It is not only rare but a red flag if you can drink like a 21 year old in your 30s and 40s. If you can drink like that in your 50s you probably have ascites.

But what about prohibition era gangsters smuggling guns cigarettes and liquor? How will we fight that scourge?

I understand. What’s wrong with farmers making a profit?

So let’s make ANY chance of profit, what, illegal?

How about we don’t base policy on propaganda cartoona

A profit?

Yeah farmers shouldnt profit, they’re our food slaves!

The answer is economy of scale, the collapse of the American manufacturing industry, bloated budgets, especially brand/marketing budgets, and the prices set by OEM manufacturers who themselves have bloated budgets. A lot of these brands arent actually manufacturers but middlemen for manufacturers. They do design, service, marketing and maybe assembly. But manufacturing is primarily done overseas. If it’s manufactured domestically the labor and material costs are commensurate. Maybe the frame is made domestically, maybe not.

A perfectly decent bicycle is less than $100 in China.

I think at the high level it’s the military industrial senatorial complex, the deregulation and reagonomics under Republicans, the neoliberalism under democratic, globalization, de-industrialization, the modern banking/credit system, the modern media complex, and personalized engagement algorithms… Downstream of that is a high rate of poverty, debt, illiquidity, a poor healthcare system, reliance on jobs for affordable healthcare, a lack of access to robust mental health treatment, modernization of weaponry, a radicalized and angry society, collapsing social cohesion, division along small tribal lines, lacl of patriotism, and upregulation of the average amygdala. Downstream of that you have homelessness, addiction, mental health crisises, violence, suicide, murder, and the institutional inertia that makes these intergenerational problems.

Yes, we need a multifactorial approach to all of these things both acute and chronic. It isn’t as simple or as possible to get rid of the guns, but we can increase gun laws. We could require training of all citizens, we can give a budget to support red flag law enforcement, we can give the alcohol and tobacco regulation to the FDA, and let at the ATF focus on firearm enforcement, or roll it in to the secret service or fbim We can make healthcare free. We can spend a fuckton of money on it. We can raise the minimum wage. We can actually govern the economic policy rather than outsourcing it to the Fed, and focus on demand-side instead of supply -side economic solutions, pay for college, guarantee a living wage and housing.

But not with most of the Republicans in the way and the lobbyists at the ear of our representatives.

We need a modern Robespierre. A charismatic leader to lead the public by uniting them rather than dividing them, who will make such massive changes that they’ll come for his head.