As you've clicked on this article you surely read the title and are asking yourself: " What the hell is he talking about?!" I've chosen this title very conscious: Controversial but it has a profound truth. So in this article I am going to explain why war, drugs and criminality are good. As America is the so-called world leader in terms of Capitalism I will base my reasoning on America.
Considering the title: Spoiler Alert: Only in an economical sense of course. I want to quickly state that I hate war, criminality and think an economy can do very well without it. However these things are a great source of stimulating an economy and making others weaker to the benefit of others.
War
The biggest economy has had the most wars and accounts for about 25% of the worlds GDP. It is the United States. The US has been involved in almost 30 wars in the last 100 years. They have an overwhelming 18.96 trillion US Dollars of debt which accounts for more than twice their GDP of 2016.
The most important thing in an economy is demand. According to Keynesian Theory, demand can be increased with government spending. This is when for example the US government wants to increase the demand in their economy they spend money; for example in a war the government buys fighting jets which are produced in the US. The money spent will eventually end up as a wage for an American worker. This citizen then spends his money hopefully in the American economy. As more workers receive wages, more workers can buy stuff compared to a recessionary case where the majority would unemployed.
Keynesian Theory states that the government could even hire workers to dig up holes and fill them again. The only thing that matters is that the wages end up with the citizens of the government spending their budget. But these measurements are not sustainable as they rely on taking up debt.
In the case of a recession the government would increase spending and lower taxes. The idea is that the people of the economy will have more spending power and are able to buy more (=more demand). In a boom phase optimally you would higher the taxes and pay off the debt from the recession. Often the paying back of the debt is less attractive and thus debt is accumulated.
Drugs & Criminality
These two are very intertwined with each other since drugs are in most parts of the world illegal. So if you are in possession of drugs and caught you are brand marked as a criminal. In most States of the US even Marijuana is still illegal. According to the DEA Marijuana is classified a schedule one drug which means that there is no medical use and very high potential for abuse. Which is absolutely false. There are cancer patients which inhale or ingest CBD/THC and they feel better during chemotherapy. In some cases Marijuana even kills cancer cells.
"A laboratory study of cannabidiol (CBD) in human glioma cells showed that when given along with chemotherapy, CBD may make chemotherapy more effective and increase cancer cell death without harming normal cells. Studies in mouse models of cancer showed that CBD together with delta-9-THC may make chemotherapy such as temozolomide more effective."
Source
So why then is marijuana illegal? There are only economically reasons. First of all marijuana is a great opponent to the paper and tobacco industry. Marijuana is also known as weed; what it actually is. Marijuana is weed that could grow everywhere and if something can grow everywhere everybody could harvest their own marijuana and make paper or smoke it. On the other side tobacco needs special conditions to grow and this makes it possible for great capitalists to make their monopoly from it.
The second reason is that if you have marijuana and other drugs illegal you can have more of the minorities in prison and away from society. That the minorities come into prison is good economically and politically in the interest of the state. In the economical sense it is good because prisoners are a cheap working force which is always on time, can't strike and is forced to work. If the prisoners don't accept the 25 cent wage they will get locked up in an isolation cells.
Crime has gone down but prisoners have gone up. The punishments for non-violent felonies have gotten harsher and there has grown a real industry around the working prisoners.
“The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”
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We see that prisoners are a vital but exploitative source of income for big corporations.
Next industry that criminality boosts is the security and weapon industry. People seeing these high numbers of prisoners get the feeling that the world is an unsafe place and hire security guards or go and buy guns for self defense.
From the graph below we can easily see where the trend is going.
This is the naked truth how the world functions. There are always losers and winners. In a war countries lose and other countries win. Prisoners are treated in inhuman ways and others profit from their condition. This is when people only see numbers and profits and can't feel empathy with others since greed numbs the compassion.
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Regards,
Caspar