Since I'm sure your "jack boots" will get plenty of wear this election year, I found some online when you need to replace (stomping traulls is hard on boots, eh?) ...
Posted on 06/07/2010 11:20:04 AM PDT by bamahead
Voter dissatisfaction with Republicans and Democrats is at historic levels, and the tea-party movement is hoping to play kingmaker in the November elections. The country’s current breed of discontent is ideal for the tea parties, because economic concerns are foremost, allowing the movement to sidestep the divisions between its libertarian and conservative wings.
As the elections near, however, voters will want to know where the party stands not just on the economy but on social issues. A perfect illustration is drug policy, where conservatives advocate continued prohibition but libertarians argue for legalization. Which way should the tea party lean when this issue arises?
If the party is true to its principles — fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets — it must side with the libertarians.
Fiscal responsibility means limiting government expenditures to programs that can be convincingly said to generate benefits in excess of their costs. This does not rule out programs with large expenditures, or ones whose benefits are difficult to quantify; national defense is guilty on both counts, yet few believe that substantial military expenditure is necessarily irresponsible.
Any significant expenditure, however, should come with a credible claim that it produces a benefit large enough to outweigh both the expenditure itself and any ancillary costs. From this perspective, drug prohibition is not remotely consistent with fiscal responsibility. This policy costs the public purse around $70 billion per year, according to my estimates, yet no evidence suggests that prohibition reduces drug use to a significant degree. And prohibition has unintended consequences that push its cost-benefit ratio even farther in the wrong direction. Prohibition generates violence and corruption by pushing drug markets underground and inflating prices. Prohibition inhibits quality control, so users suffer accidental poisoning and overdoses. Prohibition destroys civil liberties, inhibits legitimate medical uses of targeted drugs, and wreaks havoc in drug-producing countries.
Drug prohibition, at least when imposed at the federal level, is also hard to reconcile with constitutionally limited government. The Constitution gives the federal government a few expressly enumerated powers, with all others reserved to the states (or to the people) under the Tenth Amendment. None of the enumerated powers authorizes Congress to outlaw specific products, only to regulate interstate commerce. Thus laws regulating interstate trade in drugs might pass constitutional muster, but outright bans cannot. Indeed, when the United States wanted to outlaw alcohol, it amended the Constitution itself to do so. The country has never adopted such a constitutional authorization for drug prohibition.
Finally, drug prohibition is hopelessly inconsistent with allegiance to free markets, regardless of the level of government. Free markets should mean both that businesses can operate as they please and that individuals can purchase and consume whatever they want, so long as these actions do not harm others, even when such decisions seem unwise. Drug prohibition interferes with precisely these activities.
Thus, if the tea-party believes in its principles, it must choose the libertarian path on drug prohibition.
thank you for supporting immorality
we’ll let those prisoners live in your house and do drugs instead
make you happy?
neither of your posts address the constitutionality or conservative nature of my points
instead you make emotional and irrational appeals
I would also point out that it is not government’s job to enforce morality. Do you want to be subject by law to a morality that you do not agree with?
nor is my recognition of that fact in any way supporting these people’s lifestyle choices. in fact, I don’t support their choices and would prefer to let them kill themselves on their choices instead of taking my tax dollars to try to force them to make other choices
as for having those people in my house to do drugs...sorry, I don’t do drugs and if someone comes in my house uninvited I exercise my right to defend myself
Stipulated.
As this thread proves, these discussions invariably devolve into silly and boring name calling.
How about we throw in the towel in the War on Poverty first?
It has been going on longer, and we may have the fattest poor people in the world, but we have an awful lot more of them than when the war started.
Please note the law was written around the Constitution in the area of controlled dangerous substances, they are not banned, per se, just illegal to posess without authorization: regulated to the point there is a de facto ban.
What we need are people who will respect both the letter and founder's intent in the Constitution, and the rest will be taken care of if they stay adherent to those principles of limited and responsible government.
Cluttering up that goal with individual divisive issues is a liberal wet dream.
if you dont get it, then you are a doper yourself and not worth explaining it
from another thread:
True Liberty is not license. Those who think as you, sir, pervert liberty, and destroy the fundamental principles that allow a culture to thrive economically. This is the error of libertarian philosophy.
What libertarianism proposes is moral relativism under the pretense of “non-interference.” However, in the final measure, the result is that guaranteed outcome of any morally ambiguous system, which denies human nature and the transcendent truths that govern all cause and effect relationships. In practice the imagined utopia of the libertarian is identical in its altruistic deception to that of atheistic communism; and the outcome is predictable: the destruction of the individual and the corporate body of humanity we call society.
Libertarians think they may advance the cause of “social liberalism” simultaneously with “fiscal conservatism;” but this duality of purpose is folly, and works diametrically and insidiously against itself. The social plagues induced by such novel philosophies invariably drain the public treasury, render the distinctions of absolute right and wrong to ambiguity, destroy public confidence in justice, and dissolve private wealth.
Human society does not and cannot exist in a moral vacuum. A society that having no absolute standards of conduct defers all decisions to the individual, exercising little or no restraint on behavior, abdicates the single most legitimate purpose of the state: to increase the common good and uphold the moral order. To quote Edmond Burke:
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
-— Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)
A corrupt society, filled with men of licentious inclinations, cannot maintain its economic stability; or do you suppose the folly of the Roman Republic is worth revisiting in our times? “Give us bread and circuses!”
Economics does not transcend moral absolutes. Economics does not trump the Natural Law. History proves conclusively that no immoral or amoral culture can long prosper, nor survive its growing litany of perversions against the Natural Law; for such a corrupt body becomes its own undoing. Unfettered liberty generates unfettered vice.
Vice is not virtue; even if for a time libertarianism may advance a nation’s economic standing, it remains a foundation of sand because it denies the absolute transcendent truth indelibly stamped on the consciousness of every man by He who created all things. God is not mocked.
As things stand right now, "We" means taxpayers. And of course, with the current welfare state, they wouldn't go hungry or homeless. There'd be no need for "we" (meaning you and me as individuals) to help them.
Sorta like when Clinton said "Depends what the definition if is is." ;)
So instead of spending the money on the WOD, we'd be spending it on increased incidents of child neglect.
I'd have to disagree. Whenever something is made legal, the stigma is reduced, and you have more of it. Abortion is a prime example.
Since I'm sure your "jack boots" will get plenty of wear this election year, I found some online when you need to replace (stomping traulls is hard on boots, eh?) ...
Deb, and the rest,
I’m not a drug user. Never have. Never smoked. Drank alcohol once in my lifetime to celebrate something. Won’t do it again.
I am also a cancer survivor.
Was there pot available for me to help with the nausea? Yes. Did I partake? No.
Now, from my perspective, and believe me, if you haven’t been there, you have no clue what you’re talking about, if there’s a way to help that, and you can bring yourself to do something to help, then you want that available.
A simple take is not “legalization” but to take it out of the fed’s hands. If California wants to have pot houses, so be it. If Nevada wants full heroin bars, that’s their choice. If Utah wants to ban it, that’s their choice. But, NO FEDERAL INVOLVEMENT.
Don't know if you've ever played on a "drug thread". They're really fun and it doesn't take much to get them going crazy.
The level of lawlessness shown by government agents who trample the Bill of Rights under the pretext of fighting the war on drugs, far exceeds that shown by drug users.
The Libertarian Party has failed to craft that message as part of the broader move toward smaller government.
That's because the LP is trying to sell easy, because older libertarians have had to face worse than you guys. Compared to the smearing they used to face, "LIBERALtarian" is pretty mild. Remember when Gore Vidal called Bill Buckley a crypto-Nazi? Older libertarians faced that kind of smear too. They had to become inured to being taunted as "right-wing extremists."
So, when the hippies showed a little sympathy to libertarianism, it's no surprise that the libertarians jumped right in. An issue like drug legalization makes libertarians look permissive - the opposite of the 'authoritarians' they were smeared as.
He has his point. The "war on murder," "war on robbery" and even the "war on rape" did nothing of the kind. The worst offshoot from crackdowns on those crimes was false accusations. I'm not trying to minimize the hurt that false accusations cause, but miscarriages of justice don't warp the system as a whole.
The level of lawlessness shown by BOTH sides is THE CORE of the issue. BOTH sides keep pointing fingers of blame at each other, and using that to rationalize their own misdeeds. It’s like catching two kids fighting, and all you can get out of them is crap like, “Well, he started it,” and “He hit me first,” and “I was playing with that and he grabbed it.”
It’s just one cock-and-bull story after another.
BOTH sides are WRONG.
The government’s too heavy-handed, and the druggies can’t grok that “righteous” in the context of “self-government” has NOTHING to do with playing Black Sabbath records at 78rpm.
THE SOLE DEMAND of LIBERTY is RIGHTEOUS SELF-GOVERNANCE.
Failure (or refusal) to meet that demand results in a loss of liberty.
Look, here’s a breadcrumb to get you pointed right: grab you bible and check out Romans chapter 3. Hunt up the phrase “righteousness apart from the Law.”
I think you’re probably smart enough to go from there. Now, it may boil down to whether or not you want to, and that’s your prerogative, but once you recognize that it’s you making that choice, you also recognize that you own it all; that playing the blame game is OUT.
You might also hunt this one down, as it’s also appropriate to this discussion: Whom The Son sets free is free, indeed.
Now THAT’S liberty!
The danger posed to innocent people by lawless government agents so vastly exceeds the danger posed by pot smokers, that pursuing the latter while the former are allowed to run wild is--at absolute minimum--a gross mis-allocation of resources, equivalent to prosecuting an office-worker for 'stealing' a Post-It to remind himself to buy groceries, while ignoring workers who steal millions of dollars' worth of equipment or merchandise.
There can be no real law and order unless the government and its agents conduct themselves lawfully, and are held to a standard at least as high as the population at large. In the vast majority of human endeavors, people will adapt their behavior depending upon what is required. It's human nature. If it becomes well-known that government agents will be allowed to act lawlessly, many will begin to do so.
Someone who favors law and order should regard a cop who breaks into someone's dwelling in a fashion inconsistent with the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments (the Sixth clarifying 'due process of law') as a burglar if he doesn't accost any occupants, or as a robber if he does. Titles of nobility are forbidden under the Constitution, and a person's legitimate duties can by definition not include illegitimate actions.
That is a problem associated with socialism, not a problem associated with liberty.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.