In December of 2019, I wrote about Major League Baseball (MLB), along with the Major League Baseball Players Association, announcing that marijuana use by professional baseball players would no longer be verboten. Concluding my discussion of this new development, I commented that “More professional sports organizations will surely follow in eliminating marijuana use prohibitions.”
Tag: restrictions
One of Robert Higgs’ great contributions to understanding government is his exploration of what he terms the ratchet effect. In a 2011 interview posted at the Mises Institute website, Higgs provided this succinct description of the ratchet effect:
In my work, the ratchet effect describes the characteristic way in which government under modern ideological conditions grows during a perceived national emergency. The government’s size, scope, and power grow abruptly as the government acts to “do something” to allay the threat. Then, as the threat is eliminated or diminished, the government shrinks, but not all the way to the level it would have reached if the crisis had not occurred. Hence, each crisis shifts the government’s growth trajectory to a higher level of size, scope, and power.
College, long a fun and liberating experience for many young adults, has become a dreary and oppressive experience for many students living under the weight of a multitude of restrictions imposed at American college campuses in the name of countering coronavirus.