The facts are fairly straightforward. Tens of thousands of Americans are being killed by fentanyl poisoning, in so many cases the result of brown-package pharmaceuticals and otherwise illegal drugs being laced with fentanyl.
Certainly I understand that this is a border issue, that Joe Biden’s abandonment of the enforcement of the southern border with Mexico has allowed tons of such illegal drugs to get across that border, no matter how much the Border Patrol tries to contain the flow.
I get that, and in no way am I diminishing that facet of the problem. Biden needs to address the border, but he won’t, and that abandonment is the topic for another piece.
What I don’t get is the economics, or maybe I do, and either way the answer is frightening.
If you are not familiar with the economic concept known as “rent-seeking”, it is simply the situation whereby an entity (the rent-seeker) tries to establish regular payments from another entity (the rent-payer), with a minimum of effort required on a regular basis from the rent-seeker.
There are many examples of this model starting, of course, with actual rent, wherein a tenant pays a landlord on a monthly basis, and the landlord hopes that little is required from him that can’t be covered quickly and with little expense.
Other examples include cell phone service providers, which provide a finite amount of bandwidth and try to add as many regular monthly payers as possible to use it, since each additional user is pure revenue with minimal cost. Another is a streaming service such as Netflix, which produces content and seeks as many subscribers as possible — again, as each additional user adds only negligible added cost.
Those, of course, are legal. The aren’t all, of course. For example, your high blood pressure drug is needed daily, and so the mail-delivery pharmacy that ships it is a legal rent-seeker, guaranteeing they receive your insurance company’s payment every month, while all they have to do is send you a plastic bottle of amlodipine or metaprolol pills.
On the other hand, the dealer selling to his regular, cocaine-addicted customer base is every bit as much a rent-seeker, just a criminal one.
And this, my friends, is where the fentanyl problem gets awfully murky.
You sell illegal drugs to make money. If you kill off your customer base, you need to find new customers to replace them. It is a whole lot easier not to have to replace customers, especially for an illegal practice like selling cocaine, or heroin, or whatever.
So who, then, is stupid enough to lace other drugs they’re selling with fentanyl, knowing that it is likely to kill most of the people they’re trying to sell to in a rent-seeking model?
Well, isn’t that a good question!
It is happening so often, that we can readily see that the whole practice has nothing to do with economics. If you are doing something that is reliably going to kill off your customer base, the “golden goose”, then it is because your actual purpose is to kill off your customer base, not to make money.
Let us not wander very far, since we really don’t have to. Fentanyl is manufactured in China, and sold to the Mexican drug cartels (or, often, the ingredients are made in China and sent to the cartels to manufacture fentanyl in Mexico). Either way, the root source is China, our adversary in all ways.
China, then to Mexican cartels, to American drug dealers, to doomed customers. Surely the cartels and the drug dealers have no economic interest in killing off their customer base.
But the Chinese do.
They are the enemy of the United States. They can’t exactly kill us off by dropping bombs, since the U.S. military would retaliate and that would cause all manner of problems. Plus, we owe them a peck of money, since the Democrats have been running up the national debt for years by overspending and borrowing the difference, much of that from China. Bombed-out countries aren’t good payers.
I’m not sure exactly what the aim of China is in loosing a fentanyl bomb on us. There are still about 35 births in the U.S. for every fentanyl-poisoning death, so it’s not clearly a population issue. And it’s why I’m pretty sure that China’s intent is more an internal decay program, as part of a larger attempt to create and exacerbate as many rifts in the population base as possible, capitalizing on the severe left vs. right (or sane vs. woke, or economically literate vs. Democrat) fractures already present. Divide and conquer. It’s as old as the hills.
I don’t think I’m all that wrong. Whatever China is actually trying, it involves the intentional killing of Americans by the action of a foreign government, and it is still going on.
And the Biden Administration not only is doing nothing about it, they are not even talking about it, and certainly not vocally condemning China for killing Americans. It would seem that Biden’s family corruption in its dealings with China would account for that. But I suspect that an equal rationale is that if his puppeteers were to have him condemn China in a speech, his Republican opponents would rightly ask why he hasn’t lifted a finger to stop the flow of fentanyl across our border, when he obviously can.
It’s right to ask Biden why he is letting China kill 70,000-100,000 Americans per year with impunity. It’s certainly right for me to ask; after all, it’s a free country.
But why isn’t the actual American press asking that? Inquiring minds would dearly love to know.
Copyright 2014-2023 by Robert Sutton
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