this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
44 points (100.0% liked)

Trees

7272 readers
28 users here now

A community centered around cannabis.

In the spirit of making Trees a welcoming and uplifting place for everyone, please follow our Commandments.

  1. Be Cool.
  2. I'm not kidding. Be nice to each other.
  3. Avoid low-effort posts

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago

Capitalism is not just commerce. Capitalism is the idea that you can buy control of a market and use the leverage of your investments (capital) to gain outsized profits off the value of the labors of others.

For sure, there are capitalists in the black market drug trade, but there are also socialists (where the laborers have a greater protected share of the value they generate) and fascists, where violent force is the leverage used to gain profits. I'm not suggesting the black market was good, but it did have the side effect that corporations and politicians could not publicly use their positions of power to capture the markets.

Your local weed dealer is probably out of business, or has graduated to other illicit sales. It's the same thing that happened to mom and pop shops in every town when superstores and the internet crowded them out of business.