HOW TO GET HOOKED ON WEED.

To the long list of improbable things only government could do, there is one more item to add: Lose money selling drugs.

You may remember the scene in The Godfather in which a summit of mafia dons debates the infamia of selling drugs. Their concern was the evident immorality of exploiting addiction, not a lack of profit: “If you put up three-, four-thousand-dollar investment,” the Detroit don says, “we can make fifty thousand distributing.” In the end, they resolved their morality- profitability dilemma by agreeing not to deal drugs near schools or to children.

Not to cast unfair aspersions on our various provincial finance ministers but they had a similar gathering this weekend in which the assembled consigliere complained that Ottawa’s imminent legalization of marijuana might end up costing them money. That was even assuming a fairer division of the spoils than the 50- 50 split of tax revenue that Ottawa had originally offered. On Monday, Finance Minister Bill Morneau said he would change the formula to 75-25, in favour of the provinces, with the federal take capped at $ 100 million. Guesstimates are that up to $ 1 billion of tax revenue may be on the table but, amazingly, it’s all apparently going to be eaten up by costs, whether from extra drug- counselling, tax- collecting, border-enforcing, industry-regulating or, a completely avoidable cost, actual marijuana-selling.

Yes, because if your plan — as it is in some provinces — is to give marijuana sales over to a monopoly government retailer employing only a high- priced sales force that works to union rules, you may well find your costs are over the top. But there is no need to do that. As CBC’s The National pointed out on its Sunday report this week, Colorado uses the marijuana tax revenue it has been clearing since legalization began to buy homes for the homeless and for a number of other admirable social purposes.

This helpful i nformation came in one of those post- story info- torials that are now a major part of The National’s new format. Normally those are used to point out how the Trudeau government is falling short on its progressive agenda. But this one must have been written by the Corporation’s closet libertarian.

The message was subliminal, but what allows Colorado to clear revenues that are then available for whatever purposes it likes is that it doesn’t actually sell marijuana itself. It leaves that to a wide array of private businesses that presumably do it in a cost-minimizing way that, as is always the case in competitive markets, attends closely to the preferences of consumers — unlike our various provincial liquor monopolies, which are hyper-sensitive to the needs of producers, especially local ones.

One good thing about the finance ministers’ gathering was that none of them actually went so far as to suggest that if they don’t make money on marijuana decriminalization, it shouldn’t go ahead. We’ve developed a bad habit in this country, almost an addiction, that policy measures should be judged mainly on whether they do or don’t make money for governments. Thus, public support for different cultural or sporting extravaganzas is justified on the grounds that they’ll bring in more in tax revenues than they cost in subsidies ( never mind that the subsidies are usually underestimated and the tax revenues overestimated). How the government does financially is not a relevant consideration. Our governments aren’t, and aren’t supposed to be, money-making operations, doing anything and everything at which they think they can make a buck.

Rather, they’re institutions that should instead be weighing the overall social benefits and costs of the different possible policies before them. And they should only be considering those that can’t be done by other institutions in society, including private individuals and businesses. In the case of marijuana, retailing is clearly something the private sector can handle. As recent high-profile retail layoffs suggest, the sector is currently suffering from excess capacity. At such a moment, trying to expand government retail operations — which like most things governmental can only be done excruciatingly slowly, with all the forms and checklists completed in quintuplicate, all the stakeholders consulted, all the reviews and oversights completed — doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Not unless as a government you put inordinate weight on staying best buds with your unionized workforce.

Of course, the official rationale justifying such coziness is that only government employees will enforce rules against purchases by minors. Any of us grey-hairs who have had the experience of being carded at private U.S. liquor stores, or who remember, a ways back, having the legal guy in the group pick up the booze for the rest of us, will dispute that assumption.

On the other hand, if the cost in new addiction is as great as the alleged required increases in government anti-addiction budgets suggest, not to mention increases in private anti-addiction budgets, as well, maybe this is a policy change whose net social impact really is negative. If that were true, it shouldn’t be undertaken no matter how many billions in taxes it brings in. Doing bad things for money: we already have the mafia for that.

ALL $1B OF TAX REVENUE WILL APPARENTLY BE EATEN UP BY COSTS.