If the principle is, "Let's not get lethal substances out to the public", the first one you'd go after is tobacco. The next one you'd go after is alcohol. Way down the list you'd get to cocaine, and sort of invisibly low you'd get to marijuana.

America has always been the richest and most secure, and sometimes the most dangerous country in the world. In the early years, the danger was to everybody near us, slaves, Native Americans, Mexicans. It finally expanded in 1898 to the Caribbean, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines.

The majority of the population thinks that if the government runs healthcare, they're going to take away your freedom. At the same time, the public favors a national healthcare program.

To construct a scientific theory from the data and to be able to recognize that it is a reasonable theory is possible only if there are some very sharp restrictive principles that lead you to go in one direction and not in another direction. Otherwise, you wouldn't have science at all, merely randomly chosen hypotheses.

Control is the source of strategic power.

In other countries, rich and poor, education remains substantially free, with educational standards that rank high in global comparisons. Even in the US, higher education was almost free during the economically successful years before the neoliberal reaction - and it was a much poorer country then. The GI bill provided free education to huge numbers of people - white men overwhelmingly - who would probably never have gone to college, a great benefit to them personally and to the whole society. Tuition at private colleges was far below today's exorbitant costs.

Plainly elites in America don't want democracy. And why should they? Democracy is always harmful to elite interests. Almost by definition.