Posted on 04/04/2010 6:51:11 AM PDT by rabscuttle385
An article by a conservative named Cliff Kincaid, who serves as editor of the Accuracy in Media (AIM) Report, provides a perfect example of how different libertarians are from conservatives and, well, for that matter, how there ain't a dime's worth of difference, when it comes to individual freedom, between conservatives and liberals.
The article concerns the drug war and is entitled, "Dopey Conservatives for Dope." Ardently defending the continuation of the drug war, despite some 35 years of manifest failure, Kincaid takes fellow conservatives to task who are finally joining libertarians in calling for an end to the drug war. He specifically mentions columnist Steve Chapman, whose article "In the Drug War, Drugs are Winning," which was posted on the website of the conservative website Townhall.com, was apparently what set Kincaid off.
Chapman made the point that it is the illegality of drugs that has produced the drug gangs and cartels, along with all the violence that has come with them. The reason that such gangs and cartels fear legalization is that they know that legalization would put them out of business immediately.
Consider alcohol. Today, there are thousands of liquor suppliers selling alcohol to consumers notwithstanding the fact that liquor might be considered harmful to people. They have aggressive advertising and marketing campaigns and are doing their best to maximize profits by providing a product that consumers wish to buy. Their competitive efforts to expand market share are entirely peaceful.
Now, suppose liquor production or distribution was made a federal felony offense, just like drug production or distribution. At that point, all the established liquor businesses would go out of business.
However, prohibition wouldn't mean that liquor would cease being produced or distributed. It would simply mean that a new type of supplier would immediately enter the black (i.e., illegal) market to fill the void. Those suppliers would be similar in nature to the current suppliers in the drug business or, say, Al Capone -- that is, unsavory people who have no reservations about resorting to violence, such as murdering competitors and killing law-enforcement officers, to expand market share.
At that point, the only way to put these Al Capone-type of people out of business would be by legalizing booze. Once prohibition of alcohol was ended, the violent liquor gangs would immediately go out of business and legitimate businesses would return to the liquor market. The same holds true for drug prohibition.
The big objection to the drug war, however, is not its manifest failure and destructiveness but rather its fundamental assault on individual freedom. If a person isn't free to ingest any substance he wants, then how can he possibly be considered free?
Yet, for decades Kincaid and most other conservatives and most liberals have taken the audacious position that the state should wield the power to punish a person for doing bad things to himself. In fact, the drug war reflects perfectly the nanny-state mindset that has long afflicted both conservatives and liberals. They feel that the state should be a nanny for American adults, treating them like little children, sending them to their jail cell when they put bad things in their mouths.
Kincaid justifies his statism by saying that drugs are bad for people. Even if that's true -- and people should be free to decide that for themselves, as they do with liquor -- so what? Why should that be any business of the state? If I wish to do bad things to myself, why should the likes of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, George W. Bush, and John McCain wield the power to put me into jail for that?
Quite simply, Kincaid: It ain't any of your business or anyone else's business what I ingest, whether it's booze, drugs, candy, or anything else. I am not a drone in your collective bee hive. I am an individual with the natural, God-given right to live my life any way I choose, so long as my conduct doesn't involve the initiation of force against others.
For decades, conservatives and liberals have been using the drug war as an excuse to assault freedom, free enterprise, privacy, private property, civil liberties, and the Constitution. They have brought nothing but death, violence, destruction, and misery with their 35-year old failed war on drugs. There would be no better place to start dismantling the statism that afflicts our land than by ending the drug war.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Great find... And still so appropriate!
Do you have any idea about the other questions (plural) that I asked RE: Congress?
Can ANYBODY out there give me their take on the 4 questions that I asked in post #139 in this thread?
It seems to me the question is not whether you or I should care about what a third party puts into his body, that is afterall a moral judgment, rather, the question is whether the government should care about what someone puts into his body?
Clearly the government has a constitutional right to regulate and criminalize drugs just as it has the right to regulate food and ethical drugs. The question is not whether it's constitutional but whether it is good public policy.
Seems to me that if a government prohibition on the use of drugs actually eliminated drug use, few except perhaps some aging hippies and top models would argue vehemently against such laws which would redeem so many wretched lives. But experience has shown that government fiat does not eliminate drug use. So the real question is, does government prohibition reduce drug use? And if it does, is the price worth paying? It is not entirely clear that the laws against drug use actually reduce their use because the prohibition itself creates a financial incentive which works to subsidize its use. The government has never found a way to eliminate or reduce drug usage without inserting a profit factor. Worse, the more the government is effective in reducing the inflow of illegal drugs, the more it creates a counter incentive of increased profitability by the law of supply and demand. Perversely, since the drugs tend to be addictive there is a physical compulsion to seek more of the drug and, since government efforts to eliminate it inevitably raise its price, users who are in withdrawal are tempted to finance their habits by becoming dealers. So it is not clear whether the government's efforts to reduce drugs by prohibiting their use actually does more harm than good.
One of the prices we pay for our government's campaign against drugs is certainly a loss of liberty. I tend towards the Libertarian's view that it is none of the government's damn business what I put in my body. However, I recognize that such usage inevitably presents a risk to society. I do not want inebriated drivers plowing into my automobile whether they are drunk on alcohol or drugs. But society has learned a hard lesson, that it is better to make the drunk driving the crime but not the consumption of alcohol itself.
Another price we pay is a loss of privacy. Mandatory testing of both government and private employees is to some degree intrusive. Queries about drug use and application forms are equally intrusive. Undercover agents operating in public bathrooms is an affront to our dignity. Eavesdropping of telephone conversations is unquestionably an invasion of privacy. It is the reduction, or rather the presumed reduction, if any, in the amount of drug usage obtained by these intrusions worth the price?
We pay a great financial price as well. The war on drugs costs us billions of dollars annually in enforcement and incarceration costs. Is this money well spent?
There is an insidious price as well: corruption and its handmaiden, cynicism. Our police, our border agents, our judges, one might say the entire criminal justice apparatus has been infected with a corruption generated by the huge profits to be made-profits which are there only because the government by its policies has created them. Inevitably cynicism results in the whole of the people beginning to despise rather than revere the rule of law.
Because drugs are illegal, the price is high and profits are enormous. Yet we send our boys to fight in Afghanistan to deprive Taliban chieftains of their poppy fields which finance at least indirectly the very terrorism we fight against. Would it not be better simply to eliminate the profits in poppies by legalizing the drug? Is the damage to our foreign policy, like the damage to our precious rule of law, worth what benefit we get from criminalizing drugs use?
On balance, I have to throw my lot in with William F. Buckley and say that the war against drugs is lost and we ought to try a new tact.
Again, this has almost nothing to do with what I said. I wasn’t even commenting on the majority of what was written in this piece. I’m saying that the use of the statement in question is ultimately detrimental to his overall argument because it is demonstrably false.
I don’t believe, personally, that if some drugs were legalised, that anyone not currently using them, would turn to a life of drugs, prostitution and general lowness. I think all it would really do, is keep those same people from getting arrested.
I disagree.
“For instance, George Soros is a big supporter and funder of the drug legalization push on both sides of the aisle and we need to be asking why.”
I don’t know. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Maybe he thinks that it would destroy America. Maybe he’s wrong about that. It didn’t destroy the country when it was legal before.
” I do know a crack addict who was locked up for smoking crack while pregnant. She says its a victimless crime.”
If abortion is legal, legally, she’s right. If we can succeed in extending rights to the unborn, she will be wrong.
If people commit crimes while under the influence, they’re still crimes, no matter the legal status of the intoxicants. People who commit crimes while drunk get no special favors, in fact, if the crime concerns use of a motor vehicle while drink, the penalties are even more severe.
I know it’s just speculation now...after all, the November elections are still a long ways off. I’m just interested about which way the political winds are blowing.
The problem with libertarians being they have never found a vice that they cannot advocate.
Thank God most commenters here understand the difference between rationalizing immediate self gratification and freedom. Whether the "drug" is alcohol or crack or meth the consequence of blatant irresponsibility, crime, and devastation to others, accrues regardless of the legality. The "drug war" is simply admission of this criminal tragedy, and is an attempt, no matter how inept, at addressing it.
Drugs are a problem, a big problem. While the rationalizing self indulgent may try to "argue" their own desire for legalization, the more mature (responsible) among us know there is a dire need for attenuation, which needs to be addressed through multiple psychologies, certainly one of which is legal penalty.
Again there is no better example of the juvenile rationalization of libertarianism than this article.
Johnny Suntrade
Start listing!
Initiating force is not the same as initiating violence, btw.
What are some of those hundreds of offenses that one can make that do not step on others but directly negatively impact society?
You don't want to offend the Paultards?
Your choice.
But I hold YOU and anyone else who won't disavow the crackpot in question responsible for his position on the military. Neither he nor you get a pass from me.
Thread with Photo postings of Ron Paul's allegations made in his newsletter back in 1993
I remember when he put this crap out. He was on several of the news shows running his diarrhea mouth on the issue. Though that era was before every move a politician makes was preserved on YouTube, his newsletter still remains, and anyone who supports him is saddled supporting his position.
I don’t think that the regulation of marijuana is covered in the constitution, actually, I don’t see that drug trafficking should really be a federal offense, unless it crosses state lines or involves international borders. It should be a state issue.
Money and income...
If I had to guess, including the cops, I’d bet there are upwards of 4 million people making a good living in one form or another, off drugs being illegal.
The increased mental illness and the permanent damage to your body from drugs can be enormous, too. One guy that I knew spent his whole adult life, in and out of mental institutions and died in his fifties from heart disease that the doctors attributed to his drug abuse.
Were you talking about drugs or alcohol? This sounds exactly like the problems found with alcoholics.
Yet we aren’t banning that...
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