Wealth & Money Quote by Michael Badnarik

Badnarik frames drug policy as an economic engine for violence, not a moral safeguard. The sentence is built like a prosecution brief: prohibition is the defendant, “gang warfare” and “other violent crimes” are the body count, and the mechanism is simple supply-and-demand. By emphasizing “raising the prices” and “astronomical profits,” he yanks the conversation away from personal virtue and toward incentives, as if to say: you can preach sobriety all you want, but if you create a black market, you’re effectively issuing a venture-capital term sheet to the most ruthless people available.

The subtext is libertarian and deliberately unsentimental. “Vicious criminals enter the market” implies that criminality isn’t an accidental byproduct; it’s a rational response to state-made scarcity. Addicts, in this framing, are less villains than predictable casualties of a distorted market: “rob and steal” not because drugs make them inherently criminal, but because inflated prices push them into desperate math. That shift matters politically. It reframes enforcement not as protection but as provocation, turning “law and order” rhetoric back on itself.

Contextually, Badnarik is speaking from a third-party politician’s vantage point, where moral consensus is the obstacle and contrarian clarity is the tool. The long, unbroken causal chain in his wording mirrors his argument: one policy choice cascades into a whole ecology of harm. Even the lack of qualifiers is strategic. It’s not a nuanced policy memo; it’s an indictment meant to puncture the assumption that prohibition equals safety.