, it will allow the present drug distributors and their present armies to become legitimate, and use their distribution knowledge legitimately by selling into a regulated market. It will allow the good hardworking people of Mexico to get back to a normal and hopefully better life than constant fear they presently live under.

If this is not done, if we continue to pay huge amounts of out tax money in the unworkable attempt to legislate morality, we will loose in the end, we will continue to spiral downward in our standard of living, and the wave of violence will continue to sweep north and west until we all live in the same fear as do our neighbors to the south.

What do you think?