Replies

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.