Politics & Power Quote by L. Neil Smith

Smith swings less like a policy analyst than a satirist with a ledger. The line is built to sting: the War on Drugs is framed not as a moral crusade gone awry, but as a make-work program for people whose power depends on the war never ending. By stacking job titles - politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, and now the military - he turns “public service” into a conveyor belt of institutional self-interest, escalating toward the most ominous inclusion. “Now the military” lands like an alarm bell: what begins as policing metastasizes into militarization, with all the domestic consequences that implies.

The intent is ideological and strategic. Smith, a libertarian-leaning science-fiction writer, is arguing that prohibition is a market distortion sustained by rent-seeking. The subtext is that the drug war’s real product isn’t safety; it’s careers, budgets, and expanded authority. That’s why he targets “employs” rather than “protects.” The program’s success is measured in headcount and appropriations, not reduced harm.

The closer is deliberately cruel: “dubious talents” and “sell pencils from a tin cup” weaponize class contempt to puncture the sanctimony of state power. It’s not just that these actors are wrong; it’s that, absent coercive institutions, they’d be economically irrelevant. The exaggeration is the point: strip away the moral narrative and you’re left with a bureaucracy defending its own paycheck, a war whose constituency is the apparatus itself.