Conservatives are fond of preaching the importance ...

The Future of Freedom Foundation ^ | September 27, 2001 | Jacob G. Hornberger

[gargoyle]

...Sounds like it's you, rather than libertarians that need to find some self-control...

[BluesDuke]

Question for Libertarians: With respect to drug legalization, do you still feel that good intentions don't matter and that advocates of the legalization of all drugs should take responsibility for its destructive consequences, or do you now feel that only the drug addict's mother, wife, husband, children, neighbors, and society at large are responsible for the drug addict's self destruction, wasted life, and burden upon the nation?

An answer, if I may: This libertarian believes an individual is solely responsible for his or her actions and the consequences thereof, and that society is under no obligation to facilitate or mitigate any consequences. (And don't even think about expecting the taxpayers to pick up the tab for your rehab, either, if it gets that far.) This libertarian believes there is a distinction between vice (what you do with or to yourself only) and crime (what you do with or to another sovereign individual, regardless of what you have or have not consumed prior to committing that act).

This libertarian believes you can do whatever the hell you want whenever the hell you want to in the privacy of your own home and on your own property, so long as a) no one but you is affected by what you do, b) you do not force someone else to join in with you, and c) you commit no crime against someone else in order to facilitate whatever vice it is that animates you, for whatever reason. I don't have to like or approve of whatever it is in order to respect your absolute right to indulge it in your own home. A fellow citizen's vices are no legitimate business of mine unless or until he or she tries to force me to join in the fun; a fellow citizen's vices are no legitimate business of society until or unless he or she a) insists, by the relevant actions, that society must contend with said indulgence in the public square, or b) commits a crime or crimes to facilitate said indulgence.

Society, in other words, has no damned business poking its nose into your home, or onto your property, unless there is legitimate, not politically trumped up, evidence that you are harming another sovereign person explicitly, and without the proper exercise of the law based upon the prescriptions of the still-intact, still-unrepealed Fourth*, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments - and none of this jazz about snatching every damn last thing you own before you have been found properly guilty of a properly-defined crime, either. (For that matter, away with this crap about pouncing on sovereign citizens who are "fool" enough to be carrying more than a certain limited amount of cash on their persons and proclaiming that they "must" be involved in some criminal activity if they're carrying that much cash.)

This libertarian believes that if you do commit a crime on behalf of whatever vice it is that animates you, then does society have every last right to prosecute and punish you, swiftly and surely, for the actual crime you committed - and when you commit a crime, it doesn't matter a damn whether you had consumed pot, cocaine, Hostess Twinkies or McDonald's hamburgers or whatever the hell it was you consumed before you committed that crime.

And, in closing and with apologies for consuming too much space, this libertarian would like to remind you and anyone else who cares to understand that though it may be so that many if not most actual druggies support an end to the War on Drugs, it does not follow that many if not most of those who support an end to the War on Drugs are actually druggies. (for those who are interested in purple cows, it might be useful enough to recall that the actual seed of the War on Drugs was planted by a liberal government - the Harrison Act of 1914 was signed off by Woodrow [Make The World Safe For World War II] Wilson; and, more to the point, that its first and most draconian escalation was prompted by liberal Republican President named Richard Nixon. And anyone who thinks Nixon wasn't a liberal should read the record once again. Thoroughly.)

(* - May we remember, please, that "probable cause" does not equal some assoholic Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy deciding someone living on a rich and sumptuously-grounded estate simply must be growing marijuana somewhere on those grounds or otherwise involved in drug activity, thus giving himself "probable cause" to stage a rather nasty and unannounced SWAT raid in which the homeowner was killed because the homeowner, thinking his home was being burglarised, cocked and fired his own weapon to defend his home and his wife against the would-be burglars. And what was the actual motive behind this disgrace? This man's estate, with its sumptuous grounds, sat surrounded by some federal parkland the official stewards of which had coveted that estate's grounds for the home, and previous inquiries as to whether the man might consider selling his home had been met with refusals, it being so that the man, understandably enough, loved his home and those grounds on which it sat. You can look it up: it really did happen, in the 1990s. The man's name was Donald Scott and he was wealthy in his own right in addition to being the heir to a European cosmetics fortune the name of which escapes me. Oh, yes, I almost forgot: No marijuana plant was ever found on his grounds or in his home. His story is told chillingly enough in Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, a book which should be required reading for anyone still deluding themselves about the innate goodness of the State and the innate evil of the individual.)

[tpaine]

Good catch. His remarks are nonsense, fer sure:

Conservatives believe that societal influences can corrupt people. We also believe that risk is a variable to crime. That is why we oppose porn, drugs and drunk driving. - #10 - appy pappy -

Risk is a variable?
= 'A chance taken [risk] is a changable [variable] to crime.' - ? -

Nope. - Still don't make no sense to me.

[BluesDuke]

Another point to ponder, if I may: Is it not possible that, if the United States had preserved a properly construed government (whose first priority is to protecting the lives, liberty and property of her citizens against both properly-defined criminals at home and attack from abroad), rather than an improperly consecrated State (whose first priority is plundering, pillaging and looting her citizens on behalf of programs, plans, and schemes which lack either legitimacy or Constitutional buttress), we would never have been vulnerable to such an atrocity as was committed against us 11 September in the first place? That if we had never allowed our properly-construed, limited government to become an improperly construed and unlimited State - and thus to permit the proper and adequate defence of the United States against any real or prospective external threat to either fan out into meddling in the business of other nations or deteriorate at home in favour of the aforesaid illegitimate and unconstitutional schemes - no one could ever have even contemplated, never mind executed, such an atrocity with such deadly consequences?

[Richard Axtell]

All your points are thoughtful and well considered, but unfortunately, beside the point. My point, my main point and my only point, has been that to pretend that drug abuse in itself, regardless of legality, even at the level that it exists today, not withstanding the potential for more widespread use of an even more debilitating spectrum of drugs in the future, is not a threat to the nation and its citizens is worse than a flight from reality; it is a failure to uphold the number one constitutional responsibility our government has, ... the protection of the people of this country, from all enemies... foreign and domestic.

Is there any doubt that we are now under multi-lateral assault from well financed terrorists that are such a threat that we now must declare war on them? And that these terrorists include the FARC narco-terrorists of Columbia? They have connections with Castro, the IRA, and Ozama Bin Laden, and we have been funding their takeover of both Columbia and Venezuela with US drug proceeds. Even if the fantasy world of Libertarianism could dawn tomorrow, wouldn't the fact remain that the real, long term, and most devastating damage done to our country is not a matter of legality, but of the physical "drugging" of our future? Argue for or against this point, and we can have a real debate.

[gargoyle]

...be prepared to accept the consequences of your actions. Uhhhhh, OK!

...What a novel idea!

...Sounds like something libertarians espouse...

[tpaine]

My point, my main point and my only point, has been that to pretend that drug abuse in itself, regardless of legality, even at the level that it exists today, not withstanding the potential for more widespread use of an even more debilitating spectrum of drugs in the future, is not a threat to the nation and its citizens is worse than a flight from reality; it is a failure to uphold the number one constitutional responsibility our government has, ... the protection of the people of this country, from all enemies... foreign and domestic.

------------------------------------

No reasonable person on FR is arguing your point that drug abuse is a terrible problem.

You are not able to face the reality that the use of a WODs, - OR, a war on terrorism, - to infringe upon the basics of our constitution, in the name of 'protection' subverts the very idea of our free republic.

We all know that some personal liberties have to be a temporary casualty of war. -- But, as per '1984', a perpetual 'war', is just tyranny, by another name.

[gargoyle]

...I voted for one...once."hehehe"

...we all make mistakes-(ONCE)LOL"hehehe"

... What logic! What reason! What a debate!

...What kind of banal, mediocre, infantile bullsh*t is this called?

...How about "in private?"

[BluesDuke]

All your points are thoughtful and well considered, but unfortunately, beside the point. My point, my main point and my only point, has been that to pretend that drug abuse in itself, regardless of legality, even at the level that it exists today, not withstanding the potential for more widespread use of an even more debilitating spectrum of drugs in the future, is not a threat to the nation and its citizens is worse than a flight from reality; it is a failure to uphold the number one constitutional responsibility our government has, ... the protection of the people of this country, from all enemies... foreign and domestic.

Drug abuse becomes a threat to our citizens only if and when the drug abuser deems fit to commit a properly defined crime, or round of crimes, on its behalf. Then - and only then - do we have the proper duty to prosecute and punish said drug abuser, and on the grounds I enunciated above: what you consumed before you commit a crime is irrelevant; otherwise (and I say this cautiously, not wishing to give anyone else any other bright ideas) we would be waging wars on chocolate cake because someone on a sugar rush decided to beat the living crap out of someone else for no good reason. Our proper domestic enemy is a properly-defined criminal. One who merely indulges a vice, however distasteful or disgraceful said vice might be to you or to me, is a threat to none but his or her own self; should he or she harm or destroy a fellow sovereign or said fellow's property in the indulgence of said vice, that is something entirely different, and something against which we have every last right to act accordingly.

Is there any doubt that we are now under multi-lateral assault from well financed terrorists that are such a threat that we now must declare war on them?

We are and have been under such threat for a very long time, irrespective of the drug issue. That is part of what I was trying to say when I posited above that, had we not permitted our properly-construed government to become an improperly consecrated State - that is, a State which acts beyond its legitimate and constitutional bounds, while neglecting its legitimate and constitutional bounds - such a threat would be inconsequential to us, because we would otherwise have provided and sustained the proper enough defence of the nation and her citizens' lives, liberty and property that few if any would even contemplate such attacks upon us. And we must draw very carefully that line which distinguishes between declaring war upon real enemies and declaring war upon our own citizens, a line which has not been drawn so carefully in the recent enough past. Not coincidentally, our systematic destruction of our fellow citizens' rights to defend themselves against all manner of predators probably has more than a little something with leaving us prone in general to such terrorism - when the target can strike back promptly enough, the terrorist has a few less weapons to deploy effectively. (Which reminds me: the pilots' union has a point when they press now for flight crews to be allowed to carry a weapon on their flights. Any bets on how successful the WTC bombings might have been if the stewardesses could have whipped out pistols and told those hijackers don't even think about it? And what the hell would have been the matter, at the nation's airports, with the local police departments dispatching contingencies to handle airport security, that is something which would come into the legitimate purview of proper police work and training? I mean, that is one of the reasons why we have police, right? Not to mention letting the airlines themselves take responsibility for their own security - you're not going to be terribly lax in that department when you're responsible for securing your own property.)

And that these terrorists include the FARC narco-terrorists of Columbia? They have connections with Castro, the IRA, and Ozama Bin Laden, and we have been funding their takeover of both Columbia and Venezuela with US drug proceeds.

Had there not even been such a thing as the War on Drugs, I should think that not a dime worth of "drug proceeds" would get into their hands. The nature of their beasts is that their market is the so-called underground market. Remove the underground market and they have no market and, thus, no profit of the sort which makes their activities possible. Castro, the IRA, and bin Laden are sure as hell not getting their financing by manufacturing lines of small appliances, or automobiles, or liquors, or cigarettes, or computer chips.

Even if the fantasy world of Libertarianism could dawn tomorrow, wouldn't the fact remain that the real, long term, and most devastating damage done to our country is not a matter of legality, but of the physical "drugging" of our future? Argue for or against this point, and we can have a real debate.

This would seem to assume that, upon the end of the War on Drugs as prosecuted now and the concurrent legalisation of drugs, the majority of us would rush forth to blow tootski post haste. I don't believe that would happen. In fact, I don't believe there is much more than a comparative and profound minority among us which abuses drugs with any great regularity. They were not illegal, by the way, until the Harrison Act of 1914 began the ball rolling, mostly, and if you don't count the occasional hiccup of embryonic big government from Washington on isolated occasions to that point, no one exactly thought the nation was going to hell in a handbasket because of whatever stimulants a comparative few were or were not indulging.

This country has been damaged by far worse devastations than the comparative minority of our fellow citizens who, for whatever reasons, choose to abuse drugs. You and I would most certainly retain the right to speak against abusing drugs; indeed, we should be fools if we did not so speak. (I don't believe, by the way, that marijuana use is of itself dangerous. Just because many if not most harder drug abusers began with marijuana, it does not follow that all those who smoke marijuana will graduate to the harder stuff.) The government's proper business is not to tell us how to behave, but to protect us against real predators; for telling us how to behave, that is why we have such things as the church or the synagogue, and various and sundry extracts of social power (in the proper sense of that badly abused phrase), it being so that social power is always preferable to (and should be deemed superior to) State power because the former offers considerably less room for abuse than the latter.

But aside from that, one who makes such a choice has, really, no bother upon us, other than our distaste for what he does (you and I probably dislike a good many things - let us say you and I both despise hip-hop music, shall we have hip hop fans rounded up and arrested post haste merely because we might deem hip-hip an aberrant deconstruction of the musical art and thus detrimental to our society's cultural advance?), until he plans and/or executes a properly defined crime against a fellow sovereign citizen, at which point we are most certainly entitled - indeed, mandated - to prosecute and punish his crime.

And we should certainly speak loud and long when the government, which is supposed to protect us against true criminals, engages (as it does, liberally enough) in the misuse and abuse of our fellow citizens' rights on behalf of prosecuting a drug war; indeed, on behalf of prosecuting a goodly number of "crimes" which were not in fact crimes but, rather, politically incorrect activities. (Cases in point: Hunting down financiers whose explosive success provokes enough people to assume one could not possibly have attained such rapid and visible success unless one had committed crimes to do it, that the government felt compelled to trump up a charge that all but amounted to illegal and unconstitutional ex post facto law; case in point - Michael Milken. Or, hunting down software stars whose mousetraps became so popular that the cats ganged up on them demanding tribute, and went whining to the State to do it for them, thus sending the economy overboard and promising only to throw a less heavy anchor this time: see Microsoft.)

We'll never get it absolutely perfect. (Sidebar: Properly defined libertarian sociopolitical philosophy acknowledges the impossibility of imperfect man creating the perfect temporal society, and that it is the far better part of valour to prosecute men and women for what they do or are truly planning to do, rather than what we think they are going to do.) You know that without my even having to say so. But we can sure as hell do it a lot better, and with a lot less abuse of power and distortion of the rule of law, than is done now.

We have been "drugged" by a far worse narcotic than drug abuse; namely: the narcotic that the State is the be-all and end-all of our temporal life, that there is no earthly problem that can be resolved among individuals except by the solvent of State power which inevitably must plunder other citizens to make the attempt. That narcotic has done far greater damage to the American experience than any pot smoker or coke blower has done, which is not to say that I would prefer living in a society jammed with pot smokers or coke blowers.

[gargoyle]

...Paragraph One and two; If you will show statistics, or a link, to them? In your third paragraph, "victims of their own stupidity". Does that depend on the meaning of what own, owns? THIS PROBLEM ALREADY EXISTS! I understand you think it could be worse, because of historical data. I'll give you that for lack of statistics, for now. The police are hired to enforce the law, not to maintain law and order. It's called Law Enforcement. Only in specific instances are the police called to maintain the law and order when civil disobedience may occur. Individuals that are vigilant, call the police if they believe the law is being broken. Once again, if the police show up in time, they can maintain law and order.

[Texaggie79]

So why is it immoral to blame US foreign policy for terrorist attacks, but OK to blame US immigration policy?

It's not. But you blame it for the wrong things.

For instance, there is absolutely nothing wrong with us supporting Israel. They are the lone democracy in the region, and they are one of our few allies. What would be correct to blame our foreign policy would be for allowing Saddam to live. His @$$ should have died 6 years ago. That was and is a mistake. But NEVER should we turn a blind eye to all other regions of the world.

You say we should be more like Switzerland, well tell me where the hell the Swiz would be if we had never raised a finger for WWII? The Swiss are wussies.

[Richard Axtell]

Your detailed and thorough reply again was thoughtful, and interesting, but In my opinion, just more knocking down of the same straw men I long ago conceded. Sadly, you also proved my point; that to adhere to a strict Libertarian line, you must ignore the realities of how drug abuse effects a society. You will not anytime soon meet an more strident foe of a Government overreaching beyond its constitutional mandates than myself, yet the same straw man reappears with "We have been "drugged" by a far worse narcotic than drug abuse; namely: the narcotic that the State is the be-all and end-all of our temporal life.." You insist on diminishing the very real and corrosive effect drugs have on the members of our society, to uphold your point about the dangers of government interference in the life and with the rights of the individual. And you leave it at that. As long as it doesn't adversely effect you life, why worry about it?

I think this illustrates the impasse; the point of fundamental difference between social Conservatives and Libertarians. The way I see it, it is the constitutional duty of government to protect the nation. That means the people who live in it, the members of our society. If those members are being destroyed, then the society and the nation are being attacked. If drug abuse destroys a individual's life; his health, family, and his mind.. then it is destroying the society that he is a part of, one life at a time. All my adult life, I have heard excuses, dissembling, rationalizations,... any reason not to face this fact, from friends and acquaintances. But the damage done by the physically and psychologically debilitating effects of drug abuse is more pervasive and pernicious than ever.

Based on the replies I've received, Libertarians seem to offer no alternative to the prohibition and war against drugs and drug abuse, other than to deny that there is a serious problem. This is likely the basic reason that the Libertarian Party has never had much of an influence in American politics, despite protestations about the entrenched 2 or 1 party system we live with today. And as long as it offers no solution to this attack on the members of our society, I don't see how it ever will.

[BluesDuke]

You will not anytime soon meet an more strident foe of a Government overreaching beyond its constitutional mandates than myself, yet the same straw man reappears with "We have been "drugged" by a far worse narcotic than drug abuse; namely: the narcotic that the State is the be-all and end-all of our temporal life.."

A truth however embittering or discomfiting is hardly a straw man. Can you look truthfully at the cumulative run of American life in the past, say, 75 years (the seeds were planted well enough prior to that line of demarcation), and claim other than that a predominant number of American citizens (this is not and has not been, for a very long time, limited strictly or exclusively to those we would deem liberals; for better or worse, there have been and remain those on the right, as well, who can and will call upon the State to chase their particular devils) and, in sad enough truth, American enterprises - encouraged and abetted by politics and by other influences, many of which ought to have known better, trodding a concurrent path - have turned more and more to the State as a kind of court of first resort; that they came and have come more and more to see the State, and not the proper realm of social power, as the first step in resolving the things which can and ought to be resolved by social power; and, that they make this approach regardless of the point that the Constitution may well enjoin the State against any legitimate role therein?

Among numerous bitter lessons we have learned over that timeframe, I should think one of those is that the narcotic of State power is one from which withdrawal is often enough arduous and debilitating in its own right - isn't that what they tell us when, every time we bespeak the desirability of putting the State out of business and restoring in its place properly construed and extremely limited government, we are told that it simply cannot be done that fast without causing so much upheaval around the land?

You insist on diminishing the very real and corrosive effect drugs have on the members of our society to uphold your point about the dangers of government interference in the life and with the rights of the individual. And you leave it at that.

I insist on nothing of the sort; I leave it at nothing of the sort. Asked for the absolute ideal, I should certainly prefer living in a society which knew nothing of drug abuse. But I reject the proposition that the State has either a properly construed mission or a properly construed right to engage in the sort of thing which is left best and most properly to social power. The State invariably steps beyond its legitimate bounds, and concurrently traduces the rights of those who are not engaged in or otherwise aligned to drug abuse, when it graduates from protecting her citizens against the acts of her fellow citizens or our fellow countries to protecting her citizens against themselves.

Within the proper range of that rule, there is certainly a proper enough mandate for government to prevent a citizen from bringing such vices as he or she would indulge (drug abuse being one such vice) into the public square where he contends with fellow citizens who do not wish to indulge with him and may indeed be disgusted by the presence of his indulgence, as is their right. But the State has no right, under the Constitution of the United States or under any known definition or conjugation of the natural rights of man, to traduce the sanctity of a man or a woman's home merely because they indulge a vice the State deems a crime.

It is certainly our right, if not our duty, to speak where the proper opportunity exists against that which we deplore or which we believe detrimental to civil life; it is certainly our right to care about our fellow manperson enough that we should wish to advise and influence him (again, where proper opportunity exists) away from indulging that which we believe is harmful enough to himself (and his loved ones, often enough times, in due course, even if the harm be not direct, immediate, or physical in most instances). That is, among other and far more salutary reasons, why we have our churches, our synagogues, our voluntary social associations (formal and informal), among other things, and that is, also, a salutary reason for perpetuating the separation between these and the State. But no matter what you or I think about whatever it is he would indulge and whatever harm it might entail upon himself, it is not our place to impose the throw weight of State power upon him unless he injures someone else, or unless he commits any real crime, while indulging or to uphold his indulgence - in which case, the proper recourse is to punish his crime explicitly and swiftly, as should be so whether his pre-crime consumption involved marijuana, cocaine, Coca-Cola, cold cuts on rye, or Hostess Twinkies.

As long as it doesn't adversely effect you life, why worry about it?

For one thing, I am not God, to Whom one and all will answer penultimately for their vices as well as their crimes, should they indulge or commit either. For another thing, why should something someone is doing merely in the privacy of their own home affect my life? So long as he or she keeps it to their own home and out of my sight, and there is no concurrent reason or evidence to suspect that what they are doing is inflicting harm upon any other person in their home or that they are coercing any other person to indulge along, what they do (assuming, of course, that I know what they do, which would assume that I am either a friend or a close enough relative, which assumes concurrently that they have made it my explicit business to know what they do) is not my business, and I have no right in that instance to interfere.

But if either a) there is real evidence to believe they are harming any other person in their home, or coercing any other person to indulge along with them; or, b) they bring whatever it is their vice happens to be out into the public square (say, if they love to blow tootski and decide they'd like to do a few lines in the park at one of those concrete chess tables or the like), then and only then is it my legitimate concern; then and only then would it be any legitimate concern of the State.

[Richard Axtell]

"But if either a) there is real evidence to believe they are harming any other person in their home, or coercing any other person to indulge along with them; or, b) they bring whatever it is their vice happens to be out into the public square (say, if they love to blow toots and decide they'd like to do a few lines in the park at one of those concrete chess tables or the like), then and only then is it my legitimate concern; then and only then would it be any legitimate concern of the State."

Exactly. And the two situations you list are currently and unfortunately approaching the norm, in most urban areas, and many others. The fundamental point where we depart company, were our philosophies exist in skew planes, is what the remedy might be. Based on my experience and what I have heard here, Libertarianism sees a society as a group of individuals under a very loose contract. If decline be our fate as a society, then so be it, if any solution proposed involves crossing the individuals domestic threshold. I am very in favor and urge the promotion of societal remedies applied by other than the state; churches, private organizations (i.e. boy scouts, etc.), the influence of influential individuals, etc. But, if the armed, legally heavy handed, state enforced, attempt to diminish this threat, for what ever reason, is a practical failure, then church and private institutions on their own are probably outmatched against the threat, to say the least.

I cannot see how the removal or decriminalization of laws against the importation, sale, and use of dangerous drugs will in anyway improve the situation, other than to legitimize already well heeled international drug traffickers, and every immoral, parasitic criminal in their drug distribution down line chains. Perhaps the price of hard drugs and good weed will drop to their lowest point in history...due to unrestricted channels of distribution, and price competition. And perhaps any lost profit will be made up in volume, since no one and nothing would stand in the way of well financed drug entrepreneurs.

The State would have to literally get into the drug trade in order to regulate it in any meaningful way; imposing new rules, FDA regulations for safety and purity, trade and importation laws, tariffs and taxes, and manufacturing, distribution, and sales licensing. Libertarians, and Economic Conservatives for that matter, are generally against this kind of red tape in the general economy, and so would Libertarians reverse themselves and enforce strict control over the drug trade to prevent the powerful new drug lobbies from dominating the government in the same way oil, defense contractors, pharmaceuticals, and trial lawyers do today? Far from taking the profit out of the drug business, it could well open it up, to better production, manufacturing, R&D, marketing and distribution organizations than exist today. The drug trade, already worth hundreds of billions annually, might well become the number one industry in the United States, or the world.

I see no evidence that Libertarians are ready to do anything other than dismiss out of hand even the consideration of the potential results of their "policies" stated above. And this time I have not even mentioned the debilitation and damage that widely available and higher quality drugs will have on individuals and society at large. On this subject at least, we exist in different worlds, and I do not see any consensus on this subject in the foreseeable future.

[Southern Federalist]

Today, when you ask conservatives whether they're willing to take responsibility for their beloved decades-long foreign-aid program and interventionist foreign policy that have produced so much enmity, hatred, and perverse consequences for our country...

What I think is that this analysis is pigswill. The author is either (a) stupid or (b) a vile opportunist leaping to exploit an attack on our country to take cheap shots and try to get a little attention for his justly-ignored wacko views.

[FrogMom]

...they always and inevitably respond with, "Oh, no. We don't intend our policies to result in those things and therefore we're not responsible for them. Only robbers and muggers, with their lack of respect for liberty and private property, are responsible for their actions and beliefs."

I don't like them putting words in our mouths. This is BS.

[BluesDuke]

Based on my experience and what I have heard here, Libertarianism sees a society as a group of individuals under a very loose contract.

A libertarian does indeed see society in that manner - if we equate "society" with "country". But then, again, if you think very closely upon it, at all manner of level are we individuals under various and sundry "loose contracts," and while some of them may not be quite so "loose" as others, depending upon their character, they are there and unlikely to dissipate even under the heavy manner of State power, thank God.

Consider: One is the family. You don't, of course, choose the family into which you are born (or adopted, if from infancy, as was the case with I), but on another level you choose the family you will yourself constitute when you marry and conceive or adopt. A second is the church or the synagogue; you may or may not have chosen your religious faith (your parents may rear you in a particular religion but you are not necessarily enjoined against choosing another later in life) but you also may choose in due course that church or synagogue wherein you will exercise it. A third is such among that group of associations such as clubs or groups, or clubs and groups dedicated through a voluntary association toward one or another social or political purpose (say, a service organisation such as the Lions International, whose suprerogatory issue of concern is our vision; or, a group who gets together on behalf of promoting one or another of the arts, without government impetus; or, a political party - regional machine politics notwithstanding, it isn't exactly so that people are forced to join or reject a political party). And there are numerous others which might for the moment escape your thoughts or mine in explicitly identifiable terms.

You may concur that within these groups there are certain precepts and prescriptions to which their members will adhere, but the impetus for that adherence does not (and ought not to) spring from State power at any known level. Some if not most of these will concern themselves, at various times for various reasons, with the doings and undoings of their fellow manperson, they do not as a general rule cross a line which distinguishes a voluntary act or tendered opinion toward those not within their gathering from a demand for conformity, acquiescence, or obedience to their precept or prescription. Not even the church or the synagogue would do this: it is one thing when (for one very high profile example) Pope John Paul II issues a pronouncement or publishes an encyclical on this or that matter of faith or temporal behaviour; notwithstanding that as many millions not of the Roman Catholic creed consider his thinking seriously enough, it is something else again to insist that those not of the Roman Catholic creed submit, the Pope being a spiritual leader for millions around the world who adhere to the faith which designates him its international guiding force but not a world governor by any known consent.

Frank Chodorov, a titan of American right-libertarian thought, put it this way: "Society is a cooperative effort, springing spontaneously from man's urge to improve on his circumstances. It is voluntary, completely free of force. It comes because man has learned that the task of life is easier of accomplishment through the exchange of goods, services, and ideas. The greater the volume and the fluidity of such exchanges, the richer and fuller the life of every member of society. That is the law of association; it is also the law of peace...The law of association - the supreme law of society - is self-operating; it needs no enforcement agency." I couldn't improve on that if I tried, and you have just seen that I kind of did try. I would add that the only "agency" society needs would be one constituted to protect its members' innate rights and defend them from predatorily aggressive individuals at home and forces from abroad, which is why a government is constituted. But when such a constituted government graduates from such protective mandate to pre-emptive or proactive interference in the various and sundry affairs of "society" as defined above, or to pre-emptive or proactive construction or reconstruction of that "society" which it is incompetent to construct or reconstruct, government has thus graduated to the State.

If decline be our fate as a society, then so be it, if any solution proposed involves crossing the individuals domestic threshold. I am very in favor and urge the promotion of societal remedies applied by other than the state; churches, private organizations (i.e. boy scouts, etc.), the influence of influential individuals, etc. But, if the armed, legally heavy handed, state enforced, attempt to diminish this threat, for what ever reason, is a practical failure, then church and private institutions on their own are probably outmatched against the threat, to say the least.

I don't necessarily think we are fated to decline, but the further we submit to the arbitrariness and the aforesaid proactive constructions and reconstructions of the State which run contrary to the source construct of society (which is the individual) the more arduous will be the business of arresting and reversing that decline. The associations which I bespoke above probably do seem overmatched on the surface - but so, on paper, did the 1969 New York Mets. On paper, the Mets should have been exterminated in a four-game sweep (with or without a game one victory, as the Baltimore Orioles got in Game One of that memorable World Series). But then, again, on paper the American colonists were no match, necessarily, for the forces of England, either.

I cannot see how the removal or decriminalization of laws against the importation, sale, and use of dangerous drugs will in anyway improve the situation, other than to legitimize already well heeled international drug traffickers, and every immoral, parasitic criminal in their drug distribution down line chains.

There were those who thought the repeal of Prohibition would do little other than to legitimise what became known soon enough as the Mafia, too. Whether or not legalising drugs now prohibited will "improve" the situation is in one sense irrelevant but in another sense very relevant. The irrelevant sense is in what you would call the moral question: We will never know a society entirely free of immoral behaviour, wish though we might otherwise, but we can and should draw a strong line between that behaviour which is merely immoral and that which is clearly criminal. (I should add as a sidebar, by the way, though I would have thought otherwise it hardly needed saying, that any call for drug legalisation must include a continuing ban on its availability to children - a position which, by the way, is well enough enunciated in various and sundry libertarian portals including the platform of the Libertarian Party, something which the more hardline drug warriors either bypass or distort.)

Example: You and I agree that drug abuse is insidious, even immoral. (I do not, by the way, happen to believe that is so regarding marijuana, notwithstanding that I myself have smoked marijuana exactly and only twice in my entire lifetime.) A drug dealer has what the drug abuser wants. The exchange is immoral because it was made that the one might perform an immoral act. But performing an immoral act in and of itself is not to perform a criminal act. Had the drug dealer forced one or another person who otherwise would never think even once of imbibing to purchase or consume the drug in question, that would be a criminal act. And the record is littered well enough with the record of drug dealers, couriers, what have you, resorting to murder and all other manner of violent crime to secure their businesses.

If one has committed murder or other manner of violent crime against other persons and their property, should there truly be a distinction drawn because these were done in the course of a certain business? Think of it this way: The Mafia has resorted to murder and other violent crime (in actuality and in implicit or explicit threat) as a resort in resolving matters of business having nothing to do with drugs - they have done so in such businesses as labour unions, as sanitation, as longshore works, as freight and other similar transportation, as you name it. Is the Mafioso who commits these crimes on behalf of those businesses (let us call them for semantics' sake "legitimate" businesses) any the less a murderer, an extortionist, an arsonist, a burglar, than the one who commits them on behalf of such businesses as drugs, merely because we would consider drugs a vice? Better yet - the Mafia has never entirely abandoned gambling. Would murder, extortion, arson, or burglary on behalf of a gambling operation be any the less murder, extortion, arson, or burglary because they were done on behalf of a policy numbers racket, an underground card room, a floating craps game, or a sports betting wire, rather than on behalf of drugs?

Perhaps the price of hard drugs and good weed will drop to their lowest point in history...due to unrestricted channels of distribution, and price competition. And perhaps any lost profit will be made up in volume, since no one and nothing would stand in the way of well financed drug entrepreneurs.

Nothing but the market would, and I think you and I both know the market is a mistress of very flighty preferences; human nature being what it is, the market exercises only too liberally its innate right to change its mind, so to say. Today's market hit is tomorrow's market bomb. Think of it in this term: Right now, drug prohibition has had the (you can be sure of it) unintended side effect of establishing a certain monopoly, or at least an extremely limited sphere, among the enterpreneurs of whom you speak. Remove that prohibition, and you remove the exclusivity of profits divisible among those already in the sphere; for better or worse, there will be those rumbling in to capitalise accordingly. (It has a parallel in that sense with the breakup of the telephone company in the 1980s; likewise, with proper utility deregulation, as opposed to the perversion which was pawned off as "deregulation" that now has California in a mass hiccup.)

This tracks to a major reason why I sketch the point that when speaking of murder, it ought not to be treated according to why it was committed. A good number of people fear that the established drug organisations might well enough resort to an orgy of murder in order to protect what would remain to them if and when legalisation should occur. Murder should be prosecuted and punished as murder; there ought to be no distinctions drawn in any way, shape, or form, between a murder committed on behalf of drug profit or a murder committed because someone discovered his wife having a backstreet affair. And we do, after all, constitute our police agencies and our jails for the prime (it should be all but the sole) purpose of dealing with violent crime and its perpetrators, regardless of whether they did it for drugs or for a woman or for a bet on the college football games or for a concert ticket (and if you think the latter is far-fetched, you sure haven't seen too many instances - they happen, believe me - of fans being beaten into hamburger because they had those tickets to the local sold-out concert and someone else didn't but thought he should have, instead).

The State would have to literally get into the drug trade in order to regulate it in any meaningful way; imposing new rules, FDA regulations for safety and purity, trade and importation laws, tariffs and taxes, and manufacturing, distribution, and sales licensing.

Oh, the State would sure as hell try it. Always has, always does, always will try. I know of enough people who argue that, as dearly as they would like to see the War on Drugs as prosecuted now brought to an unlamentable halt, they fear the end of drug prohibition would equal a newly constituted cash cow and extortion machine for the State. And it is not an unrealistic concern, considering the well-enough established record of the State butting into just about every other known enterprise in these United States and elsewhere. And the results are plain enough to see, though it is to the political profit of only too many not to see, or otherwise to distort the view, that economically we have been in a considerable mess for a good many years. It would be so, with these factors as prime factors, even if there were no such thing as the drug business as we are discussing it.

Libertarians, and Economic Conservatives for that matter, are generally against this kind of red tape in the general economy, and so would Libertarians reverse themselves and enforce strict control over the drug trade to prevent the powerful new drug lobbies from dominating the government in the same way oil,defense contractors, pharmaceuticals, and trial lawyers do today?

Frankly, I am in favour of telling the State to get the hell out of the business of regulating business, and you have just sketched one very good reason why I should hold that position. Whyfore should anyone be jockeying for political primacy in influence, if not because the State has set itself up as a dispensary of favour whereby one can, with the appropriate bulb greasing, gain political supremacy over a competitor, either within one's own business or within another enterprise entirely which shares one's own customer sphere, by using the political machinery to distort the marketplace? And is it not so that one cannot use the political machinery to distort the marketplace without taking without legitimate warrant from another to do so? If we would chase the lobbyists the hell out of Dodge, we should think concurrently of chasing the State the hell out of the marketplace.

Far from taking the profit out of the drug business, it could well open it up, to better production, manufacturing, R&D, marketing and distribution organizations than exist today. The drug trade, already worth hundreds of billions annually, might well become the number one industry in the United States, or the world.

They feared likewise with alcohol when the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act were repealed. It's really an open question, and certainly not a guaranteed one, whether the drug trade would, upon its legalisation, become the number one industry in the United States or around the world. But it is also so that several enterprises which have held that position at one or another time have driven enough temperatures up the scale that there would always be those screaming blue murder about it. You are never going to get the "right" business assuming the Number One position until or unless you can figure out a way to change human nature. (Not to mention, again, political market manipulation, which begs the question as to who will be conferred the final arbitrary power to decide which business is the "right" or the "proper" or the "legitimate" business.) And if we have learned nothing else from a long and often bitter human history, we have learned that the State is about as competent to change human nature as would be a Pee Wee League pitcher to pitch the World Series.

I see no evidence that Libertarians are ready to do anything other than dismiss out of hand even the consideration of the potential results of their "policies" stated above.

But life itself is risk. We cannot repeal that. It cannot be otherwise; else, we would never have tarried from the caves in the first place. My ancestors, the ancient Hebrews, could very well have chosen a perverse kind of safety in slavery under the ancient Pharaoh, rather than run the risk of crossing the Red Sea and enduring a long and arduous desert trek, laden with hazards and enemies, home to the Promised Land.

Freedom is a risk. Always has been. Always will be. (If a certain band of upstarts in thirteen Atlantic Coast colonies had invoked the law of unintended consequences, we would be the British States of America.) If the law of unintended consequences became or remained codified, written, arbitrated and enforceable law, it is not unrealistic to think that life as we know it could well enough grind to a dead stop - the best parts of that life in hand with if not more so than the worst. (Which makes me think: isn't that precisely what contemporary liberalism - as in, the beast unleashed by Roosevelt II and never successfully put back into his cage - would adore?)

I realise I am about to risk a trip to absurdism, but let us say the law of unintended consequences, codified and enforceable, would have prevented the World Trade Center suicide bombing. It sure would have, if you assume the law

* - would have told the government to order the Boeing Airplane Company (as it was known at the time) to dismantle its little air mail and passenger air taxi operation entirely and not just let it separate to call itself United Air Lines.

* - would have told Juan Trippe, come to think of it, to knock it off about that silly idea on turning a nice little mail flying business into Pan American.

* - For that matter, would have told Orville and Wilbur Wright that if man was meant to fly, he'd have wings and a car engine for a heart - stick to the bicycles, boys.

* - would have told Crazy Count Zeppelin, "You're blocking the sun, dummkopf - get that big oversized tube full of gasbags down...and let those poor people out!

* - would have told the Mongofier Brothers to turn off the damned furnace in the basket and take that garish looking balloon down!

* - would have told Henry Ford to forget it about trying to make good cars fast; bye bye assembly line. (Bye bye dress rehearsals with truck bombs in 1993? And since the trucks were rentals, maybe the law would have told Mr. Hertz way back when to quit putting us in the driver's seat!)

* - would have told Karl Benz to get that motorised wagon off the street and keep it there. (The bandits who hit the WTC would have had to settle for suicide camel bombs or stagecoach hijackings, unless someone was willing to risk the ire of PETA by driving camels and horses to extinction. And, come to think of it, the only DUI we would have to worry about today would be horsemanship under the influence - though it's even money, knowing our silly fellow humans, whether the riders or the horses would be drunk or drugged.)

* - would probably have told a fellow named Howard Robard Hughes, Sr., "You've got too many revolving teeth on that oil drill bit! And who the hell needs that much oil that fast, anyway?" (Noah Dietrich, who was the longtime aide de camp to Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. - he once wrote of Hughes, Sr.'s canny decision to lease rather than sell his newly invented roller bit, "Out of that decision came the millions for Little Howard to play with in the years to come - has written, "I'm convinced that automobiles would not be on the road or airplanes in the sky if it wasn't for Hughes's invention.")

* - would have told Thomas Edison, Turn out that light!

* - would have told Mr. Otis to stay down to earth. (And we don't care if you're having your ups and downs, you get the hell out of that dopey box or we'll put you in a padded box!)

* - would have told whomever to knock it off with those big tall buildings in the first place: Remember the Tower of Babel! If God could have invented three thousand languages because of that skyscraper, you don't want to know what He'll do about yours, fool!

* - For that matter, it would have told that whack job Benjamin Franklin you'll catch your death of cold flying a kite in the rain! (Not to mention, You get hit by lightning and you'll be killed to death!)

* - would have told those settling Dutchmen, "On your allowance you can't afford $24 for Manhattan Island - tell those Indians the deal is off." (Which reminds me of a wisecrack that got wide circulation, during New York City's infamous fiscal crisis in the early-to-mid 1970s: Johnny Carson, commenting on Edward Koch's challenge to incumbent Abraham Beame for the Democratic mayoral nomination, noted "Koch has promised the Indians that, as soon as he's elected, he'll get to work bringing the value of Manhattan Island back up to $24.)

You get the idea, I am sure. The best for which we can hope is that when unintended consequences occur, as perhaps inevitably they do, we keep our heads, hearts and reason about us, reconstitute and secure that manner by which we knew and executed the precept that we punish where necessary deliberated and explicit acts by one against a fellow sovereign but otherwise leave our fellow citizens alone to live as they will, their lives a matter between themselves and God and no one else's business. We can't protect people from themselves. But we can - must - protect them from their fellows' obstructing or abrogating their rights.

On which note I should say thank you for engaging such a nice discussion. On certain issues in general and the drug issue in particular, it seems only too often to be very rare when two people holding distinct and opposing views going in can launch and maintain a discourse as civilly as you have with me and, I hope, I have with you. Whatever it was that afflicted us in that regard, it is an afflicition I wish some of our fellow debaters would catch.

[Richard Axtell]

"On which note I should say thank you for engaging such a nice discussion. On certain issues in general and the drug issue in particular, it seems only too often to be very rare when two people holding distinct and opposing views going in can launch and maintain a discourse as civilly as you have with me and, I hope, I have with you. Whatever it was that afflicted us in that regard, it is an afflicition I wish some of our fellow debaters would catch."

I also thank you for your civility and well considered thoughts. You have given me much to ponder, and in some ways altered my thinking, and the process of writing my replies has further matured my thoughts on the subject. I enjoyed spending time dealing with a subject other than terrorism for a change. That grim reality is near enough, circling as it does above us all, like a vulture on the Savanna. Good luck and take care.

[fod]

Trotting out your "look at my patriotism" cart again, I see.

Hardly. I am not one to pridefully toot my own horn. In fact, I am uncomfortable with boasting, I merely do it to expose your lies and misrepresentations.

In regards to your having to question others motivation for being assests to society, it leads me to believe you are either:

A non asset and guilty about it

or

just plain jealous

Which is it?