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.
Since you strive for the “sublime”, I assume that is a personal journey, or are you willing to use the power of the gun to “aid” others in their perfection?
Re Post 35, the problem again is TOO MUCH GOVT, not too few laws.
People need to be left alone to live or die by their own devices. It is the natural state, and CANNOT be regulated away, any more than you can legislate away the laws of capitalism. People will trade their labor for a reward, people will die, it is up to us to get out of their way. It is also up to us to put the dying day off for as long as possible, to collect as much loot as we can, and to give to those who need DEPENDING ON OUR CONSCIENCE....not govts.
I don’tuse drugs, I’m not responsible.
The lack of responsibility from drug users is pretty obvious from their stupidity.
Which has priority in construing and applying the Constitution? The text of the Constitution as ratified? The record of the debates in Congress and before the public in the Federalist Papers and other published contemporaneous writings? The private letters and comments of drafters and participants? Law commentaries in the first generation after the Constitution was ratified?
Much mischief can be done when priorities and sources are scrambled and the text is not accorded the greatest weight. Consider the First Amendment, which not only forbids laws respecting an establishment of religion, but also forbids laws impeding the free exercise of religion. In the text of the First Amendment, the two are in balance. In practice though, modern federal courts have embraced as dogma that there must be a "wall of separation" between church and state.
One searches in vain though for the now totemic phrase "wall of separation" in the First Amendment, in the debates that preceded its adoption, and in other public writings of the era as to what the First Amendment meant. The phrase "wall of separation" appears though in a private letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists in 1802.
Modern Supreme Court jurisprudence emphasizes the "wall of separation" to the point that the free exercise of religion is ignored. Can public school children be released for optional religion classes on school grounds as provided by the denomination of their parents' choice?
That sounds like the free exercise of religion to me, but not to the Supreme Court, which regards release time as contrary to the "wall of separation" between church and state. Jefferson's metaphor has effectively consumed half of what the First Amendment expressly provides as to religion.
The problem with the commerce clause is that the provision is clear in concept but not in application. In Gibbons v. Ogden in 1824, the US Supreme Court embraced an expansive view of the commerce clause:
If, as has always been understood, the sovereignty of Congress, though limited to specified objects, is plenary as to those objects, the power over commerce with foreign nations and among the several states is vested in Congress as absolutely as it would be in a single government, having in its constitution the same restrictions on the exercise of the power as are found in the Constitution of the United States.
Thus an expansive view of the commerce clause appears in the early years of the Republic in a generation far closer than we are to the framing and adoption of the Constitution. Did the Supreme Court get the commerce clause right in 1824 in interpreting it in an expansive manner? I am hard put to think that we today know better.
There's way too much chasm between the writings of Madisn and Story and the concrete reality of what the New Deal Commerce Clause has produced for me to buy that this is just quibbling over some interpretive details.
If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck it's a duck, and this duck has a name - usurpation. Sophistry isn't going to pretty it up any.
Like I said, people still use booze and there is no war on alcohol. Why is that? If it was the user that was responsible for a war created on a substance, we’d have that war hanging around.
Not to mention, if users are responsible for the drug war why did it take 30-50 years for a drug war to happen when the substances were banned yet there were still users of the subtances?
All I need to know is that by avaiable historical documentation on the original intent of the Commerce CLause what we've got now is dead-nuts wrong.
Your explanations, excuses, and desire to have a commerce clause that's just elastic enough to get you what you want without having to do a lot of work for it aren't doing a damn thing to fix it, so I'm not particularly interested in them.
Excuse me if that sounds harsh, but the current situation in Washington has proven that there cannot be any mushy middle ground. If you give them any leeway at all they will take everything.
As far as I'm concerned, if you want the federal government to have the authority to prohibit personal growing and posession of marijuana, then you need to get yourself an amendment. You can get in line behind the people that want the federal government control health care.
Obamacare may fail due to the limitation on the commerce clause stated in Gonzales v. Lopez.
Yeah, well you end all the government programs that are related to drug use before you legalize the drugs. Otherwise you are just trading one government bureaucracy for another. We already have drug court in the county where I live, which means that users get rehab and dealers get short sentences. Recently, two big heroin dealers got two years and time off for rehab. Every time a druggie goes to court for a crime that is related to drugs, they get off with light sentences and rehab. A druggie who went on a killing spree, through two counties and killed a police officer, went to the state hospital, even though the doctors at the hospital say that he does not fit the the definition of legally insane. You end all the restorative justice toward druggies and then come back and ask to legalize drugs.
I read everything I could find that was either from the Founders or someone in a postition the have talked to them personally and speak authitatively on the subject. I compared that to what the end result of what 220 years of federal commerce clause jurisprudence has wrought and I find them to be substantially in disagreement.
I made a conscious effort to disregard and pre-conceived notions about what terms like "commerce" or "regulate" mean today, and measured as nearly as I could our current laws against what those terms meant in common usage then.
The Constitution was not written to be the exclusive domain of lawyers. I don't need you to "fill in the blanks", for me. If you can provide objective, documentary evidence that anything I have posted is in error, please do so. I'll gladly correct anything that is not accurate.
Well Eva if you look at this thread you’ll see that its quite clear that drug users don’t accept responsibility for anything ever.
If we legalize drugs I guarantee we’ll see users suing suppliers for acts committed while under the influence of their drugs. (Kinda like smokers suing tobacco companies)
Personally I don’t have major issues with legalizing marijuana but I don’t have any Utopian fantasies about empty prisons and happy productive users. In fact we’ll end up with a whole laundry list of new laws that will continue to grow.
Funny you mention the drug court. We have a first offender program for drunk drivers. I was put into it my second time getting arrested for drunk driving. (I’ve since grown up and don’t drink) I grew up with a guy who has been on the first offender program 8 different times.
Did you read the Supreme Court’s commerce clause case law? Or scholarly commentary on the subject?
I’ve read Joseph Story’s writings, and early case law. Story’s writings on the subject seem compelling, and I think they’d easily qualify as “scholarly commentary”. Mr. Story himself appears to me to be arguably more qualified to speak authitatively on the subject than any modern scholar.
If you have a continuing interest in the subject, I recommend that you take a look at the development of the Supreme Court's commerce clause case law from the Civil War onwards. You need not agree with the results, but you would benefit from an understanding of how this area of law developed.
The Government Printing Office has an online edition of their annotated guide to the Constitution, which you may find at the following link: GPO Annotated Constitution
If I were to take the full “definition” from the Wikipedia page(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiation_of_force), the statement would still not be accurate. This is because it essentially includes any and all acts of wrongdoing, physical or otherwise, against another person, but does not include those harmed indirectly by your actions. Again, please tell me how the family torn apart by a sex cripple’s use of a prostitute has some force initiated upon them. Sure, if you expand the definition to essentially reverse-engineer it based on the outcome, then it becomes a tautology (i.e. Person A was harmed by Action B, thus Action B constitutes initiation of force). The problem here then becomes that almost everything can be construed as initiation of force.
The free use of drugs is not without consequence as many libertarians (and apparently you) believe. Step one, in this case, is the engineering of the term “initiation of force” in such a way that it supports your ultimate goal. Step two is then rationalizing your actions. Marijuana, possibly the least harmful of the illicit drugs, has marked negative health effects. This costs otherwise healthy people financially in the form of increased health care costs. Does this constitute initiation of force? In what way is it different from regular tobacco smokers? In either case, why must I subsidize the habit, directly or indirectly, of a person incapable of dealing with reality?
This discussion is not about freedom or liberty. It’s ultimately about the legalization crowd’s petulant need to have their vice legalized - a vice that is used and abused by people already suffering from some sort of social disorder. If you need to escape, instead of fixing the symptoms you should fix the cause. That’s my opinion. That said, the reason drugs are so abused is because the kinds of people that abuse are precisely the kinds of people mentally inclined to abuse them. It’s essentially self-perpetuating. While anything can be addictive depending on the person, it’s not as if it’s the minority of drug users who suffer social or health consequences from the use of drugs. It’s the majority.
In general, I have become more or less agnostic about the issue of legalization. Were it to be legal, those who wish to use drugs should simply have to accept responsibility for their actions. Much like bad drivers eventually lose their licenses, those who abuse drugs and lose their jobs are entitled to no help whatsoever from productive members of society. Those who endanger their children in any way from the use or abuse of drugs must bear the consequences of that decision.
This discussion to me has never been about liberty or freedom, but rather about the collective need of many libertarians to pretend their vices do not affect others. They do.
Drunk drivers are not treated as easily here, as the druggies, and we have a terrible drug problem in this rural county, and it is metastasizing. A few years ago, it was meth, now I believe that its mostly oxy and heroin. The school administrations are in denial. The meth users were easy to identify by the meth mouth (medicaid doesn’t cover meth mouth), it was a dead give away. For a while there, the some of the people were beginning to look like they came off the set of deliverance, but now you don’t see that so much.
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