We who believe in freedom ought to claim the moral high ground more often. We deserve it, we should claim it.
You can’t have a free society without good morals. The Founders knew this. Just read what they wrote about religion in the public square.
True freedom is not the same thing as license.
Yep, everytime I flush my inadequate little toilet, I thank ManBearPig.
Doing drugs is a personal choice over which the Federal Government does not and should not have any Constitutional power to control. At the same time your neighbors should have and do have the right to kick your a$$ and beat you out of town for being a degenerate sleaziod. As it stands today if a group of decent men tried to run drug addicts, perverts, and other miscreants out of their neighborhoods the armed might of FEDGOV would come down on their heads like an anvil. They would be declared racist, right-wing terrorists, and charged with violating the “civil rights” of these downtrodden victims of society.
Assuming we can agree on a definition of "bad," this question is not one of opinion, but rather of objective fact.
One can still make an arguably persuasive libertarian argument for legalization of drugs on the basis that you should have the legal right to mess yourself up if you choose to. But you cannot make a persuasive argument that (most if not all) illegal drugs do not have serious deleterious effects on many if not all of their users.
Same as with tobacco smoking, heavy drinking or homosexual sex. The negative health effects are a question of fact, not of opinion.
A better approach to the argument is this: should the federal government be in charge of issuing traffic tickets in every town in America? And if you say, “Of course not!”, then to assume that you don’t want any traffic laws at all.
It’s not an either/or argument. And neither is drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, toilets or light bulbs. Our sole choices are *not* “federal government or nothing.”
Right now, if left up to the individual States, abortion would only be legal in from 3 to 5 of them, and for an indefinite time. But it would be extremely hard to legalize abortion in States where it was not legal.
And while there would be *some* people willing to leave their State, to travel to another State, to have an abortion, before Roe v. Wade, there were some willing to travel to other countries to get abortions. Some things just cannot be entirely stopped.
As far as drugs go, between the horrific abuses heaped on the Bill of Rights since alcohol prohibition, continuing and intensifying with the War on Drugs, a LOT of States would probably say, “To heck with it!”
“We no longer care if people wish to harm themselves with drugs. Preventing them from choosing to do so is so vastly *more* harmful to us all, that we can no longer afford to interfere with their self-harm.”
“Thus we will treat drug abuse as a medical, not a legal problem.”
Yet this is also not a federal decision to make. And if people are willing to travel from a State which has decided that drugs should remain illegal, to one where drugs are legal, this again is something we must learn to live with. We cannot all wear chains, to prevent someone from leaping off a cliff.
And likewise prostitution. Thank heavens that for the most part, the federal government has not tried to make prostitution illegal nationally.
But while most States would continue to not permit it, eventually some might get around to allowing it on a limited basis. And that is their prerogative.