What’s That Old Line About Keeping Columnists Guessing?

At some point you wonder if Clyde Haberman was being facetious when he wrote that column about the mayor being unlikely to bring home any big ideas from authoritarian places like Singapore (“the mayor should be able to resist some undesirable ideas that will fall his way in rigid Singapore, where it doesn’t take much to step out of line”). First there was a reevaluation of social media. Now comes an appreciation for authoritarian approaches to illegal drugs:

Bloomberg, who just returned from a trip to Singapore and Vietnam, suggested that rather than legalization of marijuana, another approach might be better in the war on drugs: tougher enforcement.

“In lots of places in the Far East, they have signs up, ‘Death to drug dealers,'” he said, at an unrelated press conference.

“Think about the number of people who die from drug use here in this country. And yet we don’t take it seriously enough to dissuade people.”

In Singapore, he said, “Executing a handful of people saves thousands and thousands of lives.”

Bloomberg stopped short of advocating a similar policy in the U.S., saying the tactics “don’t fit our definition of democracy,” but the mayor said that American lawmakers might have something to learn from about protecting citizens’ well-being.

I almost think we should give this man one more term, just as a controlled exercise in democracy, just to see how far we could go: Sort of like what would happen if de Tocqueville ran the Stanford Prison Experiment or something . . .